Mustard Seed Grant Project—Library Placement in Ireland

By Marian and Matt Hughes, Hawaii, United States

Editor’s Note: Marian and Matt Hughes received a Mustard Seed Grant award to place 30 copies of The Urantia Book in libraries across Ireland. They share their completed project below.

We are not new to library placement programs. Marian brought books to Switzerland and Germany in 1988, and to Russia in 1995. She distributed books in 2000 while on a Jeep excursion through the Patagonia region of Chile and Argentina. The two of us undertook another library placement project in 2023, this time using funds from a Mustard Seed Grant. The recipients were in the Los Lagos region of Chile, near our vacation home. We also used this grant to distribute Urantia Books to every island in our home state of Hawaii. We received help from fellow readers on our island, and we mailed books to libraries on the others.

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Last year we set our sights on Ireland and were awarded another Mustard Seed Grant. We enlisted the help of Grevet Moyo, a Urantia Book reader from Malawi who has been attending Maynooth University in Dublin. He is due to receive his doctorate in October 2025. The first task was how to get the books to Grevet.

We initially planned to contact local bookstores and help them procure a book—thirty in total.  We had hoped to purchase the inventory online with our credit card and then reimburse ourselves with the grant funds. Unfortunately, when we contacted the bookstores, they either showed The Urantia Book as out of stock with no plans to reorder, or the title wasn’t even listed in their inventory management system.

We switched gears and decided to order books directly from Amazon using our Prime account to ship them to Grevet’s address in Ireland. Since Amazon applies limits, we were only able to purchase 4 books, which averaged $23.26 per copy. Next, we had to locate six other readers who had Amazon Prime accounts and were willing to do the same, with the promise of reimbursement with grant funds. Happily, fellow readers responded, and a total of 34 books arrived at Grevet’s home by January 2025.

It was decided that Grevet would use public transportation to deliver the books to libraries in the Dublin area. We located 30 libraries, and calculated that this would require six separate trips, distributing five books per trip. The grant funds would help pay for the costs of transportation and meals.

The closest library was walking distance from his house. Grevet eagerly visited the manager, only to learn that local libraries need county administrative approval to accept a donation. This necessitated another change in plans. We searched online, located the email addresses of county administrators for all 30 counties in Ireland, and entered them into a group email. Five counties responded, and instead of underwriting the expense of personally delivering the books, the Mustard Seed Grant funds covered the cost of mailing them to approved libraries.

As of June 2025, all of the books were successfully delivered to 34 libraries. If you chance to travel to Ireland, we hope you will visit the libraries in Westmeath, Wexford, Monaghan, Kildare, Keith McKeag, Helen Evans, Michele Howlin, and Offaly and ask for a copy of The Urantia Book!