This year, the Uprise Books Project is competing in the Dell Social Innovation Challenge, a worldwide competition that “identifies and supports promising young social innovators who dedicate themselves to solving the world’s most pressing problems with their transformative ideas.” We like to think that we fit that description and hope to make a run at a piece of the $750k+ in prizes (including a $50,000 Grand Prize).

While the lion’s share of the pool will be going to projects screened by their team of judges, the Dell Social Innovation Challenge also includes 17 People’s Choice Awards, each worth $1000. Between now and May 13, 2012, anybody can go over to the DSIC, register, and vote for their favorite non-profit organization dedicated to ending the cycle of poverty through literacy… one that will provide new banned and challenged books to underprivileged teens…

If you have a free minute, please head on over to http://www.dellchallenge.org/projects/uprise-books-project and give us a click. A thousand dollars will buy quite a few books.

Wow.

That last bit of 2011 was fun, wasn’t it? I don’t know about you all, but the last few months of ’11 had more ups and downs for us than, well, something with a LOT of ups and downs. Of course, unless you follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you probably wouldn’t have any way of knowing that, would you? What, with our ever-so-frequent blog updates here and all…

So let’s get caught up, shall we?

• The Uprise Books Project’s Kickstarter campaign was funded, hitting the 100% mark just 36 hours before our Halloween deadline. Things looked pretty grim with about a week to go, but some timely retweets from folks like Neil Gaiman and Wil Wheaton helped get the word out, and many of our contributors bumped up their already generous contributions to get us over the hump. In the end, we had 252 individual contributors and managed to hit 104% of our target!
• We shipped out all the Kickstarter rewards. If you’ve never had to pack and ship a couple hundred packages of various sizes to different locations worldwide in a short period of time, I highly recommend you pawn that job off to someone else… (Quick aside: if you haven’t yet received your goods, we either didn’t get your Kickstarter survey responses or your package was lost in the mail. Either way, please contact us right away if you don’t have your merchandise yet.)
• We’re still awaiting our 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS. As of right now, the IRS is still processing applications they received in June 2011, so it seems unlikely that we’ll hear anything from them before spring. That doesn’t prevent us from continuing to work, but it does make our fundraising options… interesting. We’ll definitely keep people in the loop as things progress on that front and continue to explore other options (for instance, operating as a for-profit social enterprise instead of a traditional non-profit).
• Finally, project development IS underway! We’re working with the designers and developers on the site you helped fund and, if everything goes according to plan, hope to have the fully armed and operational site ready to start accepting new requests in the next few months!
• BONUS: The Uprise Books Project was recently covered by Fast Company! Check out Michael J. Coren’s article on Uprise Books over at  their Co.Exist site.

You’ll have to forgive me, Internet. I’m a bit of a data nerd.

Well, in truth, that “data” qualifier isn’t completely necessary… but that’s not really the point here.

Anyway, now that we’ve hit 50% of our $10,000 goal for our Kickstarter project, I thought it might be fun to take a look at where our backers are coming from. Unfortunately, Kickstarter doesn’t make a lot of information available to folks running a campaign (at least not before it’s funded), so we didn’t have a whole lot of data available. Still, I think these graphs are probably fairly indicative of the overall population of Uprise Books Project backers.

Couple of notes:

1. The total amount pledged at the time I created these: $5,355
2. I filtered out foreign pledges ($320) and those from unknown locations ($1,168). (The “Vancouver” listed is the one in Washington state, not British Columbia).

No real surprise that Oregon tops the list there. The majority of our contacts are in the Portland, Oregon area, plus Portland is well known for its love affair with books. I doubt, though, that anyone would have thought West Virginia would be #6.

Again, Oregon leads the pack by a WIDE margin in the total number of backers (33 of the 96 in this analysis). The big surprise here is the size of the drop between Oregon and Washington. I thought Seattle would be better represented, but only four of those 11 came from the Emerald City (six were from Vancouver, Washington).

Finally, a breakdown by city. Again, Portland earns its ranking as the top city for book lovers, contributing 61% more than the #2 city (Pittsburgh, PA). I think the big surprise on this graph is the fact that San Francisco doesn’t appear at all. Sure, I teased Seattle a little for lagging behind its sister to the south, but the City by the Bay isn’t even on the board.

Very curious to see how things look when all is said and done… assuming we manage to get funded, that is. With only six days left, we still need to raise just over $4500… remember, Kickstarter campaigns are all-or-nothing affairs. Either we hit 100% of our goal, or we get nothing. If you haven’t backed us yet (or if you can afford to bump up your pledge by a buck or two), please support the Uprise Books Project on Kickstarter today.

