Conner's Eagle Project Book Drive Was A Success

Conner finished his Eagle Project on Wednesday. Hooray! We need to thank everyone who assisted in any way to help make his project a success. Conner had great support from the members of the Ward and Scout troop.

Conner's Eagle project book drive goal was to collect at least 500 books. As the books were being collected, he quickly realized that his goal had been achieved very early in the collection process. The community was extremely generous in their support of the book drive project—some houses donating 60-100 books at a time. As the evening progressed and the books kept flooding in, we started wondering about three things, in particular:

1. How many books had ultimately been collected?

2. How long will it take us to sort this many books?

3. How were we going to get such an insane amount of books to the drop-off area in Orem?

When all the books had been collected, sorted, boxed and counted we found that Conner had surpassed his goal of 500 books by a considerable margin. His final tally was around 4200 books! I say "around" 4200 books because the donations keep coming. People have been bringing more books to our house continually all week. In fact, we need to make another trip to Orem to drop off the second round of book donations next week. If they keep coming, he may end up with a total of 4500 books.

The project was a lot of fun. It was great to see so many people help out. The total number of "man hours" for the project will fall somewhere between 200 - 250 hours. Incredible.

We're proud of Conner for completing his project and we're happy that it was a success.

I've posted several photos of the project below.

The Scouts delivered two rounds of fliers to the community asking for book donations.

Gazillions of books were collected.

All the books were sorted into 5 different categories—Children, Juvenile, Adult, Educational and Recycle—then they were counted and boxed.

Here are the boxes just before they were loaded onto the trailer. We started collecting books at 6:00pm and finished loading them to be transported to Orem at about 10:30pm.

Originally we had planned to drive the books to Orem in our Honda Pilot with all the seats folded down. At the completion of counting all the books, we realized we'd need a more "substantial" means of transporting the books. Thankfully, a neighbor loaned us this trailer and their Suburban.

When Conner made it to the book drop-off area the next morning, the staff let him know that he had collected (in their words) "a whole lot of books!"

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, Conner loves reading. Many times we'll ask him to clean his room or make his bed. When we check on his progress several minutes later, usually we'll find that his bed is still unmade and the room untouched. When we ask him what he's been doing for so long, the answer is always the same—"reading." We're hoping there's a kid out there who will learn a love of reading because of a book that was collected in the book drive. And, with any luck, that same kid will leave his bed unmade and his room messy because he was "reading."