Support Us

Make a financial donation.

Each month we spend around $500 on postage. This is our largest expense. Your donation will ensure that we can continue mailing books directly to incarcerated people at no cost to them.

Donate paperback books.

We maintain a stock of over a thousand books spanning every genre. Below is a list of highly-requested of books. To donate books directly to the group, please contact us and we will work with you to schedule your book donation drop off at a socially-distanced location in Carrboro.

If you would like to order high-demand books, we keep an active registry at FlyLeaf, a local, independent bookstore. When books are purchased from our registry, we pick them up and bring them to the workspace.

Note: We can only accept paperback books, as required by prisons, and cannot accept books with markings or highlighting, images of nudity, gang-related material, or anything related to tattooing.

Also, we ask donors to be considerate of the books they donate; while we appreciate all donations, time spent weeding out unusable books is time we could otherwise spend responding to requests. If you aren't sure if a donation would be helpful, please ask! Also, please do not donate fiction unless it falls under the categories listed (we have more than we need!).

Particularly in need. Last updated Jul 2023

Purchase office supplies.

We always need more printer cartridges! Please consider donating office supplies listed on our Amazon registry (you are welcome to donate any unused items of your own, too).

When you purchase items from our registry, they are mailed to a volunteer’s address and brough to the work site. If you would like to donate items directly, please contact us and we’ll schedule a time to meet. Thanks!

Volunteer with the group.

We meet weekly on Sunday afternoons to put together packages for our recipients, sort through and shelve book donations, and listen to 80s rock on our dusty old CD player. You should join us! We can also use help with administrative things like communications, design, sourcing books, and coordinating with NC carceral institutions. If you're interested or have any questions, just send us an email.

Since fall 2021 we have been slowly been bringing in new volunteers. We ask all volunteers to wear masks while in the space, and to provide proof of vaccination on their first visit. To limit the number of people in our smallish space, we run two shifts on Sunday, from 12:00p - 2:30p and from 2:30p - 5:00p.

Advocate justice reform.

While our work helps people survive an unjust system, we recognize that the work of reform requires advocacy on a state and national scale.

Support organizations that provide fair legal representation, advocate for prisoners’ rights, and act as a bridge between the inside and outside worlds (we list some of these groups on our resources page). Read books, watch documentaries, and listen to podcasts about mass incarceration and the struggles of incarcerated people and those returning to society. Learn how to be intersectional in your activism, conscious of the overlapping struggles of imprisonment for Black, Latinx, transgender, non-straight, and other marginalized people. Call your representatives in support of reforms; speak out against the death penalty; support an end to cash bail; oppose for-profit prisons, which are moving to charge prisoners for e-readers and video calls; eschew performative activism. Resist the erasure of our brethren on the inside.

Our list of critical prison resources is intended to provide a primer on understanding and changing the United States’ system of mass incarceration.