News

WCCO Radio covered the visit of the Mandela Fellows, a prestigious group of visiting young African leaders, to the BFA warehouse in July.

St. Paul’s Books for Africa is preparing to send off another huge shipment of reading material halfway across the world. Thursday’s sorting was another step in getting millions of books to Africa.

At the Books For Africa warehouse off of Prior Avenue in St. Paul, students and administrators of the Mandela Washington fellowship program sorted thousands of books Thursday into cardboard boxes, which were bursting at the seams with children’s books and novels. Next to those boxes, shrink-wrapped pallets of stacked textbooks in biology and physics are ready to be sent across the Atlantic to the continent of Africa.

Twenty-four African leaders from 15 different countries sorted and packed books at the Books for Africa warehouse as part of the Mandela Washington Fellowship.

On June 30, Books For Africa concluded its third-most-successful fiscal year to date, shipping over 3.2 million books to 27 countries in Africa.

When University of Wisconsin-Stout’s Instructional Resources Service began its partnership with Books for Africa, the university donated small quantities of titles, and BFA Founder Tom Warth collected the boxes of withdrawn textbooks in his SUV. But now, over these many years, they are needing semitrucks to collect the books