The venture serving to needy college students get first dibs on tons of of hundreds of used textbooks every yr

That is when the venture will get a bit trickier. Over three weeks beginning in November, volunteers signed up for six-hour shifts to type the books, checking them in opposition to an MOE checklist for relevance and guaranteeing they aren’t utterly used.

“The volunteers have been actually having a extremely powerful but significant expertise sorting books. A few of these books which might be useable can be these that aren’t torn and tattered, do not have a variety of scribbles and all that,” Ms Tan stated.

“We do come throughout books which have lacking pages, like nearly three-quarters of the ebook are lacking. So these are primarily taken out. After which we begin to type it in keeping with educational degree and topic.”

WHAT VOLUNTEERS DO

Secondary 4 pupil Nicole Wee, 16, began volunteering in 2020 as a manner of doing one thing significant and recharging after weeks of finding out. She had additionally benefited from the venture a yr earlier than.

“I assumed (the initiative) was fairly useful as a result of textbooks are unreasonably costly. Individuals will purchase the books then they are going to simply throw away and it’s fairly new,” she stated.

In 2020, Ms Wee estimated that she sorted tons of if not hundreds of textbooks every day, looking for an MOE stamp that signifies curriculum relevance and extreme scribbles that might make the ebook unuseable.