The La Vida Llena Estate Book Pickup Partnership

This is the full operational record of the standing arrangement between New Mexico Literacy Project and La Vida Llena, Albuquerque's only Life Plan continuing-care retirement community. The relationship has been running for years. It is not a contract. It is a weekly working rhythm that has grown into the structure described on this page. I'm writing it down here so residents, their families, executors, and the staff at La Vida Llena have a single canonical reference for how the routing actually works.

A note on framing: this page documents an operational working relationship, not a formal partnership in the contractual sense. NMLP is a for-profit sole proprietorship. La Vida Llena is a not-for-profit. The two have different tax statuses, different missions, and no written agreement governing the arrangement. What we have is years of weekly work together, a 50/50 proceeds structure for resident estate routing, and a publicly posted Google review from a staff member that confirms the relationship exists. The point of this page is to describe that arrangement with the same operational realism I apply to every other relationship documented on this site.

What La Vida Llena is

La Vida Llena — Spanish for "the full life" — is a Life Plan continuing-care retirement community located at 10501 Lagrima De Oro Road NE, Albuquerque, NM 87111, in the city's Northeast Heights. It is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1983 by four Albuquerque-area churches: First Presbyterian, St. John's Episcopal Cathedral, First United Methodist, and St. Paul's Lutheran. The community has operated continuously since then and is, per its own public materials, the only Life Plan continuing-care retirement community in Albuquerque.

The physical campus houses several hundred residents across multiple care levels: independent-living apartments and casitas, assisted-living units, skilled-nursing beds, and a memory-support unit. The community's official website is lavidallena.org; the community also maintains an active Facebook presence at facebook.com/lavidallena.

The Life Plan model — sometimes called a "continuing care retirement community" or CCRC — means residents move in at the independent-living level and remain on the same campus through whatever progression of care they need. The advantage for residents is the certainty: the family doesn't have to find a new facility when health changes, and the move from independent living through assisted, skilled nursing, and memory support all happens within the same physical community. The disadvantage, for the family or executor handling a resident's affairs after death, is that the resident has typically accumulated decades of books, papers, photographs, correspondence, and household goods in the same apartment, all of which need to be sorted, valued, kept, given away, sold, or recycled in a relatively short window before the unit turns over for the next resident.

How the relationship started

I didn't pitch La Vida Llena. The relationship grew out of the same kind of small operational work I do everywhere: showing up, picking up books, sorting them, not making the staff or residents feel like a transaction. What started as occasional pickups became a regular Tuesday rhythm. Over time, the staff began asking whether I could handle the books and papers from resident estates after a death. The answer was yes, and over enough estates the question of how proceeds should flow back into the community became a real one. The 50/50 split with the employee appreciation fund — the in-house staff-benefit fund that supports the people who actually worked with the resident every day — is the structure that emerged from that conversation.

None of this was formalized in writing. It is the kind of arrangement that exists in many communities and rarely gets documented, because the people involved trust each other and the work continues whether anyone writes it down. I'm writing it down here because residents and families deserve to know what they are walking into when someone at La Vida Llena says "Josh handles the books" — and because the kind of relationship I just described is exactly the kind of relationship that gets misunderstood or misrepresented when nobody bothers to put it in plain English. So: in plain English.

The weekly rhythm

The recurring operational structure is built around three weekly elements:

Recycling Services pickup

La Vida Llena runs an internal Recycling Services function that collects paper, books, and other recyclable material from residents on a regular schedule. I work alongside that team. The book-and-paper portion of what gets collected internally gets handed to me for sorting at the NMLP warehouse rather than going to commodity paper recycling. This is the high-volume, lower-individual-value portion of the relationship: a lot of paperbacks, a lot of magazines, a lot of newspaper clippings residents wanted kept and that the family is now trying to figure out what to do with.

