| from the New Orleans Sun |
[Nov. 16th, 2005|11:02 am] |
Support pours in for hurricane-damaged schools
New Orleans Sun
Thursday 10th November, 2005
In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, Louisiana non-profit booksXYZ.com and The American Public School Endowments (APSE) have begun collecting money to help rebuild damaged & destroyed schools.
To date, the amounts raised and pledged exceed $30,000. The organization is now seeking requests from schools to aid in disbursement of the funds, as well as to augment continued fund-raising.
Dr Joseph Abraham, president APSE said, 'The devastation is overwhelming, but people across the U.S. and beyond have been very generous. In fact, donations are increasing, not diminishing with time.
'Many of our donors have made requests to help specific schools. To assist donors and help more schools, we created the Schools Hurricane Wish List.'
The Wish List allows affected schools to request specific needs on booksXYZ, such as new books, equipment, critical repairs, etc. APSE will use the booksXYZ lists to disburse the funds already raised. The Wish List also makes schools' needs available to corporate and private donors, who can choose requests that they find particularly important.
100% of all donations will be distributed to affected schools, with no reduction for overhead. Schools can list specific requests by vising booksXYZ ( http://www.booksxyz.com ) and clicking on the 'Schools Hurricane Wish List' button on the front page.
A major source of donations has turned out to be, surprisingly, other school districts around the country. 'The generosity is humbling when you see the generosity from so many schools around the country, many of them struggling themselves. Some of the poorest districts have put together fund-raisers and sent aid for schools battered in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Florida,' said Abraham.
In addition to the support of private, corporate and student groups, children's author R.L. Stine, NPR's Cokie Roberts and Ellen Kushner, Chocolat author Joanne Harris, Historian Walter Isaacson and Hugo, Locus and Nebula winning author Larry Niven and others have joined in supporting APSE's efforts.
Award winning children's author Phillip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials series, wrote in to say, 'I'm very glad to hear about the efforts your organization is making in rebuilding schools in the area devastated by Hurricane Katrina and the floods. Schools are beacons of hope and expressions of confidence in the ability of human beings to overcome disaster. I salute all those who create and work in them.'
http://story.neworleanssun.com/p.x/ct/9/cid/58efbe858884606b/id/27c5e5c2f55717fc/ |
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| from the daily iowan |
[Oct. 24th, 2005|02:19 pm] |
Higher purposes
By Ali Gowans - The Daily Iowan
Published: Monday, October 17, 2005
Dozens of UI musicians will join the ranks of altruistic artists everywhere who have employed their talents to benefit those in New Orleans. But tonight's Higher Grounds concert aims to help the Big Easy's young musicians.
The UI student chapters of the Music Therapy Association and the Music Teachers National Conference organized the concert. Admission to the 8 p.m. Clapp Recital Hall performance is free, but donations will be collected upon entry and after the concert concludes. All money raised will go toward the American Public School Endowment, which will then funnel the funds to the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
The lengthy lineup of musicians includes the Maia String Quartet, the UI Pan American Steel Band, the UI Flute Ensemble, the Double Reed Ensemble, and several School of Music faculty members and students.
"We'd done fundraisers in the past for the tsunami," said Joshua Russell, the UI Music Teachers National Conference president. "We found that music is such a good way to reach out to people."
The American Public School Endowment is a Louisiana-based charity that awards grants and funds to schools nationwide. The endowment has focused on repairing local school systems shattered as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, among other problems plaguing the area.
"Schools in New Orleans were in a mess before the hurricane hit. Corruption was a huge quagmire," endowment President Joseph Abraham said.
But the disaster has afforded the group a chance to make better a devastating tragedy.
"The hurricane has really caused a lot of problems, but it also created a great opportunity to do something," Abraham said.
The nonprofit organization will send the raised money to the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, an arts and music school. Local public-school students attend the center for half-days and after school to gain exposure to the arts they cannot always find in the traditional public-school environment.
"It offers sorely needed balms," Abraham said. "To be anything of excellence to those kids is a great kindness."
Russell said the two student groups wanted to find an organization local to the areas affected by the hurricanes. Based in Lafayette, La., the American Public School Endowment immediately caught their eye. When Abraham recommended the Center for Creative Arts as the ultimate destination for their money, Russell said the groups were even more pleased their efforts would aid music.
"It's one music organization helping out another," he said.
E-mail DI reporter Ali Gowans at
alison-gowans@uiowa.edu |
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| An Online Bookstore Works to Rebuild Hurricane-Ravaged Schools |
[Sep. 8th, 2005|11:40 am] |
An Online Bookstore Works to Rebuild Hurricane-Ravaged Schools
September 08, 2005
By Anna Weinberg
A week-and-a-half after Hurricane Katrina decimated much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Booksxyz, a Louisiana-based Internet bookstore, which donates proceeds from its sales to public education in the U.S., is hard at work collecting money for the public schools affected by the catastrophe.
