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Portland Street Books Project distributes free books to homeless

Laura Moulton is a renegade Portland librarian, riding around town on a bike that holds her books and delivering everything from Louis L’Amour to Noam Chomsky to the people of Portland who live outside. Street Books, which started in 2011 as a three month social practice art project, is the subject of a short documentary released Thursday by NationSwell. In the last five years, it’s morphed into an expanding summer and fall mobile library, with paid employees and volunteers handing out books by bike around the city from June to October. This year, the organization even has a little extra funding, a grant from Meyer Memorial Trust, that allows Moulton to pay her librarians $15 to $20 an hour. Moulton is not an official librarian. Instead, she’s a writer and a teacher–an adjunct at Lewis and Clark and Marylhurst and a teacher with Writers in the Schools. But Street Books runs because of the different types of experience its librarians bring. Some are trained librarians and two have personal experience with homelessness…”

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