Meera Mehta, a Glen Ridge High School junior, has collected more than 30,000 books for needy children.
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Meera Mehta, a Glen Ridge High School junior, has collected more than 30,000 books in the last three years to give to children, from economically disadvantaged families, the opportunity to read at home. She calls her effort Novel Futures.
“I started Novel Futures because I’ve always loved reading and have been lucky enough to have books in my house,” she said this week.
The impetus for the undertaking was a friend’s effort four years ago to start a book drive. Meera helped out and then decided to try it for herself. Surprisingly, she said no matter how many books she collects, the distribution is there to put them into the hands of young readers.
“We have local partners for distribution,” she said, citing the Montclair Child Development and Book Smile.
Mehta has worked with these two partners since she set out on her mission as a freshman. She has received help from the high school Key Club and the Girl’s Club,of the Women’s Club of Glen Ridge. But literally and figuratively, most of the heavy lifting is accomplished with her parents and brother. She has put the word out via social media about her effort. Consequently, books are routinely left at the door of her Ridgewood Avenue home.
“Most donations are from local families,” she said. “There is also the annual book swap at the Glen Ridge Congregational Church. This past February, we took their extra books. There were 5,000 of them. We have a lot of storage in the garage and have up to 10,000 books at a time.”
All books are welcomed, but Meera’s focus is children’s books. The books are sorted at home into categories: board books, for the youngest readers; picture books; early readers and young adults and adults. Every book that comes in goes out.
“Sometimes we have an organization that won’t accept religious books,” she said. “But somebody will take them. We hit 30,000 recently and my goal is 100,000 by the end of this year. This past January, I had collected 16,000 books and it jumped to 30,000 by May. There’s a lot of people who want to clean out their books. And most families have more children’s books because they have children growing up.”
Meera’s effort goes beyond book collections. Another aspect is that she is attempting to amplify new voices.
“I took two courses last summer,” she said. “One was at the University of Pennsylvania and the other at the University of Iowa. A lot of the writing that we focused on was memoir writing. Everyone has a voice and it made me create a diverse book finder to allow authors to share their stories.”
The finder is available online and it offers Meera’s suggestions for topics, for example, Asian-American, Black history, girl stories and Hispanic-Latina.
She has also created a story lab workshop for young children to tell their stories. Meera debuted this effort at the Glen Ridge Makers’ Day, in March, at the public library. She gave the children prompts, for instance, telling them to write about the best day they ever had. She provided handmade coloring/notebooks in which the kids would write and draw.
At GRHS, she is an editor of the school newspaper, The Journalist, and managing editor of the literary magazine, Inbetween. She has also had two pieces published in the online platform, She Knows, which specializes in parenting and women’s issues.
One of Meera’s pieces was about the Trump inauguration and the other was about a topic called the Trad Wife or traditional wife. This embraces the role of a woman as wife and homemaker.
“It’s a new trend that glamorizes a traditional wife’s role in the home,” she said. “I wrote it from the perspective of a teenage girl.”
Meera plans to continue Novel Futures next year and said she would like to do some version of it when she attends college.
“There’s no limit to the number of donations,” she said. “The more people find out, the more donations there are.”
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