I’m super excited to announce my Literacy and Library Advocacy Campaign on indiegogo.com! I was originally planning on releasing this project on Kickstarter but they don’t allow advocacy or awareness campaigns. Check out the description of the project below and help us advocate for literacy by giving money on the project home page.
Who Are We?
The Story Sailboat is a independent bookmobile on the water that will set sail around the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento Delta in the summer of 2012 setting a course that promotes literacy and libraries. Our goal is to give out 1,000 books and install 100 small, easily accessible libraries through our Guerrilla Library and Book Seeding Campaigns. We want to remind people that reading is one of the most fundamental influences on in a person’s life and we will do this through promoting reading and libraries. 
Why Literacy?
Did you know that it’s estimated that 30 million people who are over 16 in the United States can’t read past an elementary school level? Literacy is absolutely essential for an individual to understand information in the information age. Without basic literacy skills a person will have trouble with fully comprehending math, technology, science, and other basic subjects. A person can’t apply for a job, full out an application, or use computers to further their careers. If we are to eradicate poverty at home, it begins with our workforce having a grasp on literacy skills. We want to remind people that Literacy and our library system that supports adult and child literacy is intensely important to the success of our country and improvement of ourselves.
What Is a Guerrilla Library?
A Guerrilla library is part social service and part street art installation. It can be any repurposed box, shelf space, nook, or cranny that holds books for the public to take and enjoy – for free. Discovering a library in an unexpected or repurposed space adds to excitement. There have been many versions of this in quite a few cities across the country and the world. We want to bring as many of these installations to the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Delta as we can.
What is Book Seeding?
Bookseeding involves placing books in widely populated or highly trafficked areas – like subways, bus stops, coffee shops and parks. Within these books we’ve placed information about the importance of literacy and libraries. Not only will people find something to read and inspire them, but they will also learn about why reading is important. Book Seeding and Guerrilla Libraries let people serendipitously find something that inspires them, encouraging them to re-engage with their love of reading and libraries.
Why do it by Sailboat?
Sailing is the world’s oldest green energy powered transportation. The entire Bay Area and Sacramento Delta are accessible by our little 22 foot Sailboat and the majority of the population in this area lives within a few miles of the coastline.Our boat has taken us all over the bay and has allowed us to access some otherwise hard to reach coastal communities. Our boat has taken us all over the bay and through some fairly heavy wind and weather without any trouble. In the same way, we believe that reading and literacy can help everyone weather life’s tempests and come out on top.
You Can Follow Us Along the Journey
We invite you to follow along and see where we drop the books and install the Guerrilla libraries. We have a website that describes everything that we are doing on our journey. Follow us on this journey as we rebuild our larger ocean going boat called Surprise Me II, or follow our long-term goal of journeys across the ocean to spread literacy to coastal communities around the world.
We Need New Sails!
This is the reason we’re here. While we already have more books than we can handle and all the supplies we need to get the book seeding and libraries up and running, we’re still just a couple of folks who are paying for all of this out of our own pocket. We desperately need new sails to reach out to communities who are further away and to more safely navigate the Bay.
We spent the winter shaking down our boat and sailing it all over the bay and now our over 20 year old mainsail (the triangle sail on the mast) is too blown out of shape for us to safely use anymore. It’s also summer sailing on the bay which means that there’s no wind in the morning and in the afternoon there can regularly be wind well over 25 knots! The problem is that right now we have three Jib Sails (the big sails on the front of the boat) of different sizes instead of rolling furling. So, when the wind starts to blow, we have to send someone to the front of the boat to take a large sail down and put up a small one. This can be pretty dangerous! With a Roller Furling system and sail we can change the size of the sail with a pull of a line from the relative safety of the cockpit.
What Your Money Goes to
1 Main Sail ~$500
1 Roller Furling Jib ~$500
1 Roller Furling System ~$500
Other Miscellaneous bits, pieces, shackles, lines and of course… IndieGoGo’s cut – $500
If We Go Over Our Goal
The worst and best thing about owning a boat is that there’s always something to fix or improve and a day spent messing around on boats is a day well spent. So, what we can do depends on how much money we get. Some of our outstanding projects on the Story Sailboat are:
New Lines
New Anchor Chain
New Outboard
New Standing Rigging
New Paint
New Self Steering
New Solar Panels
New Navigation and GPS Devices
New Electrical Systems
How about a new boat altogether?!
But really, all we’re really looking to do is get some new sails to extend our reach and make it safer for us to sail our little boat to all of those hard to reach communities.
If We Don’t Meet Our Goal
Well, lets be honest… We can still sail! But only on days when we’re sure that the wind will be good for the whole time we’re out. This rarely happens on the Bay, especially in the summer, so we’d be hugely limited to where and when we can sail and how far we can reach with our advocacy for literacy and libraries. Basically, we won’t be able to take trips that span multiple days or go long distances from our home port in Redwood City. You can help us reach more people and make a bigger impact all over the bay. Of course, if we don’t make our goal, some kids may never learn to read and they will most surely be led astray into a life of crime and drugs.
Joey is a teacher in East Palo Alto at the 49ers Academy where she teaches seventh and eight grade math and science. For two years before taking her job in EPA she was working as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the country of Lesotho (South Africa) as a primary teacher trainer. She also worked with African Library Project to establish libraries throughout the country. She has her undergraduate degree in molecular genetics and her masters in education.
Patrick works for San Mateo County Library and manages the East Palo Alto and Portola Valley Libraries. He has worked in libraries since 2005. He is also a councilor for the American Library Association, writes a library blog at 
Patrick used to live on Coronado 27 that was called Surprise Me (hence, the naming of the Columbia to Surprise Me Too). That boat took him and his friends on many adventures around the bay and was his first serious bay boat. It was traded for the Columbia because the owner of the Columbia wanted a smaller boat.
We have a long way to go and many different things we need to do before we are actually ready to set sail for good on this journey. So, this blog is going to be about everything we have to do to get ready to go. We are going to review the boats we are sailing, document the work we put into our boats, the resources we use to get Patrick his Captain’s License, the sailing equipment we learn about, our trial runs at collecting great stories, and also our sailing adventures as they happen. There is so much to do and we’d love to take you on our journey with us so 
I might not have become a librarian if it weren’t for my local library. I would also not have become a sailor. I grew up in Tucson Arizona in the middle of the desert. I would spend my afternoons walking to the library after school because the librarians were family friends and the library was halfway between my house and the school. I can’t imagine what they thought of this 8 year old kid who read just about every book about sailing while not living within 250 miles of a significant body of water capable of sailing on. I would dream of living on and around boats surrounded by the potential of vast oceans. 
I think about this a lot while working at my library and watching the young kids that come in. I keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, one of these kids living next to the ocean is reading books about the desert, wishing that they could live in Tucson surrounded by cactus and the quiet vastness of the desert. 
PC Sweeney 