Vail students host book drive for Marshall Fire victims

Good books help us grow and, when needed, they can help us escape or better understand life’s toughest moments.

When the Marshall Fire destroyed nearly 1,000 structures in Boulder County and damaged over 120 more, many victims lost whole libraries of books along with all the stories, knowledge, and dreams contained between their pages.

“I am a book lover and I have brought books along with me through several moves and across state lines, and I have always thought of them as being some small part of my identity,” said Matt Lee, the owner of The Bookworm in Edwards. “I think it would be really tough to lose that and start over.”

A group of third graders at Vail Mountain School is partnering up with The Bookworm and a Denver-area nonprofit to help rebuild the libraries of Marshall Fire victims through a community book drive.

The book drive began Monday, Jan. 31, and will continue through Friday, Feb. 11. Community members can donate their new and gently used books at Vail Mountain School during school hours and at The Bookworm during business hours.

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Suitable donations include all your favorite books for adults and children so long as they do not have “signs of wear,” according to a release from the drive’s volunteer coordinator and The Bookworm’s former owner, Nicole Magistro.

For every book donated by the community, The Bookworm has pledged to give a new book to Marshall Fire victims, Lee said. At first, the store was considering adding an option for customers to sponsor a donation at checkout but, after some consideration, Lee decided to take this a step further.

“We felt like we should contribute equally so we didn’t want to make it into something that would benefit us,” he said. “We just want to benefit the victims of the fire.”

The Marshall Fire burned far from Eagle County, but any wildfire strikes fear, and compassion, in the hearts of communities across the region. When Vail Mountain School teacher Lauren Powell talked to her third-grade students about the fire, they immediately asked her how they could help, she said.

“They were eager to try to brainstorm, ‘Well, what could we do?'” Powell said. “We, as teachers, encouraged them to think about our focus for the year, which is reading and literacy. And they really sat down and realized, ‘Gosh, they have lost everything, including hundreds and hundreds of books.'”

Powell teamed up with the school’s philanthropy director and Magistro, who is also a Vail Mountain School parent, to finalize the idea of partnering up on a community book drive, she said.

Her students immediately got to work spreading the word about the drive, she said.

“They’re excited. They have all made their own posters and wanted to take them home to hang up at the park and kind of reach out to their local neighborhoods,” Powell said.

Books collected by Vail Mountain School and The Bookworm will be donated to fire victims through BookGive Denver, a nonprofit that distributes thousands of free books to communities in the seven-county Denver metro area.

BookGive Denver has donated over 91,000 books to nonprofits and individuals in need since the organization began in March 2020, Executive Director Melissa Monforti said.

The organization has been working to help rebuild the libraries of victims who lost everything all month long, delivering books to the initial “clearing houses” and long-term hotels used to provide for and shelter families who lost their homes, Monforti said.

“It was just such a devastating thing,” she said.

As Monforti and her team followed the progression of the fire, their minds went quickly to all the books whose pages curled up as they burned to ash amid other cherished items.

“What we learned is that many of the families are going to be in temporary housing for however long it takes for the (rebuilding) process to happen,” she said. Be it a long-term hotel or a rental home, families will be living somewhere for the months or even years that it may take to rebuild and they want those places to feel like home in the meantime, Monforti said.

As it turned out, the makeshift libraries and donations facilitated by BookGive meant so much more than having something to read to pass the time.

For one woman who lost a whole collection of art books in the fire, BookGive’s efforts meant reconnecting with her passion, Monforti said. For another family, it meant restoring the collection of children’s books that kept their kids soothed and entertained.

For most everyone who has benefited from book donations thus far, it has been a small piece of the puzzle of regaining some sense of normalcy, she said.

“I can’t imagine losing my books,” Monforti said. “Especially for children, having books at home correlates with all the wonderful things you might expect — performance at school, grades and graduation rates…”

“Books are also a way to deal with stress and, of course, these families are going through a very stressful time,” she added. “So, having books is one of the many ways to normalize life again.”

The partnership with BookGive and with The Bookworm is the perfect way to show students that they can make a difference in their community beyond the classroom, Powell said.

“We all get kind of trapped in our day-to-day lives, right? And so, as teachers, one of our goals and purposes here at Vail Mountain School is to figure out ways to encourage our students to see beyond the walls of our school and look at this amazing community that we live in,” she said.

“We want to help encourage them to become global citizens who give back and don’t always just focus on how do we gain success in our own lives, but how do we encourage others to thrive as well,” Powell said.

For more information about BookGive, visit BookGiveDenver.org or contact hello@bookgivedenver.org. The organization serves the broader Denver metro area, but is glad to work with other, farther nonprofits and individuals if they are willing to come pick up books, Monforti said.

Questions about the local book drive can be directed to Lauren Powell at lpowell@vms.edu or Nicole Magistro at nicolemagistro@gmail.com.