No books? no problem
Two sophomores are on a mission to get textbooks to first-generation students, free of cost.
By Jennifer Walter, Comm ’19
Toward the end of her freshman year, Wendy Perez squirreled away nearly 200 textbooks in her O’Donnell Hall double. “It was a lot,” she says, but the piles of print helped fuel a project she spent months planning.
Perez and fellow sophomore Julie Alemán are co-founders of a venture named Community.Books.YOU. (C.B.Y.) and winners of two awards in the 2021 Brewed Ideas Challenge, a Shark Tank-like competition from the 707 Hub that helps students fund their startups. The idea behind C.B.Y. is simple: Get college textbooks into the hands of first-generation students and those with financial needs, free of cost.
The cause hits home for Alemán and Perez, both the first in their families to attend college. Alemán couldn’t stop thinking about textbooks during her first months at Marquette. “They are really expensive even if you have a scholarship like me,” she explains. The cost of books for every class, some requiring access codes or the latest editions, can become just another obstacle in navigating life on campus.
An urge to do something burned in Alemán’s mind, but it took meeting Perez to turn intention into action. “We didn’t think it was going to happen so fast,” Perez says. The two met spontaneously in O’Donnell Hall’s bathrooms, and before they knew it, they were business partners with $8,500 worth of prize money and a stockpile of nearly 300 books.
After their success at the Brewed Ideas Challenge and a book drive, Perez and Alemán solidified C.B.Y.’s presence on social media, built a website, collected more books and inventoried those they already had. With C.B.Y. earning designation as a Marquette-affiliated organization, the books once stashed in a residence hall have found a more stable home in the 707 Hub. And early this semester, they distributed books to the first of hopefully many students.
