We are first FREE Community Library of Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh impacting 36 Villages & 40K Population. Want to order books for us, wishlist link 👇
Joined September 2020
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5 Jun 2024
In this video we asked our members what they love most about their Free Community Library. From reading newspapers to studying for hours, or even just enjoying the toys, reading comics, everyone agrees—it's like a second home at Bansa Community Library!
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India’s children’s picture book landscape has grown tremendously over the past two decades, with diverse, engaging, and locally relevant stories now reaching more children than ever before. For first-generation learners and children in resource-poor communities, picture books often serve as the first step into the world of reading.
At Bansa Community Library, we have seen how these books spark curiosity, build confidence, and create joyful reading experiences. In places where books are scarce, a simple picture book can become the foundation of a reading culture, opening doors to imagination, learning, and lifelong reading habits.
#ReadingCulture #ChildrenBooks #FreeLibraries #Books
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While discussions around the environment are a regular part of life at Bansa Library, World Environment Day gave us a special opportunity to bring our members together for a day of reflection, learning, and action.
Through engaging discussions, a movie screening, reading sessions, and interactive activities, children and young members explored some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time and reflected on their own relationship with nature and their surroundings.
At Bansa Library, we believe that building a more sustainable future starts with informed and curious minds. By creating spaces where young people can learn, question, and imagine solutions, we hope to nurture a generation that is not only aware of environmental issues but also empowered to respond to them.
#WorldEnvironmentDay #BansaLibrary #CommunityLibrary #EnvironmentDay #LibrariesForChange #ReadingForChange
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We are delighted to welcome Team Kutumb Foundation and Free Libraries Network to Bansa Community Library as part of the Comic Corner initiative.
What followed was more than just a visit, it was a day full of imagination, expression, and connection. From lively read-aloud sessions and playful drama workshops to meaningful interactions with our library members, every corner of the library felt full of energy and curiosity. For many of our children, comics are becoming a doorway to reading, creativity, confidence, and collective storytelling. And days like these remind us how powerful libraries can be when people come together to build joyful learning spaces for children.
#ComicCorner #FreeLibrary #BansaLibrary
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In a small room full of books, something beautiful is happening every evening. Our youngest library members are slowly finding their voice in English, one new word, one small sentence, one brave attempt at a time. Every evening at Bansa Library, the room fills with curious questions, shy introductions, new words, laughter, and little voices trying fearlessly again and again. What began as hesitation is slowly turning into confidence. For many of these children, this is their first space where learning English doesn’t feel like pressure, it feels like play, friendship, and possibility.
At Bansa Library, Spoken English classes are not just about language. They are about confidence, expression, and making children feel that the world is a little more within their reach.
#BansaLibrary #SpokenEnglish #CommunityLearning #RuralLibrary #ChildrenWhoRead #LearningWithJoy
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Some books arrive quietly, and yet carry entire worlds within them.
We are so happy to share that The Good Reporter / बड़ी आई पत्रकार! by Disha Mullick and reporters from Khabar Lahriya has finally reached Bansa Community Library. A beautiful work that brings together stories, voices, memories, and journeys from across rural India, the book feels deeply connected to the kind of conversations we hope libraries can nurture in villages like ours. What makes this work especially meaningful is how it centres ordinary people, local realities, and lived experiences with care and dignity. In spaces where rural stories are so often ignored, simplified, or spoken for by others, books like these become incredibly important. They remind readers that their own lives, struggles, questions, and observations matter too.
We cannot wait for our readers, especially young people from surrounding villages, to pick these books from the shelves, flip through their pages, and perhaps begin imagining their own stories, reports, questions, and ways of seeing the world.
Every new book that enters the library expands what becomes possible inside it.
#TheGoodReporter #FreeLibrary #BansaLibrary
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At Bansa Library, books often become the beginning of conversations that travel far beyond their pages. Around the same table, children, young people, and adults come together to listen, question, disagree, reflect, and share experiences from their own lives.
In rural areas, spaces like these become even more important because there are so few places where people across generations can simply gather to think, speak, and learn together. Outside of schools or homes, there are very limited public spaces that encourage open conversations, curiosity, and collective reflection. This is why free community libraries become so important. They create accessible, welcoming spaces where anyone, regardless of age, background, or income, can walk in, belong, and participate. Libraries slowly become much more than rooms with books, they become spaces of dialogue, imagination, confidence, and community.
