Food for Fines: Helping Students and the Community Page: 1
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Food for Fines: Helping Students and the Community
A library has a unique opportunity to highlight its value to a community through the services it offers. A
Food for Fines drive is a great way for a library to help students take care of their library fines and help
the local community as well.
In the fall of 2011, I was brainstorming on ways my department, Access Services, could support our local
community through the services it offers. My Fines Supervisor, Bethany Hardikar, suggested the UNT
Libraries run a canned food drive where students could donate cans as a way to reduce their fines. Each
year the libraries had a canned food drive which supported our local area food bank. Collection boxes
were placed near the entrance of each of our libraries, but the drives were not tied directly to any
library services. Offering a food for fines drive would enable students to clear up their overdue fines by
donating cans, which in turn we could give to a local food bank. I decided, with support from our library
administration, to conduct a food for fines drive that fall semester as a pilot project and if it was
successful, continue to offer it as a service each semester. Offering a drive each semester would also
help our local area food bank, which would benefit by receiving canned goods from our library each
semester rather than just once a year.
Planning
In planning our first food for fines drive we had several things to determine. How would we structure
the drive? Would we limit the kinds of cans we would accept? Would there be a maximum amount of
cans accepted per student? How long would the drive run? What kind of marketing plan should be
designed? Where would we store the cans during the drive? Who would we donate the cans to?
We decided the structure of the drive should be as simple as possible to make it easy for students to
donate the cans and for staff to collect them. For each dent-free, non-expired, 12 oz or larger can
donated, a $1 credit would be applied to the student's library fines, up to $20. The maximum amount of
cans a student could therefore donate would be 20 cans. We would also accept cans from anyone who
wanted to contribute to the drive even if no fines were owed. The drive would take place in the middle
of the semester and would run for two weeks.
Marketing was an important factor in making the drive successful. Signs were created by our External
Relations Department and posted in various areas on campus as well as throughout our libraries. We
advertised the service on our website, in the school newspaper and our library newsletter.
We designated several shelves in our workroom as a storage area to hold the cans during the drive. It
was decided we would donate the cans to Denton County Friends of the Family, a local area charity that
had a food pantry.
Implementation
The UNT Libraries first Food for Fines drive ran from November 7 to November 21 of 2011. The Access
Services Staff was trained on how to process the cans collected and how to post the credits to the
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Venner, Mary Ann. Food for Fines: Helping Students and the Community, article, October 2012; [Teaneck, New Jersey]. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc185798/m1/1/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .