Donating the magazines you love is a meaningful way for consumers, publishers, businesses and libraries to increase literacy to improve the lives of children and families who have limited access to reading materials.
Your magazine donations to MagLiteracy help us in two ways: They either go directly to readers to foster literacy, or we recycle them back to paper mills to promote sustainability and gain revenue that we use to cover the expense of literacy deliveries.
Sending us all of your magazines allows us to increase our supply to support both variety for literacy programs and volume for recycling efforts. We also accept catalogs! Those support our sustainability goals and can also be used by art programs for therapeutic vision boards and collages.
Fostering Literacy
Donating the magazines you love is a meaningful way for consumers, businesses and publishers to end illiteracy and poverty. Print magazines have a built-in sustainability advantage — they can be passed on to new readers, multiplying their impact.
MagLiteracy is the only project in the world that provides magazines for literacy on a large scale at no cost to literacy programs and readers via teachers in classrooms, food pantries, shelters, health care facilities, summer feeding and reading, youth mentoring, job training, elder and foster care, veterans programs and more.
Bundles of publications donated by magazine lovers like you are prepared by local volunteer teams for delivery to people who have limited access to reading materials via our literacy newsstands in food pantries, shelters, classrooms and other community service programs.
Recycling for Financial Support
Now, we’ve launched a new major magazine recycling effort to promote sustainability: Magazines beyond what’s currently needed by the programs we serve are sent to a paper mill to be recycled into new magazines. This recycling effort not only keeps tons of materials out of landfills, but it also generates funds to deliver other donated magazines to new readers. Every single magazine and dollar raised by our recycling program brings us closer to our goal of changing so many lives for good.
How to Donate Your Magazines
Please complete the form below to tell us about the magazines or catalogs that you would like to recycle for literacy.
What to donate
You can donate any magazines, and even catalogs, no matter what age or condition.
The magazines that you donate that we deliver to new readers should be gently read magazines in clean, good condition with no cut, torn or scribbled covers or pages and no moisture damage.
Privacy considerations
You can mark out your mailing information with a black permanent marker, or we will do that to protect your privacy. Then we cover the spot with a clean opaque white label for delivery to a new reader.
Delivery
Except for a couple locations where we have local teams (Madison, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Ohio) we can only receive your magazine and comic book donations if you mail them to us. Magazine donors cover their own postage costs.
Tightly packed U.S. Postal Service flat rate medium boxes are the most cost-effective way to send your magazines. The boxes are available at no cost from your local post office or online from the Postal Service website and can be shipped for about $18 postage. A box of reading materials will serve 25 or more readers.
Tell us what you would like to recycle for literacy.
Please complete the form below. Include a description of the reading materials and the approximate quantity. Based on that, we will supply you with a shipping address.
Registered literacy programs can get magazines here.