#FreeLibrariesForAll #RightToRead #BansaCommunityLibrary #AccessToBooks
ALT A group of children, teenagers, and young adults sit together in a circle outdoors at Bansa Library, engaged in a book discussion. Some are seated on bright orange chairs while others sit on benches around a table with books and papers. The gathering takes place beside a brick wall lined with green plants, creating an open and informal community learning space where members from different age groups are listening and sharing ideas together.
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At Bansa Library, Mother’s Day is not just about celebration, it is about creating space. A space where women from the village step out of routines and responsibilities for a little while and simply sit together. They talk, laugh, listen, share stories, and slowly rediscover time for themselves.
For many women here, the library has become more than a room full of books. It has become a place of friendship, comfort, and belonging. A place where stories are read aloud, conversations unfold without judgement, and afternoons are spent together in warmth and care.
Some come with their children, some come shy and quiet at first, and some stay back long after the reading circle ends, continuing conversations that rarely find space elsewhere.
This Mother’s Day, we celebrated not only mothers, but the gentle community that forms when women gather around stories, around each other, and around the simple joy of being seen and heard.
Because sometimes, a community library becomes one of the few places where women are allowed to pause, breathe, and belong.
#BansaLibrary #MothersDay #CommunityLibrary #WomenReaders #LibrariesChangeLives #RuralLibraries #ReadingTogether
ALT Women and children gather at Bansa Community Library during a Mother’s Day celebration, sitting together for story readings, conversations, and community activities inside and outside the library. The images show women listening to read-aloud sessions, sharing time with one another, celebrating with cake, and smiling together in the library courtyard, reflecting the library as a warm community space for connection, reading, and belonging.
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Dear friends of Bansa Library, sharing with you, with much love, our Monthly Update for April from Bansa Library.
April was a full and tender month at Bansa. The summer arrived in full force, but so did our community, showing up for one another in the most beautiful ways. Our Comic Corner that has quickly become a favourite among our younger readers, took pop-up library sessions out into the villages around Bansa, and watched the women of our community pick up their pens at our Hindi Writing Workshop, writing, singing, and claiming the space on their own terms. Read the entire report here- bansacommunitylibrary.org/wp…
In numbers: 714 books issued, 430 visitors, 193 new books added, and 45 new members welcomed into the Bansa family, including 16 competitive exam aspirants preparing for life-changing opportunities right here in their village.
If you would like to support our aspirants directly, even one book from our Amazon Wishlist goes straight into the hands of someone building their future through their own quiet, determined effort. amazon.in/hz/wishlist/ls/3OU…
And do follow us on instagram.com/bansacommunity… to stay close to the everyday life of the library. We would love to have you along.
Happy Reading
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For a long time, reading here was tied almost entirely to survival. Books meant textbooks, guidebooks, exam papers, and the pressure to 'study' for marks, jobs, and competitive exams. For many children and young people in villages around Bansa, access to books beyond academics simply did not exist. There were very few spaces where reading could be slow, joyful, curious, or personal.
What we are witnessing now at Bansa Community Library is a quiet but meaningful shift.
Children who once came only looking for study material now sit together turning pages of storybooks, comics, picture books, and novels. They are reading not because someone asked them to, but because they want to know what happens next. Conversations are forming around characters, ideas, and imagination. The library is slowly changing the meaning of reading itself, from a task connected only to exams, into something that can also bring comfort, excitement, wonder, and companionship.
This change may look small in a photograph, but in communities where access to books has always been limited, it is deeply significant. A reading culture does not appear overnight. It grows page by page, circle by circle, child by child.
#FreeLibrary #BooksForAll #RightToRead
ALT A group of children sitting together inside Bansa Community Library, quietly reading books and looking toward a laptop placed on a table. The room is filled with bookshelves, study materials, and colorful chairs, reflecting a shared learning and reading space in a rural community library.
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The beauty of Bansa Library holding a place for discussion that goes beyond books and reading.
#SafeSpace #CommunityLibrary
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In a village where voices are often held back, this circle becomes a rare, powerful space, where young people and community members sit as equals, speak without fear, and listen without judgement.
Here, conversations don’t stay within books. They move into real lives, into questions of identity, society, fairness, and the everyday realities people carry but rarely get to share. Disagreements happen, perspectives collide, but something deeper is built each time: confidence, empathy, and the courage to have a voice.
