Librarians and educators know about book deserts and understand what’s at stake when families lack access to rich, culturally relevant information in their communities and homes. Data backs this up: A 2010 study correlated a higher number of books in a household with higher educational achievement, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status.
The collaborative, grassroots Community Book Gardens (CBG) initiative aims to transform deserts into landscapes where local storytelling flourishes by helping communities to create their own books. A panel of librarians and literacy advocates talked about the CBG model at “Community Book Gardens: Helping the Underrepresented Write and Publish Their Own Stories,” a June 29 session of the American Library Association’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia.
In 2014, Unite for Literacy’s interactive map of book scarcity helped spark awareness of the concept of book deserts. “The map implied a simple answer,” CEO Mike McGuffie said. “That these places just need more books. But it’s an ecosystem,” he clarified—with interdependent relationships, and requiring active participation to thrive. “When you invite the community in as partners, when you ask them to create content for their own children, in their own voices, you start to see change.”
For Amanda Sweet, technology innovation librarian at the Nebraska Library Commission and one of the project leads, the work started with building community members’ confidence. “The people we talked to had all these stories stuck inside them, that they wanted to share, but didn’t think they could,” she said. She recalled one participant who joked that he couldn’t “word good.”
Sweet’s team facilitated group workshops where participants collaborated to build storyboards, write drafts, and learn basic publishing tools, including generative AI story-creation aids like Nookly. “When it wasn’t just one person doing it, it was the hive mind working together,” she said. “That’s when the stories really started to come out.”
CBG prints some of the books it publishes in small batches of 50 or 100 copies, while it distributes others digitally in dozens of languages, from Ojibwe to Somali, through Little Free Libraries and book stands in community centers and places like laundromats.
Sharing and celebrating these published works engaged families as active participants rather than passive recipients of information, said Anthony S. Chow, director of the School of Information at San José State University, who helped develop the CBG framework. “It’s about creating the conditions for the joy and discovery of books.”
