Hialeah Campus Launches Donation Drive To Offset High Textbook Costs

Lorena Martinez was determined to make a change after she noticed many students were struggling to pay for textbooks.

Two months ago, she set up a bookcase at the New Student Center and kicked off the Hialeah Campus’ college textbook donation drive on April 18 using four books she used while studying English at Miami Dade College in 2017. 

Today, the collection has more than 400 books. 

“That was a big surprise for me,” said Martinez, who has worked as a pre-college advisor at Hialeah Campus since January of 2022. “There are a lot of people that want to help.

To boost the project, Martinez told colleagues and faculty and emailed students.

Martinez also promoted it on her professional Instagram account—@mdc_college_advisor—creating posts and reels featuring testimonials from people who received or donated books. 

Within weeks, the New Student Center was inundated with books valued between $100 and $300, covering topics ranging from psychiatry to business administration. 

The largest donation was made by Ada Durand, a mental health counselor who provided more than 176 psychology textbooks to honor her father, Cesar Durand, an educator, who died this year.  

“[Ada] was thrilled [by] the idea of being able to help new students that were struggling financially,” said Cesar Jeronimo, her brother-in-law, who transported the book donation to Hialeah Campus.

As the project has grown, the catalog has expanded to include children’s books, dictionaries and test-prep textbooks for exams such as the SAT and GRE. Last month, the drive started allowing anyone in the community to take books. 

For students like Jairzinho Lahens, the initiative has served as a gateway to explore his interests. 

After finding out about the project through an email, the 32-year-old criminal justice student visited the bookshelf to find psychology textbooks to help him study for a midterm exam. 

He has since returned for books about taxes and real estate. He even fetched a self-help book, Love Is Letting Go Of Fear.

“Reading is fundamental—it opens your mind up,” Lahens said. “Textbooks can be expensive sometimes so this is a big help.”

Other students like Diana Trilleras, an international student from Colombia who is studying computer programming at North Campus, have also taken advantage of the opportunity. 

 “I couldn’t believe it,” said Trilleras, who retrieved a statistics book valued at $120 from the bookshelf. “I thought it was a book exchange because nothing comes for free.”

The collection has grown so rapidly that Martinez had to add three cardboard boxes to hold textbooks that don’t fit on the bookshelf. In the future, she hopes to create a website for the project with a digital catalog and a forum so people can make requests. 

Textbooks can be dropped off at the New Student Center, 1780 W 49th St., in Room 1101 Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. To take a book, readers must fill out an online form. 

“It doesn’t matter how old we are or where we are from, I’d like to encourage people to read more,” said Julio Osorio, a business administration student at Hialeah Campus who took 11 books last week. “There are a lot of things you can learn.”

Staff writer Nikole Valiente contributed to this story.

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