The Uprise Books Project is thrilled to be working with Ellen Hopkins to promote teen literacy, fight censorship and end the cycle of poverty. Ms. Hopkins has the distinct honor of being the American Library Association’s most frequently challenged author of 2010¹ and her debut novel (the New York Times bestseller, Crank) ranked fourth among challenged books for that same period².

When we talk about our reasons for promoting banned and challenged books with The Uprise Books Project, we usually mention our disdain for censorship and our belief that the “forbidden fruit” angle will entice teens to actual read the things. But there’s another motive that’s sometimes ignored: these books are often challenged for the very reasons teens need to read them.  Such is the case with Ellen Hopkins’s works, books that explore situations that are often uncomfortable, but that can provide valuable insight to teens facing those circumstances in real life.

To celebrate our new relationship, The Uprise Books Project has added two new reward levels to its Kickstarter campaign:

• $75: A signed copy of Ellen Hopkins’s Crank.³
• $1000: A Kindle Fire with copies of Ellen Hopkins’s Crank Trilogy, Perfect and her latest novel, Triangles

The Uprise Books Project Kickstarter campaign ends on October 31, 2011.

About Ellen Hopkins:
Ellen Hopkins is the New York Times bestselling author of Crank, Burned, Impulse, Glass, Identical, Tricks, Fallout, and Perfect. Her novels are praised by teens and adults alike, and she has been called the “bestselling living poet in the U.S.” by mediabistro.com. Her latest novel, Triangles, is available October 18 from Amazon.com and your favorite local bookstore.

Be sure to visit Ellen Hopkins online at ellenhopkins.com; facebook.com/ellenhopkinsauthor; and twitter.com/ellenhopkinsYA.

¹ALA: Most Frequently Challenged Authors of the 21st Century
²ALA: Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010
³Limit of 25 signed copies.

UPDATE (9/26/11):

The final tally on the Chuck Palahniuk Effect:

• Gained 34 new backers (a 136% increase)
• Added $1297 in new pledges (a 151% increase)
• Jumped from 8% funded to 21% in one day.

Of course, we’re still quite a ways from the $10,000 we need to reach 100% of goal and Kickstarter working the way it does, we won’t see a cent if the campaign doesn’t reach that mark. If you can help, make sure you go to our the Uprise Books Project Kickstarter page and contribute today.

So you all remember that little Uprise Books Project Kickstarter campaign, right? The one we started to help raise $10k to cover the design and development of the website we’re going to build to help us get banned and challenged books into the hands of teens throughout the country? Well, we got a little bit of a boost today, thanks to the official Chuck Palahniuk Twitter and Facebook accounts.

At about 9:30 this morning, this happened:

and this:

Oh, and one of those “100+ others” who retweeted it? Some guy named Neil Gaiman…

Next thing you know, this happens:

In the last five hours, we’ve gone from being 8% funded ($857 from 25 fantastic people) to 18% funded ($1,814, 55 backers). For you non-math majors, that’s a 112% increase in funding ($957) and a 120% increase in donors. Phenomenal.

We still have a long way to go, of course (still $8,186 shy of our goal), but considering you all helped knock out 10% of our total in just five hours? Well, something tells me we’ll be able to do this.

Thanks for all your time and support,
Justin

Looks like the Uprise Books Project is starting to get a little attention! The project and our Kickstarter campaign have been covered by a few different blogs and one Portland-area newspaper this week:

• The Portland Mercury wrote a nice little piece about us that appeared online and in the September 22 print edition
• The Portland State University Impact Entrepreneurs blog posted an interview with our president and founder, Justin Stanley.

And a couple of librarian blogs:

• Agnostic, Maybe: Support An Uprising
• The Digital Immigrant: Radical librarians unite!

And a couple of tech blogs:

• BeingExchanged: Uprise Books – Not specifically Exchange Server Related
• newbie2mac: Uprise Books Project (hey, it’ll run on Macs too!)

OK, so both the tech posts were written by the same person, but still. Just shows you that others are just as passionate about literacy, poverty, and censorship as we are.

Did we miss your coverage of The Uprise Books Project this week? Please let us know.

“Andy is a librarian in New Jersey. He spends his days surrounded by vast amounts of information which he consumes on a fairly regular basis. And he loves games of all sorts as well as grilling.”

That’s how Andy Woodworth describes himself on his popular Agnostic, Maybe librarian blog. Others have called him a “Mover and Shaker.” We call him “one of the first supporters of our Kickstarter project.”

In a recent blog post, Andy wrote about why he decided to contribute to the Uprise Books Project (and why he thinks you should, too). In that post, Andy mentioned that he didn’t come to the decision lightly:

I have some reservations. I’m curious as to how the inevitable question regarding the role of parents (or lack of role, in some cases) will come into play. Will parents be a part of this process as a way to get their kids to read books that they feel they should be allowed to read but otherwise couldn’t afford? Will kids or teens be allowed to select or receive books without parental consent? For kids that don’t want to get books at their homes (or have temporary living arrangements), how will the books get to them?