Lafayette, where the organization is based, was hit by little more than light rain when Katrina pounded regions to the east. But the city, pop. 130,000, and its surrounding areas, were soon overwhelmed by residents of New Orleans seeking refuge from their waterlogged city. “We’ve got so many evacuees here,” says Dr. Joseph Abraham, the founder of Booksxyz, who estimates that his city’s population may have tripled in the past week. “You can hardly drive in town right now,” he says. “And everybody’s scrambling around trying to help. We’re filling up churches, we filled up the Acadia Center, shelters. There are a lot of stories of heroism and kindness. We’re high and dry here, but we’ve just got to help people over there.” Story continues below ↓
Booksxyz’s site, which is accepting donations by credit card and check, has pledged to direct 100% of the funds it collects to helping to “rebuild school districts in the ravaged areas, and to assist school districts absorbing refugee students.”
“You know, we didn’t want to jump on education too soon, because we need to look after water and food and shelter first,” Abraham says. “But at the same time, we have the world’s attention right now. This disaster is a multi-year problem, and while we do have to keep the victims of the storm alive, we also have to make sure they can rebuild their lives. And education is going to be absolutely essential.”
from www.thebookstandard.com
http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/retail/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001057106 |
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| from www.maudnewton.com |
[Sep. 6th, 2005|08:53 am] |
"Support education in the aftermath of Katrina by giving to the American Public School Endowments, which promises that "100% of all donations ... will go to help rebuild school districts in the ravaged areas, and to assist school districts absorbing refugee students." (If you’re concerned about the legitimacy of the organization, read this recent article from The Book Standard.)"
www.maudnewton.com/blog |
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| please post in your journals,websites and forward to appropriate press |
[Sep. 2nd, 2005|01:54 pm] |
Press Release
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Jacob Rakovan
337.769.1466
/jacob@booksXYZ.com/
APSE accepting donations to aid school systems decimated by Hurricane Katrina
Lafayette LA
“We urge you to make most of your donations for basic needs to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but we also ask you to remember that other, essential needs will continue for months and even years to come” said Dr Joseph Abraham, president of the Louisiana-based American Public Schools Endowments (APSE) Friday, Sept 2
APSE has utilized its existing resources to aid schools hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, and to help offset costs of schools absorbing refugees.Donations for schools affected by the hurricane are accepted at www.apse.us APSE and its affiliate and founding entity, the Acadiana Educational Endowment are 501(c)3 non-profit organizations. The AEE was founded in 1989 and has distributed over $200,000 to public education in Louisiana |
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| from quill and quire |
[Aug. 22nd, 2005|01:59 pm] |
Canada's Magazine of Book News and Reviews
Online books financing real-live schools
The Book Standard has an article about the Acadiana Educational Endowment, a fund that distributes small grants to teachers who can't afford to finance classroom projects. In 2003, AEE founder Joseph Abraham decided to expand the reach of the program, establishing the online bookstore booksxyz.com, which, as reporter Anna Weinberg writes, "helps fund the mini-grants and also donates 5% of each sale to the U.S. college or school of the buyer’s choosing."
http://www.quillandquire.com/blog/ |
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| from litblog Tingle Alley |
[Aug. 16th, 2005|12:54 pm] |
http://www.tinglealley.com/index.php?p=836
"Two bookish PSAs
Filed under:
* In The Conversation
— caaf @ 12:37 pm
• booksXYZ, an online bookseller specializing in new and hard-to-find books, has opened up shop. The project is a nonprofit, with all profits benefiting public education. You can even direct that 5% of your sale go to the school of your choice. Check ‘em out. ..." |
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| from the Ithaca Times |
[Aug. 15th, 2005|03:42 pm] |
08/10/2005
Helping Schools
By: Stephanie Bergeron
Donating to your alma mater is as easy as buying or selling a book, with a new Internet service donating five percent of all sales to the school or college of a customer's choice.
Booksxyz.com is a Web site for listing books that is similar to the eBay and PayPal model. Book listers are also able to list their titles through the Web site to be sold elsewhere. The Web site stems from the first endowment for public education, founded in 1989.
Founder Joe Abraham said that the Louisiana-based Web site is especially useful for small publishers, giving them an "open merchant" format to sell their books and providing a platform for small publishers.
The company handles all credit card transactions, generates bills and invoices, tracks shipments, and maintains relations between buyers and sellers. No inventory is involved, because publishers ship their own books. Listings are also free of charge.
Five days after a book is delivered, a lister will be reimbursed for 85 percent of the purchase price. Five percent of each sale also goes to the school or college of the customer's choice.
Unlike other online bookstores, BooksXYZ is a non-profit with all sales going toward public education and the college or university of the seller's choice. The American Public School Endowments and the Acadiana Educational Endowment own the site.
Abraham said that the site hopes to raise money to establish full-time teacher chairs in public schools and support music, art, theater and language programs.
"We want to reach kids that other academics don't necessarily reach," he said.
Because the site is relatively new, it has only started to see profits in the last few months. Cornell University and Ithaca College have not yet received any profits from the site.
"We're just now getting out there," said Abraham of the Web site gaining popularity on a national scale. "So far no one out there has gotten on the bandwagon."
