Yesterday, ECBC re-stocked its outpatient libraries at CHOC’s Outpatient Infusion (OPI) Center and at the Hyundai Cancer Institute (oncology clinic) for the last time, delivering 550 new Halloween-themed books for all patient ages and across many genre types.

This was a bittersweet “last” for sure, as this aspect of ECBC has been one of the greatest joys amongst ECBC’s numerous programs. Outpatient book gifting wasn’t part of ECBC’s original mission to bring books and literacy support to CHOC patients — which generally meant children on the inpatient side with life-altering treatment and lengthy hospital stays. In the early days of ECBC, the extras were given to the outpatient side, more as an afterthought. When Covid hit, all of our inpatient programming was halted, including our inpatient book gifting — whereas outpatient welcomed the donations and so we established it as a regular program, creating gifting cart libraries and providing monthly donations.

Over the past many years, ECBC has gifted more than 30,000 new books to OPI and the oncology clinic. We are so proud that patients came to expect the opportunity to select a new, high-quality book as a regular part of their outpatient experience. The best part has been the patient and parent testimonials — mostly in the form of social media shout-outs and emails — sharing their gratitude for specific books, for inspiring their kiddos to read, and even for contributing to school reading awards. We are currently working with these outpatient centers on how to help them continue to offer books to patients and look forward to reporting on that in the near future.

Thank you to all of our donors who have made our outpatient book gifting programs possible over the years. And a huge thank you to outpatient nurse manager Ali Langdon for embracing the value of books for patients and making space in her busy world to support our program — from regularly informing us of specific numbers of books needed for each book type, to organizing philanthropic book drives in the community, to literally carting boxes of books from the parking garage to inside the hospital– Ali made the partnership easy and wonderful.

And finally, we still need a couple hundered more books for next week’s final inpatient event — BOO-ks for Treats on Halloween day. If you haven’t had a chance to donate yet, please consider doing so one last time at https://bit.ly/Halloweenbooks4ECBC or by clicking on Amazon image below