Chandler Arnold

Chandler's Story:

As an undergraduate I founded the Harvard Emergent Literacy Project (HELP), an initiative that places reading volunteers in Head Start centers across Cambridge .   As a part of this work I was lucky enough to meet Marshall Ganz, and later take his class on community organizing as a senior.  After graduation I continued organizing with First Book (www.FirstBook.org), a national nonprofit organization that has provided nearly 35 million new books to children from low-income families.  In communities across the country First Book supports the work of local heroes who run after-school programs, shelters, Head Start centers, and other initiatives, by providing them with the critical resource of new books for the children they serve.   

In addition to organizing groups of volunteer First Book Advisory Boards in communities across the country, I also worked closely with First Book’s corporate partners to harness the power of the private sector to advance social change.  After working with First Book about five years, these collaborations ultimately lead me to pursue my MBA at Stanford and to spend a year working in the private sector as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group.  I have recently returned to First Book as the Executive Director of the First Book Marketplace, a revenue-generating subsidiary of First Book that we believe will place a record number of new books in the hands of children from low-income families.

Chandler's Current Project:

The First Book Marketplace is a web-based venture that sells high-quality children’s books to community-based literacy organizations at prices 50% below any other source.  Marketplace revenues are used by the Marketplace’s parent non-profit organization, First Book, to expand its national efforts.  In this way, the Marketplace advances an irrefutable double bottom line — it provides the critical resources of new books to low-income children and, in so doing, generates revenue enabling First Book to provide even more books to children in need.  Educators, community leaders, activists, and industry experts are convinced that the Marketplace will revolutionize the way community-based programs support the children they serve. 

The Marketplace just completed a very successful pilot phase and was recently named the grand-prize winner in a national social enterprise business plan competition sponsored by the Yale School of Management and the Goldman Sachs Foundation.  In addition to securing funding for our first year, I am focused on two major organizing tasks: spreading the word about First Book to community organizations across the country interested in receiving free or low-cost books, and working with staff across First Book’s entire organization to coordinate our response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  First Book recently pledged, for example, to distribute 5 million new books to children affected by the recent hurricanes, many of whom have lost everything.

Chandler's Learning Question:


The majority of my community-organizing experience has been, by necessity, done in-person.  I have been able to form personal connections with community leaders and volunteers we work with, hear their concerns face-to-face, and work with them one-on-one to meet our shared goals.  The majority of my organizing work now, however, is done online.   My main question for others doing this work, then, concerns how best to connect with online communities and networks of people committed to the same work we are.  Whether I want to reach out to community groups across the country to announce the availability of free books, or I want to tap into networks of volunteers interesting in helping us provide books to children affected by Hurricane Katrina, I know there are others of you out there who know more about this than I do.  If you are a part of one of these networks—or know others who are—please let me know.  And if you know of programs serving low-income children interested in free or low-cost books from First Book, please ask them to register with us at www.nationalbookbank.org or www.fbmarketplace.org!