Bansa Library isn’t just creating readers. It’s creating a space where people can finally be heard.
#FreeLibrary #Discussion #SafeSpace #Readers
ALT A group of young people and adults sit in a circle on orange plastic chairs in an open courtyard, engaged in a discussion. The setting appears to be a village space with boundary walls, trees, and a small structure in the background. Some participants are listening attentively while others are speaking, creating a sense of an open, inclusive conversation. A dog lies nearby, and the overall atmosphere reflects a calm, safe community space for dialogue.
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A free community library is never just about books.
It’s where children walk in with curiosity and walk out with confidence. Where stories are read aloud, shared, questioned, and lived together. Where afternoons turn into circles of laughter, quiet focus, and small discoveries that stay. It’s a space where access is not limited by distance, money, or background, where anyone can belong, learn, and imagine more for themselves.
At Bansa Library, this is what a library looks like every day: not silent rooms, but living, breathing spaces of possibility, where a community comes together, one story at a time.
#BansaLibrary #FreeLibrary #RightToRead
#Books #Reading
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A circle forms, a comic opens, and just like that, the common room of Bansa Library softens into stories. There’s something gentle about this moment: heads leaning closer, eyes following each page, laughter arriving at the same time. The librarian reads, but the story belongs to everyone in the circle. This is how reading begins, not as a task, but as a shared joy. A quiet, growing love for books, held together in small, warm moments like these.
Our comic corner is one such space, where children return, sit a little closer, and find themselves in stories, again and again. We’re deeply thankful to The Kutumb Foundation and Free Libraries Network for making this possible, helping us create a corner where stories are not just read, but felt, shared, and cherished.
#ComicCorner #FreeLibrary #RightToRead
ALT A group of young children sits in a circle on the floor of a colorful community library, gathered closely around a librarian who is reading a comic book aloud. Bookshelves filled with children’s books surround them, and the children lean in with focused, curious expressions as they follow the story together.
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Monthly Update Report for March
If one word defined March at Bansa Community Library, it was community, in the truest, most lived sense of the word. This month, we watched women walk through our doors with new ease and make the space their own. We watched aspirants prepare late into the evening for the opportunity of their lifetime. And we watched, quietly moved, as student leaders and older aspirants began sitting beside the younger children on their own accord, helping them with homework, reading, and fluency. Nobody designed this. It simply began, the way the best things often do.
- A few highlights from the month:
Launched our Hindi Writing Workshop with Lampshade Writers, a six-week space under our Women Readership Enhancement Project where women are learning to write and tell their own stories, many for the very first time.
- Issued 893 books, welcomed 670 visitors, and added 33 new children and 8 new aspirants to the Bansa family.
- Received 145 new books to support our growing community of learners and exam aspirants.
To everyone who has walked with us, donated books, volunteered, or simply cheered us on from afar, thank you. Bansa Community Library is not just a space with books. It is a living, breathing hub of creativity, learning, and human connection, and it is everything it is because of you.
Read the full update here- bansacommunitylibrary.org/wp…
Order books for us from Amazon- amazon.in/hz/wishlist/ls/3OU…
Help us ensure that women don’t have to choose between distance, duty, and the right to read. Your support can bring books, safe reading spaces, and opportunities closer to those who need them most. Contribute here- pages.razorpay.com/RightToRe…
Read and bloom where you are planted.
#BansaCommunityLibrary #RuralLibrary #FreeLibrary #CommunityLibrary #ReadingForAll #WomenReaders #HindiWriting #LibrariesChangeLives #Hardoi #UttarPradesh #ArunaMithileshFoundation
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At Bansa Library, books don’t always wait on shelves. Sometimes, they travel.
In nearby mazras and villages, where women and children cannot easily reach our physical space, the library finds its way to them. A courtyard, a shaded corner, a borrowed space, for a few hours, each becomes a place to read, listen, and imagine.
Stories are read aloud. Little ones lean in, wide-eyed, asking what happens next. Older children pick up books and read to the younger ones. Women talk, sometimes about the story, sometimes about their day, sometimes about things they've never said out loud before. There's laughter. There are games, antakshari between pages, quick rounds of guess-the-word, silly rhymes that have everyone giggling. Someone always wants to draw. Someone always wants one more story.
