For the past two weeks, a children’s book drive in Lawrence County was conducted by United Way of the River Cities community impact. The group collected around 600 children’s books that will go to underprivileged children of the community through outreach ministries of the C3 churches of Ironton and South Point.

On Thursday afternoon, workers from United Way and volunteers from Emerson Liebert and Armstrong Cable sorted the books, ranging from books for infants to high school age, at the Ironton Farmers Market and packaged them up to send.

“Community impact is essentially making sure everything United Way is doing is all strategically working together to create a positive change,” Andrea Roy, director of community impact at United Way of the River Cities, said. “We had a book drive to collect the books and the C3 churches had the infrastructure in place to get them to those communities that need them. In the summer, children don’t have access to educational opportunities and research shows that they lose up to two months of reading achievement.”

Books were collected at all five Briggs Lawrence County Library locations, Armstrong Cable and St. Mary’s Medical Center in Ironton.

“It’s great for the community. We have a really nice number of books to give out,” Roy said. “It couldn’t have happened without community wide cooperation and support.”