Embrace Books announced earlier this year that it gave away over $1 million worth of books in 2023, though founder and director Taleah Greve said that mark wasn’t arrived at scientifically.
“The number we come up with is an average number,” Greve said. “We don’t ask people to tabulate the number of books they’re taking. We come up with an average of 80,000 books (the amount given away in 2023) times the number of people who come in, at about 15 books per person. We have people who borrow shopping carts or hand carts to take books home. It’s probably much more than we even know.”
The dollar figure isn’t relevant to Greve, a Montague native who runs the nonprofit out of All Shores Wesleyan Church in Muskegon, which donated the space. Greve said she founded Embrace in 2014 after her husband Jeff asked her what she’d want to do if money were no object.
“I said that I’d love to give books away,” Greve said. “He probably regrets it now, but he said, ‘Go do it.’”
Greve collected about 1,000 books through donations to get started, and things have continued to grow from there. Embrace has so many books now that its space organizes them by genre.
“We give books to families and seniors and day care providers and teachers and community organizations, like Hope Project and Muskegon Rescue Mission,” Greve said. “It’s a lot bigger than I ever imagined.”
Greve welcomes all manner of book donations during all open days, which are the second and fourth Saturdays of each month from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Embrace gets most of its donations from private givers, but it also has partnerships with some library branches and local schools that produce donations as well.
The joy of providing reading has kept Greve going since opening the doors nine years ago. There have been many interactions with customers that have given her joy in that time, but she still thinks back to one of the earliest ones.
“We were just getting started and seeing 15-20 people come through the door,” Greve said. “There was a little girl who saw our signs up and wanted to know what we were doing. She took about 10 minutes and looked through the books and said, ‘This one’s for my mom and this one’s for my sister who’s having a birthday, and these three are for me.’ She said, ‘I’m so excited because I only have one book at home.’ She just skipped out the door and I just cried, because I have 15 books on my bedside table. I have the privilege of access to that. To think someone just didn’t have access to books in their home, for whatever reason...(I love) the ability to give that gift to someone else.”
Greve is aided by a team of volunteers; no one makes money from Embrace.
“We have no income coming in,” Greve said. “Word of mouth is the way we advertise and the way we market...We just want to be connected with the community.”
Those interested in donating to Embrace monetarily can visit embracebooks.org and click the ‘donate’ link. Embrace also maintains an Amazon wish list for those who wish to support that way.
“One of the great predictors of future success is access to books and reading in the home,” Greve said. “It thrills me to bits to see people excited about books. My favorites are local senior centers where people will have read all the books in their library 10 times over and someone gets in touch with us to donate those books, and then we send them home with boxes of new books to read.”
