On the morning of Wednesday, August 5, a business networking event in Hicksville is going to ask something slightly unusual of the people who show up: bring a book.

The Melville Chamber of Commerce's NexGen Professionals group is hosting A Community Commitment to Literacy, a panel discussion and community book drive, in collaboration with The Book Fairies. It is free, it is open to everyone rather than members only, and it runs for ninety minutes before most of the room heads to work.

The essentials

  • What: A multi-generational literacy conversation and community book drive
  • When: Wednesday, August 5, 2026, 8:30 to 10:00 a.m.
  • Where: The Book Fairies, 220 Miller Place, Hicksville
  • Cost: Free, and all are welcome
  • Catch: Space is limited and registration is required

You can register through the Melville Chamber's event page. The format is an interactive panel, networking, and the book drive running alongside both.

Who is on the panel

The lineup deliberately mixes the people who move the books with the people who put them in front of young readers. It is moderated by Courtney Collins, associate executive director of The Book Fairies.

  • Eileen Minogue, executive director of The Book Fairies
  • JoEllen McCarthy, author and literacy advocate
  • Linda Sotomayor, core volunteer with The Book Fairies
  • Eli Johnson, founder and executive director of The Too Alive Tour, a nonprofit he started in 2018 that builds confidence, anti-bullying and career-awareness programming for high school and college students

There is also a special appearance by Geanna Koulouris, Miss Long Island 2026, and her presence is less decorative than it might first appear. Koulouris, from Bethpage, holds a master's in teaching English and teaching students with disabilities from NYU and works in education supporting diverse learners. Her platform, EmpowerEd, is about equitable access to education. She is also the first person to hold both a current and a former Miss Long Island title, having been Miss Long Island Teen in 2018.

What to bring, and what is actually needed

Attendees are asked to bring a new or gently used book to donate. The organizers have been specific about which ones: children's books, young adult titles and Spanish-language books.

That specificity is worth taking seriously, because those last two categories are where donation drives reliably fall short.

Nassau and Suffolk have substantial Spanish-speaking populations, and the supply of donated books does not remotely reflect that. Household book drives generate what households have, which on Long Island skews overwhelmingly English. So the shelf that empties first at a community book fair is often the one a family most needs. If you own Spanish-language children's books your household has finished with, they are worth more to this drive than almost anything else you could carry in.

The same is true, slightly less acutely, of young adult titles. Picture books arrive in abundance because small children outgrow them fast and visibly. Books for eleven- to sixteen-year-olds get kept, or quietly thrown out, and they are the ones that keep a reader reading at exactly the age most readers stop.

Where it is being held, and why that matters

The venue is not incidental. The event is inside the building The Book Fairies works out of, at 220 Miller Place.

The organization runs on a premise that sounds obvious until you sit with it: books already exist in enormous quantity on Long Island, in basements, in reorganized classrooms, in the houses of families whose children have grown up. They are simply in the wrong places. The Book Fairies sources those books and redistributes them to under-resourced schools and communities across Long Island, New York City and further afield.

Since 2012 it has moved more than 6.2 million of them. It passed its five millionth in November 2024, donated to a student at Northwest Elementary School in Amityville.

What the August 5 donations feed specifically are the free community book fairs the organization runs each month, where children choose their own books rather than receiving whatever was left over. That distinction carries more weight than it sounds. A book a child picked is a book a child reads.

Who is hosting

NexGen is the Melville Chamber's group for younger entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners, and its stated remit runs past business development into community and social responsibility and philanthropy. Its events are usually the recognizable kind: after-hours mixers, financial literacy seminars, networking with a theme attached.

This one is a fair test of whether the second half of that remit means anything. An 8:30 a.m. panel at a book warehouse is a harder ask than a bar at six o'clock, and the entry fee is that you turn up carrying something.

Long Island has no shortage of business groups. The ones that put money and effort back into the towns they operate in are a smaller set, and worth showing up for.

If you go

Register first, because the room has a limit. Check the shelf your kids have outgrown before you leave the house, and bring more than one book if you can. Arrive close to 8:30, since ninety minutes with a panel and a room full of people goes quickly.

Note the address rather than trusting your instincts about Hicksville: 220 Miller Place. Details can change, so confirm with the Chamber before you set out.