The Free Book Buggie: Meeting Children With Free Books Where They Live, Learn, and Play

The Free Book Buggie (TFBB) is helping children across the Twin Cities and surrounding Minnesota communities build home libraries of their own—one free book at a time. Through its colorful bookmobiles, school visits, and community partnerships, the nonprofit brings books directly to children in neighborhoods where access to reading materials may otherwise be limited by cost or transportation barriers.

Founded in 2018 by Debbie Beck, TFBB has distributed more than half a million books to children throughout the region. With the help of volunteers, donations, and community support—including small grants that help put more books into the hands of eager young readers—the organization continues expanding its reach while encouraging a lifelong love of literacy.

For many children, a visit from The Free Book Buggie means more than simply choosing a book to read. It may mean owning a book for the very first time. We put some questions to Debbie Beck, founder and director of The Free Book Buggie.

Kars4Kids: Tell us about the Twin Cities area and the children you serve. What challenges do these kids face when it comes to access to books and literacy?

Debbie Beck: The Free Book Buggie (TFBB) goes all over the Twin Cities and surrounding communities to provide children with free books. TFBB was created to help families overcome two major challenges to accessing books for their children: finance and transportation. The challenges that many of these children face are that they either have zero books of their own in their homes or they have few. Being literate is imperative to growing, learning and ensuring that children have a solid start in life. When a child has no books of their own at home, they don’t have a fair chance in life. Research has shown that book ownership is essential to a child’s literacy growth and future success in life.

Kars4Kids: You previously co-created an “I Love to Read” program at your children’s elementary school. How did that program work, and what kind of impact did it have?

Debbie Beck: That program worked on a small scale like TFBB. We knew that there were children that had no or very few books at home, and we knew that there were books out there that could be given to them for free. We started it as a book swap where children were able to bring in up to 5 books from home, and they could swap them out for 5 new-to-them books. We also made sure that every student in the school was able to choose and take home at least 1 or 2 books to keep. At that time, we were just looking for donations of books from our community, found books thrown in a dumpster at a library, and took them. Between the books we gathered and the books the children donated, every student in that school got to pick out any 1–2 books to take home and keep.

Kars4Kids: What led you to shift from a school-based program to a bookmobile service? How did the idea—and the name “Free Book Buggie”—come about?

Debbie Beck: That’s a funny story. The idea didn’t come until years later when I was traveling with my daughter in Brazil. I grew up in the South, and as a family, we had a VW bus. My daughter and I were walking in a coastal town in Brazil when I saw a VW bus in a park with all doors open and filled with books, and tables filled with books. I grabbed my daughter’s arm and said, “I know what I’m doing when we get home.” That was it! We sat in the park with a very small tablet she had and started coming up with names. When we got back to the states a few days later, I filed for nonprofit status in MN and had that within 1½ weeks. I had researched before we came back to make sure there was nothing else like what I wanted to do because if there was, I would have just joined and volunteered to help. Well, there wasn’t, so I had 2 goals in mind, and that is where the name came from. The books would always be free, and we needed to bring the books to the children where they live and learn. The word “Free” needed to be part of the name, and “Buggie” (taken from the VW bus, and I also had a VW bug as my first car) needed to be included so people knew we brought the books to them. So, The Free Book Buggie was born.

Passion is what hit me in the head, and in an instant, that passion drove the mission of TFBB.

Kars4Kids: Since founding The Free Book Buggie in 2018, how many books have you distributed, and how many communities have you reached? What does that impact look like on the ground?

Debbie Beck: As of now, we have distributed just over 578,000 books since we started in 2018. We serve over 60 communities and have satellite branches in both Duluth and Rochester.

Kars4Kids: What role do volunteers play in running The Free Book Buggie? How many people are involved, and what does their work look like day-to-day?

Debbie Beck: Volunteers play a hugely vital role in keeping the Buggies going and getting books into kids’ hands. Our volunteer opportunities are:

• Book Sort Saturdays – every Saturday from 10-12 we count, sort, and shelve the book donations we have received that week. We also pack up any deliveries, load the Buggies when needed, and pack up for tabling events.
• Events – coming to events with the Buggies and tabling events

How many? That is a good question. We have probably hundreds of volunteers who come and go throughout the year and get involved when they can. We are quite unique with our volunteer program. We have volunteers that come weekly; some come a couple times a year, and we engage parent volunteers when we go into schools during the winter. We have volunteer students from high schools getting their National Honor Society hours; we have volunteers from St. Thomas University teaching clubs who come yearly; we have St. Thomas University Interns; we have U of M students and student clubs. We LOVE our volunteers and all that they add to our mission. All of them have a passion for what we are doing, and we could not be prouder of all who help make TFBB successful.