These pop-up sessions are small and temporary. But in the middle of an afternoon, in a village that rarely sees books, they quietly open up a whole world, especially for those often left out of reading spaces because of where they live or what their day demands of them.
At Bansa Community Library, we strongly believe that access should never depend on distance. If they can’t come to the library, the library goes to them.
#FreeLibary #LibraryForAll #RightToRead #BooksForAll #BansaPopUpLibrary
ALT A vibrant outdoor community gathering in a rural Indian village setting for a "Bansa Library Pop-Up Session." In the center, a woman sits on a white floor mat, smiling and engaging with a group of young children and women dressed in colorful traditional sarees. They are gathered around a small, portable wooden bookshelf filled with children's books. Three young adults stand behind the group, observing and participating. The background features lush green trees, bicycles parked against a brick wall, and a glimpse of village life with cattle and thatched-roof structures.
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Bansa Community Library retweeted
कुछ लोग कहते हैं तो कुछ करके दिखाते हैं ऐसे ही @BansaLibrary की साथ, जो कहा वो करके दिखाया
बहुत शानदार
Grammar classes have been quietly shaping young minds at Library for a long time now.
Over time, we’ve seen children become more expressive, more confident in reading and speaking, and more willing to participate, both inside and outside the classroom. What begins as a grammar lesson slowly turns into a space for voice, imagination, and self-belief.
What makes this even more powerful is the integration of digital learning. Through online sessions, children in a small village like ours are able to connect with educators beyond their immediate surroundings, breaking barriers of geography and access. It opens up new worlds, new methods of learning, and new possibilities they may not have otherwise encountered.
With incredible consistency and care, the Look Forward Foundation continues to show up for our primary group learners, week after week, building confidence, curiosity, and a strong foundation in language.
#GrammarClass
#FreeLibrary
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Grammar classes have been quietly shaping young minds at Library for a long time now.
Over time, we’ve seen children become more expressive, more confident in reading and speaking, and more willing to participate, both inside and outside the classroom. What begins as a grammar lesson slowly turns into a space for voice, imagination, and self-belief.
What makes this even more powerful is the integration of digital learning. Through online sessions, children in a small village like ours are able to connect with educators beyond their immediate surroundings, breaking barriers of geography and access. It opens up new worlds, new methods of learning, and new possibilities they may not have otherwise encountered.
With incredible consistency and care, the Look Forward Foundation continues to show up for our primary group learners, week after week, building confidence, curiosity, and a strong foundation in language.
#GrammarClass
#FreeLibrary
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A Big Thank You — from Bansa, with love.
Over two beautiful days at our 4th Fundraising Book Sale, hosted by the wonderful @kunzum Books at GK II, 2,430 pre-loved books found new homes, over 600 of you walked through the doors, and together we raised ₹2,27,742 for the Women Readership Enhancement Program at Bansa Community Library.
We're still a little overwhelmed, honestly.
To everyone who came, bought, browsed, or simply told a friend, thank you. To those who donated books, who shared our posts at odd hours, who stood in line and stayed late, thank you. And to Kunzum, for opening their doors to us, again, thank you.
The funds raised will go directly into powering our Women Readership Enhancement Program, bringing more books, more sessions, and more space for the women of Bansa to read, reflect, and grow.
Missed the April sale? Don't worry, we have another one planned for the first week of July. To get updates, fill the form here: forms.gle/uWydyj6Z6wZQovSq9
Here's to a community that's growing, learning, and making a difference, one book at a time.
#BansaCommunityLibrary #FundraisingBookSale #KunzumBooks #WomenReadership #CommunityLibrary #BookSaleDelhi #PreLovedBooks #ReadMoreGiveMore #FreeLibrary
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Day 1 of the Bansa Library Fundraising Book Sale was incredible, Delhi showed up and showed OUT. Now we’re back with FRESH books for the final day.
📅 April 5 | 11 am to 08 pm
📍Kunzum Books, GK II, Delhi
Come find your next favorite. Support our Women Readership Enhancement Program. Be part of the movement.
See you tomorrow?
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Bansa Library Fundraising Booksale
Delhi showed up. The love, the energy, the belief in our mission, it was everything. Now, we’re back with fresh books for the final day. Tomorrow at Kunzum Books, GK II. April 5. Your support fuels rural literacy, women’s empowerment at Bansa.
More details- eventbrite.com/e/bansa-libra…
#FundraisingBookSale #FreeBooks #BookSale
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