Quick Update

The past few weeks have been extraordinarily busy.

Briefly, in the past few weeks Library Build has:
1) Continued talks with a school in Philly that we hope will be our pilot school for Working Libraries and Library Fellows. Stay tuned for an official announcement, which we hope to make by the end of the month!

2)Met with community building/revitalization/organizing nonprofit organizations in Philly. One of the organizations believes that it can meet our need for office space - an extremely pressing need at the moment!

3) Begun applying for grants. Unfortunately, it take the IRS 100 days (according to their website) to update their electronic database which lists organizations who have 501c3 status. This means that we are still ineligible for the majority of grants (particularly corporate) since most grant-makers use this database as an initial verification step.

4) Secured a pro-bono auditor and have begun the audit process for last fiscal year (an important step in order to qualify for grant money).

5) Suffered catastrophic laptop failure which is currently being resolved. Fortunately, we have been diligent about creating backups to store both on and off-site but unfortunately, the failure hit us during a particularly vulnerable period.

Tonight we are going to a see Waiting for Superman (playing at the Ritz East in Old City) which is a documentary about the state of the American education system. Geoffrey Canada, probably the most innovative and successful educator in the US right now, features prominently. The movie also covers the charter school movement and the lottery admission systems used by charter schools - similar material covered in the movie we recently wrote about, The Lottery. Later this week, we will do a post on the movie.

Geoffrey Canada was on The Late Show last night - great opportunity to raise awareness of the challenges facing education right now.

Philadelphia Reads was featured prominently in the Inquirer yesterday as they face funding challenges for one of their literacy programs that provides books for teachers' classroom libraries. The program is based at MLK High. Read about it here: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/20101011_Teachers__book_bank_in_danger_of_closing.html