Each summer, the library mounts a citywide learning campaign to help students avoid “summer slide." In 2021, concerned about pandemic learning loss, the library and a coalition of community organizations, nonprofits, businesses, volunteers and city agencies upped the ante to distribute 500,000 new books (10 per child) to seed the home libraries of students. These Summer Together “book bundles,” grouped by grade level, were distributed at libraries, summer camps and schools, and through the city’s public housing sites.

Summer Together was the largest book giveaway in the library’s history. Conceived just two months before the end of the school year, the project required the collections team to purchase half a million new paperback books, secure a warehouse and delivery company for the logistics, wrangle hundreds of community volunteers who worked daily shifts in the warehouse bundling the books into sets of 10 by grade level and deliver to reopened libraries and partner agencies to get the books in the hands of all students.

44,000 San Francisco students in grades Transitional Kindergarten through 12th grade picked up their book bundles at neighborhood libraries or through their summer camp, summer school, or public housing site. Remaining books were distributed to the SF School District’s middle and high schools. “I was able to get 600+ bundles (enough for the whole school)! These students now have Summer Together at-home libraries in their hands when they might not have otherwise, since their home library branch is closed.”