While Andy obviously didn’t think those reservations were enough to keep him from supporting the cause, we believe they’re valid concerns worth addressing for the larger group.

Our intent is to allow teens to select and receive books without parental consent, in the spirit of American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights:

Librarians and governing bodies should maintain that only parents and guardians have the right and the responsibility to determine their children’s—and only their children’s—access to library resources.  Parents and guardians who do not want their children to have access to specific library services, materials, or facilities should so advise their children.

In short, if a student fits our basic criteria (between the ages of 13 and 18, lives in the United States, and meets our income eligibility requirements), we’ll do our best to fulfill his/her requests for books. If a parent wants to withhold access from a particular title, that parent needs to do so by telling his own child directly, not by relying on outside organizations (schools, libraries, governments, or us).

However, that doesn’t mean we think parents should be cut out of the picture altogether. Indeed, even though the effect is lessened by the time students reach the age we focus on, there’s ample evidence that parental/caregiver involvement is linked to a child’s reading achievement. We’d love to help parents in any way we can, and that’s actually one of the main reasons we launched the campaign to fund the website: by automating as much of the actual order fulfillment process as possible, we’ll have more time for such outreach.

Finally, regarding shipping, we’ll initially send the requested books to anywhere in the US serves, whether that’s the student’s home address or some other safe place that can accept shipments on her behalf. Some of our future plans involve establishing relationships with schools in the hopes that we might be able to follow the models used by organizations like Scholastic and RIF, groups that either send all shipments directly to the schools or bring in the physical books from the start. That’s a long-term objective, though, that would require a much more extensive infrastructure.

There is a certain amount of dangerousness to this project, but I don’t think that it is a disqualification for support. In fact, I’d say that the project should be expanded to children and teens in crisis looking for books that reflect their situation, whether it is coming out as gay, dealing with domestic violence or sexual abuse, or coping with self destructive behaviors. I’d argue that those groups run the same risk as the children and teens in poverty since they are less likely to achieve higher education degrees without some form of intervention. (The teens killing themselves over their sexuality, their psychological problems, and their inability to cope do not even make it to the lifetime earning list.) I hope that this project may pivot to provide for those teens in the future, but in the meantime it does look to make inroads on behalf of literacy and the elimination of poverty.

We love this idea, though as with the in-the-schools concept mentioned above, it’s something we’d have to do down the road. For the immediate future, our limited resources will require us to focus on our initial target: impoverished teens.

That said, we do have plans to establish relationships with various underrepresented organizations to help promote titles that are significant to them. As Andy mentioned, a young adult dealing with his/her sexuality should have access to literature that helps him/her cope safely, but “homosexuality” is an oft-quoted reason for bans and challenges. We hope to partner with LGBT groups to help fund and fulfill orders for kids who need those books the most. Likewise, one can imagine logical partnerships to help distribute books banned because they were “offensive to religious beliefs” (code for anything from “witchcraft” to “Islam” to… well, I’m not sure how Captain Underpants fit that description…).

Have any questions, comments, or concerns of your own? Please feel free to contact us any time.

See that button on the left? Yesterday morning, we clicked that little guy and officially launched the very first Uprise Books Project Kickstarter campaign.

For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with it, Kickstarter offers folks with an idea the chance to raise a little seed money to fund their creative project. The “project” could be just about anything… a dance recital, a video game, a trip to do research for a book on the mating habits of denizens of the Jersey Shore… it just needs to be an actual project, something with a defined beginning and ending. For instance, they might allow a theatre company to run a campaign to cover the costs of putting on a single production of Evil Dead: The Musical, but not to cover the company’s ongoing operating expenses.

For the most part, Kickstarter projects behave very much like your typical NPR fund drive. Creators set a financial goal and end date for the campaign (neither of which can be changed after launch), then build different reward levels for contributors. Pledge $20 and you can get X, pledge $50 and you get Y, etc. With Kickstarter, though, there’s a twist: it’s all or nothing. If you fail to reach your initial goal before the clock runs out, you get nothing (contributors are only charged if the project is funded completely).

The Uprise Books Project Kickstarter campaign was created to help fund the design and development of the website we’re going to need to start getting books into the hands of kids. The one you’re reading this on now is great for things like blogging and sharing information, but it doesn’t have the functionality we need to get the job done.

