bluebin.org is a new web service that facilitates the re-use of goods within a community – much like freecycle.org – which is also a great idea. bluebin is blessed with a very friendly Web 2.0 design. When I arrived at the site, there were already some magazines listed for re-use. We’ve added some of our own and will encourage others to do so. This especially helps us address situations where generous consumers want to donate their magazines for literacy from locations where we do not yet have a volunteer team in place to manage the flow to community literacy programs.
Today, I spoke to a wonderful magazine distributor in Wisconsin who wants to get surplus, expired copies of magazines from the newsstand to new readers. This person has a ready supply of magazines that children and adults would love to read – especially our neighbors who find themselves in homeless or domestic violence shelters, or children in after-school or other mentoring programs. One of our most difficult challenges for our literacy marketplace is moving magazines around from literacy champions to literacy agents. The incredibly elegant beauty of this opportunity is that the Wisconsin distributor travels the State, picking up the surplus magazines, and readily wants to help deliver them to our volunteer teams or community literacy programs. The solution is win-win, where we bring literacy needs to the table that the distributor enjoys filling and children and families can enjoy magazines that would have otherwise been destroyed.
We’ve dreamed of tapping this newsstand link in the magazine supply chain since our inception and have had some success already. Developing this model further will teach lessons that will enable us to quickly inspire others to replicate the program. We are boosted by a convergence with technology that now allows distributors to scan returned magazines for audit purposes, rather than tearing their covers or otherwise returning them for destruction.