Assistance League of Diablo Valley Volunteers & Customers 'Make A Difference!' By Donating Books

One of more than 120 chapters nationwide, Assistance League® of Diablo Valley has been serving the Contra Costa County community for 47 years through its hands-on philanthropic programs.

For more than 20 years, USA WEEKEND Magazine, in collaboration with Points of Light and the support of Newman’s Own, has brought us Make A Difference Day, the largest national day of community service.

This groundswell event will again celebrate neighbors helping neighbors, with millions of Americans uniting in a common mission to improve the lives of others. It will be a “Local Event with National Impact” when, on October 25, millions of volunteers across the nation will become hands-on involved to improve the lives of others by donating books to children.

What will be the glue that holds this event together? Our love of reading will be shared through a local community book drive for children. Every chapter of Assistance League will do the same thing on the same day and will, therefore, submit one national entry form.

Collecting 113,001 children’s books in 2012 resulted in Assistance League® placing as one of Make a Difference Day ten honorees. In 2013, Assistance League received the All-Star Award for amassing 103,036 books. This year, Assistance League will again “Make A Difference!”

As neighbors helping neighbors, how will we help? By Saturday, October 25, we can donate new books and deposit them in the well-marked box at Assistance League Way Side Inn Thrift Shop, located at 3521 Golden Gate Way, in Lafayette. Or, we could purchase an “almost new” book at the thrift shop and donate it to the Make A Difference effort.

As neighbors helping neighbors, how will we affect children locally? Assistance League of Diablo Valley will team with Monument Impact whose volunteers will distribute the books to elementary schoolchildren living in the Monument Corridor, in Concord.

Monument Impact’s mission is to provide training and tools in order for its residents to become economically self-sufficient, healthy and safe, civically engaged, connected to each other and committed to life-long learning. We ALL will help by realizing that if knowledge is power, then reading empowers. By Saturday, October 25, we ALL will Make a Difference!

To learn more about Assistance League of Diablo Valley and the philanthropic programs its thrift shop funds, please visit this website: diablovalley.assistanceleague.org.

Image: Thrift shop member volunteer Dorothy Rodola makes a difference by placing donated books in boxes soon to be delivered to elementary schoolchildren in the Monument Corridor.