Building on the success of our Veterans Day Walk for PTSD Awareness in Pearland, TX, HIKE for Mental Health is partnering with Operation Paperback on another local Texas event. Operation Paperback is a non-profit that collects gently used books for American troops overseas as well as for veterans and military families here at home. Operation Paperback volunteers have shipped more than 1.9 million books to locations around the globe. More than 5,000 books have been collected in Pearland and Friendswood since 2012.

In January and February, we will collect books at the following locations throughout the Pearland community:

• City of Pearland Recreation Center – 4141 Bailey Road
• Claws and Paws – 2556 Broadway St
• Pearland Neighborhood Center – 2335 Texas St. #105
• Silverlake Animal Hospital – 10015 Broadway, Suite G
• Westside Veterinary Hospital – 6034 Broadway
• Westside Veterinary Clinic – 9223 Broadway

Bestsellers, action and spy-novels, murder mysteries, westerns, fantasy and science fiction are the most popular genres requested by our service men and women. Also high on the list are requests for business and investing books, classics, history (especially military history), and current event-oriented non-fiction. The VA hospitals look for all kinds of puzzle books. Their favorites are word find and crossword puzzles. Of course, pornography and sexually explicit materials are not accepted.

We will sort, package and ship the books we collect. We sell any books we cannot ship to help offset postage costs, although generous project sponsors still pay most of the freight. No money raised from our hikes or walks is used for this program.

If you would like to purchase books from Amazon and ship them directly to the troops, contribute money to help pay for postage or participate in our project by collecting books, please email Nancy at nancy.kozanecki@hikeformentalhealth.org more information.