Owner Profile: Donna Kamiel- Forster
Forster’s Book Garden has been in business in Bolton for 20 years and 266 Queen Street (Queen Street and Ellwood Avenue) is their third location. This independent book store exhibits a strong community focus. Donna and Paul are currently collecting gifts for the Caledon Community Services Santa Fund. When customers purchase items for this cause, they receive a 30% discount from Forster’s. Forster’s participates in all kinds of community events with other local businesses. This fall they have participated in the Nightmare on Queen Street, Hallowe’en event and Clovis’ Culinary Caper in conjunction with the Honey Garlic Festival. Forster’s also hosted three local author book launches in October. They support local artisans by selling their creations in store.
- Forster’s Book Garden is located in a residential area within easy walking distance to a public school, many restaurants, services such as hair cutting and dentistry, a butcher, a public library, bulk food/health food store, dog food store, florist and a small department store to name a few.
- There is a sign in their window that says: Shop, Read, Eat, Live, Local
Sustainable Nature of the Organization’s Approaches/practices
- Renting DVDs of current movies. Don’t buy it, share it. Remember that the packaging of all DVDs is not recyclable in the Town of Caledon.
- They keep all of the shipping boxes that they receive and reuse these and most of the packaging they receive whenever possible. If you have need of boxes and packaging, like bubble wrap please stop by and they will be glad to supply you with what they have.
- If you wish to have a bag to carry your purchases they offer paper bags made of recycled fibre. Should you desire a plastic bag, they will provide you with a clean shopping bag that is being reused. They will gladly fill your reusable shopping bag.
- Consider the implications of ordering a book online. Not only does it need to be trucked to your home, but it will be packaged in a box with bubble wrap (normally) which is fully reusable, but not recyclable. When you order the same book through Forster’s Book Garden, it will be shipped with other books and in the case of Forster’s the packaging will be reused. This is always better than being recycled or discarded.
- There is a recycling bin at the back of their building that they make use of for all of the material that they, or one of their customers cannot reuse.