BOOKS for the BARRIOS (BftB) is an all volunteer non-profit organization( 501(c)(3), that began in 1981 and operates out of its headquarters in the San Francisco East Bay, in Walnut Creek, California. is a not-for-profit, public-benefit California corporation run by volunteers that collects school textbooks, educational learning aids and devices from schools, publishers and schoolchildren in the
United States and delivers them to remote barrio public schools throughout the Republic of the Philippines. Priority is given to those schools that are most deprived and most remotely located without regard for politics, religion or ethnicity. has developed an efficient organization of volunteers who turn each dollar of financial support into $100 worth of educational materials placed directly into the hands of the teachers and students most in need. also provides professional teacher training programs to advance instructional technology of the national educational delivery system. Selected severely deprived public schools are transformed and maintained as world-class learning institutions to set the national standard. The corporation is the largest of its kind working in the Philippines, having brought a chance for a brighter future to 10,000 eager pupils each week for the past twenty-eight years. As we enter our thirtieth year of global operations in support of the eager pupils of the remote public schools of the barrios, the volunteers of BOOKS for the BARRIOS are happy to report that we continue our legacy of success. Our international youth literacy development program now trains tens of thousands of American schoolchildren in a character development hands-on California State standard learning unit for peace, human rights and the environment. Our volunteers learn to organize their communities to reuse. Since incorporation in 1990, we have delivered over twelve million books that otherwise would have been destroyed. Those precious resources are distributed to needy children by our troops as they build local schools while on deployment on the frontiers of conflict around the globe. In 2010 BOOKS for the BARRIOS (BftB) shipped 464,000 pounds of educational material to needy children, filling sixteen 20-foot container vans, without loss or diversion. The donations were distributed to five hundred deprived, depressed public schools that lacked classroom resources and reference learning materials. Continuous training and logistical support is provided to the sixty member schools in the BftB National "Model of Excellence" Schools Program.
