A charity which collects and distributes second hand text books to school children in East Africa has thanked Safestore in Old Trafford for donating free storage space and staff time.
The Safestore store at City Park in Brindley Road has donated 400 sq ft of storage space each month, free of charge, for the past three years to Read International. Thanks to the company’s support, the charity sent a record 296, 965 books to Uganda and Tanzania this summer, bringing the total number of books sent to East Africa to over 1m.
Tanzania and Uganda follow a secondary school syllabus almost identical to the UK, but teachers often lack the resources needed to teach. In the UK newer editions of books inevitably replace the old (very often only a couple of years old though), which makes for good quality, but technically ‘out of date’ textbooks filling up school store rooms or ending up in landfill. The charity sends them to where they are really needed, improving access to education to hundreds of thousands of children in East Africa.
Alistair Johnson, Store Manager at Safestore Old Trafford commented: 'We are proud of our association with Read International and look forward to continuing working together in the future. We are delighted that this crucial charity was able to send so many books to children in East Africa this summer as we know it will really help them with their school education.'
Rose Blackie, Head of UK Operations at Read International said: 'Sending so many books would not have been achieved without the kind support and patience of staff at Safestore in Old Trafford. We truly appreciate the relationship we have with the Safestore team as they contributed towards our success of providing much needed educational resources in East Africa.'
ENDS
For further press enquiries please contact:
Lucy Clark/ Mark Gee
Hudson Sandler
Tel: 020 7796 4133.
Email: safestore@hudsonsandler.com
Editors’ Notes:
About Read International
The charity began life in 2004 as a small project based at Nottingham University, founded by a group of socially entrepreneurial students following a ‘gap year’ teaching in Tanzania. Now there are almost 1,000 student volunteers involved, operating from a network of over 45 university sites across the UK.
We collect any books from anyone, anywhere throughout the UK, but we focus our efforts on collecting textbooks and children’s literature from secondary schools. We sort the books and send the most relevant, up-to-date, and high quality books to schools in Tanzania and Uganda. Any books collected which are not relevant or appropriate to send are sold online or recycled to generate funding.
http://www.readinternational.org.uk/
Information on Safestore
Safestore is the UK’s largest self storage company with 94 stores across the country and two business centres, plus a further 24 stores in Paris. The company provides secure, cost-effective self-storage facilities, an increasingly attractive solution to the growing storage needs of both business and household customers. As a result of this increasing demand for self storage, Safestore has seen unprecedented levels of occupancy growth, with levels in 2010 being 26 percent higher than in 2009.
Stores are staffed by a highly trained teams and accessible seven days a week. Services include free van hire, four weeks free storage for new customers, Tesco Clubcard token acceptance and a DHL service point to send parcels worldwide. For business customers, there are larger storage rooms with wider aisles and doors available together with a goods holding facility. Safestore has also formed a partnership with Scope.
For more information, please see www.safestore.co.uk