Kars4Kids: What personally drew you to focus on literacy and getting books into children’s hands?

Debbie Beck: What personally drew me was that I have a deep love of reading and using my imagination. I have always loved reading detective books as a child and adult. Reading allows me to enter a world outside of my own and uses my imagination to conjure up the story in my mind. My grandmother instilled in my brothers and me the love of reading. When I’d spend time in the summer with her and my grandfather, we had to read every day for 30 min. She took us to the library a lot, and I gained a love of reading out of that. I still have the very first book that she and I read together as I was learning to read. I also instilled that in my children, and at this point, as adults, they both read like they used to as children. I also grew up in a family where we didn’t have money to buy a lot of books, so when our school got to fill out the order for books in the class, I was one of the students who could not fill that book order out. I remember that feeling, and no child should ever have that feeling.

Kars4Kids: Why is there a need for The Free Book Buggie?

Debbie Beck: There is a huge need for TFBB because MN is and has been struggling for a long time, years, with literacy issues. One of the biggest barriers that children face is access to and ownership of books. When a child chooses books that look or are interesting to them, they are more likely to read and explore. TFBB makes that possible for thousands of children every year. We invite children to choose as many books as they want. They are always surprised that they can take more than one, that they are free, and mostly that they get to keep them. We still, after 8 years, have children come up to us at an event in the Buggie or at school and say, “This is my first book.” On the one hand, that made me feel very sad, but as I thought more about it, that is exactly why we do what we do – to make sure no child, of any age, ever has to say that. At that point, we send them back to get more books, and if we have bags on board, we will give them one and tell them to fill it up.

Kars4Kids: How do you decide where and when the Buggie operates? Are there specific communities or settings where you see the greatest need?

Debbie Beck: Our intentional focus is always on low-income communities. We are at the point where we get invited to events across the Twin Cities and surrounding communities, sometimes as far away as 1-1.5 hours.

We partner with organizations that have the audience we need to reach, such as:

• Nonprofit organizations
• Schools
• Police departments
• Cities
• Community events

The more we are out there and visible, the more awareness we bring to the issue of book access, and that is what this is all about. Literacy is about reading, speaking, writing, and communicating, and if children don’t have access to books from birth, they are at risk of falling behind.

We connect with families and parents about the importance of reading to and with their children. We hear often that my son or daughter doesn’t like to read, but when we share some tips and tricks and invite them to come in and choose books, they walk away with an armload of books many times.

Kars4Kids: How do you choose the books you distribute to children for free? Do you take used books?

Debbie Beck: We accept new and preloved books in good condition. Our Book Sort Saturdays are all about making sure the books we keep are in good condition. We don’t advocate “new books”; we advocate “books.” We ask for books without damage, no encyclopedias, and no textbooks or dictionaries. If we get dictionaries or teacher resource books, we donate them to our partner Kids in Need Foundation, which gets thousands of books from us quarterly or more often. We try to find other homes for books we don’t take if they are not damaged.

The Buggies are filled with all of our book categories and get refilled often. When we table at schools and indoor events, we take a wide variety of our categories so children have a wide variety to choose from.

Kars4Kids: What are your goals for The Free Book Buggie moving forward? What would you most like to accomplish?

Debbie Beck: My goals for TFBB are to continue to grow and expand our reach, whether by more satellite locations or expansion to other states someday. We still have a lot of work to do here, and I believe that I need to take care of my own backyard before moving on.

I would most like to accomplish continued growth, both in our reach and our organization. When I started this organization, I used to say I wanted it to be like the ice cream truck of books. When the Buggie rolled into an event and/or community, the children all got excited and came running. Well, that is happening now, and it makes me so happy. I love seeing the excitement from the children when they come in and are then told they can choose as many books as they want.

Now we have 2 big Buggies, a delivery Buggie and a small contract staff. We have to grow our donations so we can continue doing what we do—meeting children where they live, learn, and play—and giving away free books.