Friends! If you don’t follow us on Instagram, you may not have heard… but we recently met our GoFundMe goal of raising $5K to cover the costs of books for the remainder of 2022!!! Exciting! And it all came together in about 2 weeks. Our minds are blown and our hearts are full.

So, how did this come together so quickly? WELL. Let’s take a minute to tell you what’s been going on since the TTG was featured in This is Tucson and started a GoFundMe

First, the article from This is Tucson was picked up by the Arizona Daily Star for inclusion in the Sunday print edition of the newspaper on January 30 – the front page of the “Home and Life” section. We were shocked and SO EXCITED. We might have gone out and bought more copies of the paper than anyone really needs… 🙂

Following that, (as you know), we started a GoFundMe campaign to raise $5K to pay for books for the remainder of 2022 – our hope was to raise enough money to hide 30 books a month. In just a week and a half, we had raised nearly $2K – we were feeling great! We were (and still are) incredibly grateful for all our friends, family, and community members who invested in (and continue to invest in!) this little book-hiding dream! And then, something magical happened…

Early on Friday morning (2/18), an anonymous donor – moved by “Random Acts of Kindness” day on 2/17 – topped off our GoFundMe campaign by gifting us the remainder needed to meet our goal – $3,188. We were so stunned that we *might* have cried when we saw the email alert from GoFundMe. One of us *might* have looked at the GoFundMe account, oh, I don’t know… 3-4 (or 10) times before believing it had really happened.

Although we can’t share the details of what unfolded with this gift, we will say that we knew something really special had happened when we received a call AND an email from a member of the Marketing & Communications team at GoFundMe congratulating us on meeting our goal and sharing some news about how this gift came to be. Honestly, it was a crazy heartwarming path of serendipity that resulted in this anonymous gift. It’s like something you would read in a book (LOL). So now we’ll be able to hide ~350 brand new books around town this year. Is this our life? Has this really just happened? YES!

THEN (wait, wait, it keeps getting better!), on Sunday (2/20), the Arizona Daily Star sent a photographer to hang out with us while we hid books around town. It was so fun. And with those photos, they updated and re-shared the (original) lovely article about the Tucson Tome Gnome book-hiding project– which you can now read here.

And finally: a good friend sent us a text message on 2/24 with a photo she took of a letter to the editor in the Arizona Daily Star. I’ve included an image below. Honestly, we couldn’t love this town more. We truly believe that we thrive together when we invest in our community together. Tucson really IS a place of unexpected treasures.