Currently, BooksXYZ lists more than 1.4 million titles, with the number constantly increasing as the site gains popularity. All colleges and universities are listed on the site, and in the future users will be able to see the amount of money donated to each school.
Stephanie Bergeron
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15009364&BRD=1395&PAG=461&dept_id=216620&rfi=6 |
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| By way of introduction: |
[Aug. 15th, 2005|10:15 am] |
taken from www.thebookstandard.com
A Visionary and His Bookstore Help Kids in Underfunded Schools
August 13, 2005
By Anna Weinberg
In 2000, John D. Sorrel Jr., a physics teacher at Northside High School in Louisiana’s Cajun Country, was fixated on the night skies. Science classes at the high school weren’t filling up the way he wanted them to, and Sorrel, eager for projects that would draw kids in, thought astronomy might appeal to those who normally avoided discussions of entropy like the plague. The problem was that there was no money in his underfunded school district for stargazing. But his assistant principal told him about an organization called the Acadiana Educational Endowment (AEE), which was doling out mini-grants to public school teachers who couldn’t get the money from their school districts. Sorrel applied, and a few months later was the recipient of a $1,000 check, which he used to buy the high school’s first telescope, the germ of the school’s now-popular astronomy program. “When I started that program, there were maybe 15 kids involved,” says Sorrel. “Now there are about 150. You can do a lot with $1,000.”
The AEE was started in 1989 by citizens of Acadiana, led by an emergency-room physician named Dr. Joseph Abraham. Its mission was to provide funding to local public schools by soliciting donations and generating money with its non-profit status. The mini-grant program was an essential part of this. But the efforts of the AEE were confined to a few parishes in Louisiana, and Abraham’s vision was bigger than that. “We wanted to bring the entire country into our service area,” he says. So in 2003, he started the online bookstore booksxyz.com, which helps fund the mini-grants and also donates 5% of each sale to the U.S. college or school of the buyer’s choosing. Story continues below ↓
The website, which now lists over 1.4 million titles, from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to Jon Stewart’s America (The Book), allows people who hope to find loving homes for their books to either sell the titles directly through the website—structured on the eBay model—or to direct buyers to other venues, free of charge. As the site’s mission statement says, the goal is more about becoming the “single site for locating any book, anywhere,” than it is about turning massive profits. But ideally, says Abraham, the website will also “generate money to support education, and create more readers, citizens and thinkers,” he says. “We also provide a platform where small publishers can compete with large publishers, and thus keep information and creative channels open.”
The motivation for providing a venue for small publishers (and self-publishers) to hawk their wares dates back to 1998, when Abraham self-published Happiness: A Physician/Biologist Looks at Life and realized suddenly how hard it was to market books. He found the massive amount of literature on the market both daunting and exhilarating. “I think that’s exactly what you want—lots of different approaches and lots of different ideas,” he says. “But booksxyz.com is very interested in making sure that those daring books can get out there and still have an impact on our community and our world.”
With the establishment of the website, the AEE expanded to become the American Public School Endowments (APSE), and to date has distributed more than $200,000 in mini-grants. Teachers have received grants to make story quilts with their students, build a reading loft in a school, promote computer literacy, and have been able to teach everything from local folklore to “Cookin’ on de Bayou” to DNA Fingerprinting & Forensics.
And of course the grants have continued to fund Northside’s budding astronomy program. With the money from his mini-grant, Sorrel accomplished nothing short of the miraculous in leading high school seniors outside at 5:30 in the morning to look at the stars. “All I can tell you,” he says, “is though these mini-grants aren’t big, they have really inspired some great things.
http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/retail/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001014379 |
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| About Us: |
[Aug. 10th, 2005|10:10 am] |
booksXYZ.com
A Service Supporting Public Education
Authors, and Publishing,
across the U.S.
booksXYZ is both an Internet service providing a single platform for listing any and all books, and a vehicle for generating funds for public education.
booksXYZ is an "open platform" for listing books, comprising two novel approaches to Internet bookselling and e-business. First, booklisters may sell titles directly through booksXYZ in a manner similar to the eBay+PayPal model. Alternatively, booklisters may list their titles through booksXYZ to be sold elsewhere, free of charge. These two options will assist booksXYZ in eventually becoming the single source for locating any book, anywhere.
If booklisters choose to sell their titles through the website, booksXYZ handles all credit card transactions, generates bills and invoices, tracks shipments, maintains relations between booklisters and readers, and provides accounting records and other business and financial support; booklisters are only responsible for packaging & shipping their books. Five days after delivery, booklisters are reimbursed 85% of purchase price, and all of the shipping charges.
Currently, booksXYZ lists over 1.4 million titles, and will expand that number constantly, as it upgrades the content and functionality of its website.
All profits from booksXYZ benefit public schools nationwide, and 5% of each sale goes to the school or college of the customer's choice. The majority of profits from each sale return to the public schools in the purchaser's local area. All funds for public education will be distributed and overseen by The Acadiana Educational Endowment (AEE) and its affiliate, The American Public School Endowments, (APSE), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. |
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