MIT-Sabre volunteers provide new medical, science, and engineering textbooks to universities in many countries around the world. Recent shipments have gone to Iraq, Liberia, Kenya, Pakistan, Uganda, Indonesia, Cameroon, Rwanda, and other nations. We sort and pack the textbooks at our volunteering events, which occur on Saturdays every 2-4 weeks. Our volunteers include MIT undergrads, grad students, postdocs, and staff. The volunteering events give MIT community members an opportunity to meet people from other departments through a fun service activity.

New volunteers are always welcome! It's easy and there is no commitment necessary: feel free to come just once or as often as your schedule permits.

The textbooks we process are donated by publishers. We sort and inventory the books so that the recipient universities abroad can select the titles they wish to receive. The project is a partnership with the Sabre Foundation (www.sabre.org) in Lawrence MA, which has 24 years of experience shipping books to developing countries.

The calendar below lists our upcoming dates. We depart MIT at 9:15am and return to campus around 2:30pm. The work site is a warehouse in Lawrence, MA, a 30-minute drive from Cambridge. We provide rides from the MIT student center (W20).

MIT-Sabre Foundation Volunteers began in 2009, originally named Aspire. In our first year, Sabre shipped 25,000 more books than it could have done without the MIT volunteers. This represents one and a half 40-foot cargo containers full of books!

For more information, contact landrema@mit.edu. You can subscribe to our email list to receive notifications of our volunteering events.

Below: Iraqi physicians in Baghdad receiving one of the shipments of medical textbooks.