Description of the Project: The Neighbourhood Lending Library is a project meant to engage a community into the reading culture. The strategy used is simply to have a wooden or metallic box that can be used to host books. The box is placed outside a home, school, or building, and people in that community passing by can take a book for pleasure reading or leave a book in the box for others to enjoy reading. This project is meant to be self-sutatinable in the long run and; largely addresses two sustainable development goals (SDGs):

• SDG #4 (Quality Education) - Improving people's lives through reading.

• SDG #12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) - Recycling books for others to read instead of throwing them away.

Participants' Reflections: This project has enabled us to raise awareness on the reading culture while sharing and enhancing knowledge of books, and interests. Together, we were constantly pushed to develop our inquiry, organization (planning), and communication skills by carefully choosing the communities to place our lending library books, how to create the lending library box, and how to fund the project. Several neighbourhood opportunities came up, but we had to limit ourselves to the resources that we could make available.

Funding the project was one hefty task. Students were creative and were able to design scratch cards for sale thus enabling them to raise a sum of Rs 5,310. This was an amazing feat since it was done within one week. The support rendered by the school (financial and transport logistics) was much appreciated and helped make the project a success.

Reaching out to our neighbourhoods was a great experience. How could we be more caring to our communities? This project enabled students to share resources (financial, book donations, designing stickers to place on the boxes, etc), learn more about their neighbourhoods. How could we embrace fairness and development in our midst? The joy and excitement from the schools and neighbourhoods where we placed the lending library boxes was evident enough that this was a great project and their quest to emulate and sustain the project made us appreciate the project's success.

We believe that this project also helped us practice our school mantra (Learn Build Innovate and Succeed) in multiple aspects by learning more about our communities, building relationships with them, creating a literacy-friendly environment, and succeeding in setting up the lending library boxes at the four neighbourhoods we had identified.

Currently, our biggest challenge is on sustainability of the project and we hope that the collaboration with key persons in the neighbourhood where the lending library boxes were placed such as School Heads and Librarians, University Librarian, etc. will help us monitor the regular use and sharing of book resources. Last but not least, our team was able to reflect on what we could have done better, and how this project can be enhanced next time we have our LBImpactS Week. We appreciate our school (LBIS) for giving us an opportunity to be more caring and better inquirers around our communities.

Sponsors:

1. Le Bocage International School.

2. Design Technology Lab.

3. Book donations from students.

4. Fundraising by students through the sale of scratch cards.