Every year, tens of millions of American college students throw away valuable textbooks because they are replaced with newer editions and have no resale value. Every book that is thrown away or left to sit on a shelf unused is a treasured resource being wasted.
Pages of Promise began as a small collection of a few hundred books among friends at Iowa State University in November of 2003. While researching poverty and food insecurity in Malawi and Zambia earlier that Fall, Keegan Kautzky was shocked by the harsh educational conditions in sub-Saharan Africa and the overwhelming lack of textbooks and educational resources at many of the leading colleges and universities on the continent.
Recognizing the critical need to rebuild the libraries and classrooms of African high schools and universities with updated textbooks and educational resources - and the systemic waste of the publishing industry and excess millions of unused and unsellable textbooks available at American universities - Kautzky and a fellow student, Kevin Geiken, organized the first book collection on the Iowa State University campus in early 2004. The first drive collected over 11,000 books with a resale value of nearly $280,000.
Subsequent book drives have been held at Iowa State University every semester since, collecting nearly 80,000 textbooks and other educational and reading materials for distribution to African educational institutions.
Nearly 15,000 additional books have been collected through affiliated collections at universities across Iowa and Minnesota:
- St. Cloud State University (10,000 books)
- University of Northern Iowa (2,500 books)
- Simpson College (1,000 books)
- Des Moines Area Community College
- Eastern Iowa Community College District
- Iowa Central Community College
- Iowa Lakes Community College
- Iowa Valley Community College District
- Iowa Western Community College
- Hawkeye Community College
- Kirkwood Community College
- North Iowa Community College
- Northeast Iowa Community College
- Northwest Iowa Community College
- Western Iowa Tech Community College
Since 2005, the men of Acacia Fraternity at Iowa State University have coordinated the book drives.
Following the campus collection held at the end of each semester, all donated textbooks are boxed and transported to Books For Africa in St. Paul, MN. Books for Africa sorts and packages the books and ships them to field partners in the recipient countries for distribution to universities, schools and libraries.
1st Pages of Promise Book Collection Organizers (L-R): Kevin Geiken, Craig Buske, Victoria Brenton, Keegan Kautzky, Amber Herman
