Summit Public Library
Our long-term partnership and collaboration with the Summit Free Public Library is a cornerstone of Bright Youth's efforts. Many of Bright Youth members are registered teen volunteers at the library, with some partnerships spanning over five years.
Beyond the regular duties of library teen volunteers, Bright Youth has spearheaded several independent projects to enrich the library's offerings. These include:
Chinese Book Donations: Since 2019, Bright Youth has worked closely with the Summit Library and the Summit Library Chinese Club (SLCC) to support the development of a dedicated Chinese children’s book collection. Members such as Jingyi Han and Allison Guo actively participated in the community fundraising effort, which successfully raised over $2,000 for the purchase of Chinese-language books—including original Chinese works, translated titles, and bilingual editions.
We played an active role throughout the rest of the program: after the books arrived in batches from overseas during the pandemic, we collaborated with adult volunteers from SLCC to unpack the shipments, carry boxes, check the books against the original order lists, inspect for damages, and categorize the collection for shelving.
Employing our Chinese language skills, we assisted the library in translating all the titles, authors, publishers, and other information of these Chinese books into Pinyin (which uses the English alphabet to represent Chinese sounds). Jingyi and Allison then completed the weighty task of manually entering all the ISBN numbers into the library’s catalog. This combined effort enabled the library staff to establish a comprehensive system for cataloging and borrowing Chinese books, ensuring they are easily accessible to the community.
Thanks to these joint efforts, the Summit Free Public Library now proudly holds the largest Chinese children’s book collection in Central New Jersey, with over 1,100 titles available to the public.
To learn more about how Bright Youth supported the Summit Library and SLCC in building this collection, please refer to Jingyi Han’s published article on TAPinto Summit.
Recording Chinese Books: Bright Youth members are dedicated to creating video recordings of the library’s Chinese storybook collection. This initiative helps children with limited Chinese reading skills enjoy these stories through engaging read-alouds. The recordings, presented in Chinese, are featured in the library’s Volunteer Storytellers program.
If you are confident in your Chinese reading and speaking abilities and would like to become a teen storyteller, we’d love to hear from you—there are still many wonderful Chinese storybooks waiting to be shared!
To listen to the recordings, click here.
Language and Cultural Programs: Our volunteers often serve as teachers and assistants for the Chinese Corner at the library, promoting language learning and cross-cultural exchange. We also help plan and support the library’s annual Lunar New Year celebration, helping set up and clean the venue, performing in cultural programs, serving as event hosts, and assisting with various interactive activities for children and families.
Clubs: Our volunteers create and manage various clubs at the library, such as Rubik's Cube (founded by Even Yao), Chess (founded by Samuel Zhang and Amelie Chan) , Dungeons & Dragons (founded by Jingyi Han), Fun Science (founded by Alex Jiang and William Jiang), and Math clubs (founded by Allison Guo).
These activities provide valuable services to the library and offer our members meaningful opportunities to develop leadership skills and community connections.
