Posted: August 26, 2011

FOR 17 YEARS, Juanita Rivera-Gordon lived on the streets of Norfolk- along with a $200-a-day-crack habit.

"I was a prostitute, I was a thief and I was an unfit mother," she said. "I wanted to change the way I was living."

She got clean in late 2006, and spent six months looking for work.

"Everyone I approached for a job, I was denied," she said. "Doors were slammed in my face because I had a criminal background."

But one nonprofit business, Spotlight Books on Tidewater Drive, which sold books online to support its social services mission, opened its doors and hired Rivera-Gordon as an online sales specialist.

Now, four years later, Rivera-Gordon supervises a staff of 12 as a warehouse manager and training supervisor for Up Center Books, which merged with Spotlight last year.

The Up Center is a nonprofit that used to be known as Child & Family Services of Eastern Virginia. It provides counseling, financial and social support for the needy, the poor, the disabled and the convicted.

Four months ago, Up Center opened a bookstore on 25th street between Colley Avenue and Hampton Boulevard, in an industrial neighborhood just outside of Ghent. The retail shop is a natural extension from the group's successful online book-selling operation, which is ranked among the top five nonprofit book sellers on eBay and brought in $200,000 last year. Since it has opened, Up Center Books has seen its sales increase 50 percent month to month.

In a big warehouse in the back of the store, Up Center employees catalog and organize the store's 15,000-book inventory that the center raised through book drives.

The employees at the center have had troubles such as homelessness, substance abuse or incarceration, like Rivera-Gordon.

They work in the warehouse, recording titles and deciding which books to stock inside and which ones to sell online.

All the proceeds from the book sales goes back into Up Center's work.

The center is relying heavily on social media to publicize the store and is teaming up with Ghent businesses to promote it.

The store recently partnered with the Naro Theater, when it screened a documentary about "To Kill A Mockingbird." The center held a trivia contest via Facebook and gave away a first edition of the novel.

Although the books are used, the store isn't the typical used bookstore that stacks piles and piles for customers to sort through. The books are shelved neatly, much like a new bookstore, and there are seating areas and a coffee service.

Lindsay Jackson, the center's program manager, said the bookstore wants to appeal to the literary crowd. The store is open Monday through Saturday and hosts after-hours events.

"We don't see ourselves as just a bookstore, because we support a social mission," said Christi Agbuya, Up Center's director of marketing.

And the center supports people like Rivera-Gordon.

"I was a junkie for 17 years," she said. "They gave me the opportunity to give back what they gave to me - and that is hope."

By Bill Cresenzo

bill.cresenzo@insidebiz.com