Friends: If you receive emails or text messages from your favorite nonprofits, then you know that Giving Tuesday is tomorrow (Tuesday, December 3, 2024)! Have you all been inundated with messages yet? I know I have. But, here we are, tossing ourselves into the fray 😉

Even though we’ll likely be drowned out by a million other “please donate” messages, we still have to take a chance that a few of you might see this and feel moved to support us with a donation – – – as a plucky little nonprofit, the Gnome needs to get in on the action! If you somehow missed the news, we’re raising money to fund our book-hiding efforts in 2025, which is RAPIDLY approaching. We are doing well so far, having raised 42% of our goal as of this writing. But we could be doing so much better with your help (click the link above or the image below to donate!) 😉

HOW WE USE YOUR DONATIONS: We have no paid staff – everything is run via volunteer hours donated by our founders and a few other dedicated folks. Thus, all the money we raise goes directly to buying the books we hide every month, supplies, and participating in various community collaborations and partnerships to spread the joy of reading! $10,000 will not cover ALL our operating costs in 2025, but it will help us and give us some flexibility to engage in new activities when opportunities arise!

WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT US? A NEW ARTICLE WAS JUST RELEASED ABOUT US! If you’re new here, we thought it might be helpful to share some background about the Tome Gnome: Founded by three friends in 2021, the Tucson Tome Gnome runs a monthly bookish scavenger hunt. Every month, we select a book, buy 45 copies from a local indie bookstore (#shoplocal), and hide those copies all over Tucson and surrounding communities for our friends and neighbors to find. We then ask people to read, enjoy, and hide their found book for the next person to discover. In addition to our monthly book hiding, we also host a regular “Solutions Focused Community Book Club,” and we collaborate with local businesses and other nonprofits in Tucson on events that create book joy for older teens and adults! We are also values-driven – we were the first book sanctuary in Tucson, and we believe in the power of diverse reading and the freedom to read.

You can learn a lot more about us in this shiny new piece released December 1, 2024, in The Booktender (written and published by Abra McAndrew, the new Executive Director of the Tucson Festival of Books!). We sat down with Abra a few weeks ago, and she crafted this gorgeous article about us (and somehow made sense of all our rambling, haha!). She is also spreading the word about our fundraiser, and we are so, so grateful for her supporting us in this way. So, to pay it forward, our second “ask” of you today is to subscribe to her Substack! If you need more phenomenal and thoughtful book recommendations in your life, you’ll want to receive The Booktender’s emails in your inbox.

In closing: Although we have other full-time commitments, we love doing this work and would love to keep the Tucson Tome Gnome going! So, if you like what we’re doing, we would be so grateful if you supported us with a donation! We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so your gifts to us are tax deductible (EIN: 88-3343983) 🙂 Truly, we would be forever grateful if you’re willing to help us meet our $10K goal for 2025 ❤ Honestly, fundraising has been going slower this year than in past years, so all gifts of any amount make a huge difference to our little bookish nonprofit. You can donate at the link below:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/hiding-books-in-2025

Even if you can’t donate, we hope you’ll share this fundraiser with folks in your life who might be able to help out and keep some bookish joy flowing through Tucson. We are so grateful to each and every one of you for helping to make Tucson the special bookish community that it is. We truly wouldn’t be here without you.

And honestly? I think we’re going to need books, kindness, and diverse perspectives over these next several years – now more than ever.