If our Kickstarter campaign is funded, qualifying teens will be able to use the new site to browse through a selection of banned and challenged books, find the ones they’d like to read, and add those to their personal Wish Lists. At the same time, donors will be able to browse through the lists of requested titles to find the ones they’d personally like to support. Could be specific titles that affected them when they were younger, could be requests from students who fit specific demographic criteria (gender, city, etc.), could even be books that were banned for specific reasons (titles that were banned because they “promoted homosexuality,” for example). Whatever’s most important to the donors.

As I write this, we’ve made it about 3% of the way toward our goal of $10,000, a number we need to hit by Halloween in order to see a single cent. If you have a few dollars you can contribute, we’d certainly appreciate your consideration (click on the little Kickstarter widget on this page). And whether or not you’re in a position to let go of your hard-earned cash right now, you can still help tremendously by telling your friends all about The Uprise Books Project and this Kickstarter campaign.

Here’s some fun math for you…

Back in 2002, the U.S. Census Bureau released a study that compared the expected lifetime earnings of workers in the U.S. based on education level. The results were pretty much what you’d expect: more education equals more income (see the chart on the right). A high school dropout could expect to earn about $1 million over a typical forty-year career, while finishing a bachelor’s degree bumped that number up to roughly $2.1 million. You can see the results in the chart on the right.

If you look at the bottom two entries on that chart, you’ll see that, over the course of a career, a person with a high school diploma will earn about $200,000 more than a person who fails to graduate ($1.2 million vs. $1 million). In other words, an investment in a high school diploma today will be worth a total of $200,000 forty years from now.

Say we wanted to know how much money we’d need to invest in, oh, the S&P 500 to get those same results: a return on investment of $200,000 in 40 years. Well, it turns out that it’s pretty easy to calculate.  The equation looks like this:

Where:

• PV is the number we’re trying to figure out, the “present value” of our $200k diploma. In other words, how much do we need to invest today to end up with $200,000 forty years from now?
• FV is the “future value” of our investment. We already know that’s $200,000.
• n is the number of years we’ve had the investment (forty).
• And i is the interest rate…

Since we’re talking about the stock market here, we have to make some assumptions when it comes to figuring out what value to use for i in that equation. You probably know that stock prices can fluctuate wildly from year to year, so there isn’t a single guaranteed interest rate to plug into the formula. We can, however, use something called the “compound annual growth rate” (CAGR, think of it as the average annual rate of growth over a period of time). It’s not exactly the same thing as an interest rate, but it’s close enough for this exercise. A little bit of Googlin’ tells us that the CAGR for the S&P 500 was 8.92% between 1971 and 2010.

Once we plug all the numbers into that equation, it just takes a little arithmetic to find…

…an investment of $6,557.30 in the S&P 500  in 1971 is worth $200,000 at the end of 2010.

For perspective, The Uprise Books Project could ship over 260 books to underprivileged teens for that same $6557.30. If just ONE of those books made enough of a difference in a kid’s life to keep him in school long enough to earn a high school diploma, we’ll have beaten the market.

Pretty amazing when you think about it… We only need to make an impact with 0.382% of the books we distribute to earn the same $200,000 return on investment as someone putting their money into the S&P 500.

Move over Tolkien and Austen. According to the Guardian, our friends across the pond have picked a new fav: To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s 1961 Pulitzer Prize winner captured 676 of the 8000+ nominations in a recent poll, 155 more than Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

It’s certainly hard to argue with the choice. After all, Lee’s classic also broke the top five in both the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the best books of the 20th century and the Modern Library’s Reader’s List (we can’t help but wonder if the Modern Library’s editors may have been… altered… when they left it completely off their own list…). While it might not be my personal Favorite Book o’ All Time, it would definitely make the short list.

Of course, it’s the book’s appearance on certain other lists that makes this news Uprise Books Project-worthy. To Kill a Mockingbird was the 21st most frequently challenged book in the first decade of this century, the 40th most frequently challenged in the 1990s  and the fourth most frequently challenged book in 2009. Apparently, some folks thought that the book contained enough “offensive language” and “racism” to make it unsuitable for certain age groups. It was also the subject of challenges in 1977, 1981, 1984, 1985 (several times), 1995 (2x), 1996 (2x), 2001, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007…

Most of the challenges revolve around the use of the word “nigger” in the book. I have to admit, even typing it just now made me feel dirty and uncomfortable. As a white male raised in the northwest, I can barely begin to imagine the feelings that word invokes in people who’ve been on the receiving end of it’s hatefulness.

All that said, though, its appearance in Lee’s classic is necessary to relate exactly how bad the situation was at the time. Take out that word and the racism becomes less repugnant. Atticus Finch becomes just another court-appointed attorney, Tom Robinson just another man wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Readers, especially the young ones parents challenging the book are trying to protect, need to understand how wretched the situation was for black men and women at that time and in that place. They may not have lived through those times, but they know that word represents evil and they understand what it’s usage by the bigots in the novel means about them.