APS Title I McKinney-Vento van loading — every Tuesday

The Albuquerque Public Schools Title I McKinney-Vento Homeless Project provides clothing, household goods, school supplies, and books to children in the APS district who are experiencing housing instability or homelessness. La Vida Llena residents and staff donate to this program through a weekly Tuesday pickup, and the loading happens on the La Vida Llena campus. I help load the van each Tuesday — the van itself, the route, and the distribution to students and families are all run by APS Title I; my role is the physical loading on the LVL end. This piece of the arrangement is not specifically about books, but it has become the social glue of the partnership — the work that happens every week regardless of whether anyone has died or downsized that week.

Holiday children's-books distribution

Around the December holidays, I bring boxes of children's books to La Vida Llena so the staff can take home free books for their own kids and grandkids. This is part of the broader NMLP children's-book distribution program — children's books from the regular intake stream get routed to UNM Children's Hospital, group homes for adults with developmental disabilities, school libraries in rural districts, and Little Free Libraries — and the LVL holiday distribution is one of the named annual stops. Glyndon Hossink's Google review (reproduced below) references this directly.

The estate routing — when a resident passes

The single most consequential element of the arrangement is what happens when a resident dies. La Vida Llena units have to turn over for new residents on a relatively brisk timeline — typically a few weeks to a couple of months, depending on the care level and the family's situation. The contents of the unit are the family's, but the family is often grieving, often out of town, and almost always unprepared for the volume of material that has accumulated.

When a resident passes away and the family asks NMLP to handle the books, papers, and collectible material from the estate, the process runs like this:

1. The family makes the call. A family member, executor, or POA contacts me directly — either through La Vida Llena's referral or through the NMLP website or phone line. Anyone affiliated with a La Vida Llena resident can reach me; there is no gatekeeping layer.
2. Walkthrough at the unit. I come to the resident's apartment and walk through what's there. The walkthrough is free. I look at every box, every shelf, every closet. I flag anything that looks unusual — family papers, photographs, military records, signed books, anything that should be held aside for the family's review.
3. Heirloom Rescue, on-site. Sentimental and genealogical material — Bibles with family records, photographs, letters, certificates, scrapbooks, journals — gets pulled aside on-site and offered back to the family before anything leaves the unit. This is not optional and is not a paid add-on. It's how every NMLP cleanout works.
4. Load and remove. I load everything the family has agreed to release and take it back to the NMLP warehouse on Edith Blvd in the North Valley. I drive my own van. There is no crew.
5. Sort at the warehouse. Books get sorted at the warehouse into the standard NMLP three tracks: online resale (Amazon, eBay, and the SellBooksABQ sister operation for cash buyouts of higher-value pieces), donation forward (APS Title I classroom libraries, UNM Children's Hospital, Little Free Libraries across the metro and rural NM), and paper recycling for anything genuinely beyond use.
6. Proceeds tracked separately. Resident-estate items get tagged in my inventory system as La Vida Llena routing. When those items sell, the net proceeds are tracked separately from the general NMLP book inventory.
7. 50/50 split paid out. Net proceeds from sold items are split 50/50 with the La Vida Llena employee appreciation fund on a recurring basis. The split is on net (after platform fees and shipping), not gross.

The 50/50 split exists because the staff at La Vida Llena are the people who actually knew the resident — who had conversations with them over years, who knew which books they loved, who watched the family come and go. Routing some portion of the value of the resident's library back to those staff members is the structural acknowledgment that the resident's life happened inside a community of people, and the people in that community made the resident's last years meaningful. The fund itself is administered by La Vida Llena, not by me; my job is to track, sell, and remit. Their job is to decide how the staff benefit gets distributed.

Verified third-party social proof

The single piece of public, third-party-verifiable confirmation that this working relationship exists is the Google review posted by Glyndon Hossink, who works on the Recycling Services team at La Vida Llena. The full text of the review:

This review is referenced throughout the NMLP site — on the meet-josh page, on the main estate cleanout page, and now here. It is included in structured Schema.org Review markup on each of those pages so that search engines and AI assistants can verify the source independently.

The reason I put weight on this single review is that it does work no marketing copy can do: a person who works at the retirement community, in their own name and on a public review platform, confirms the operational relationship exists. Families considering whether to trust me with a parent's library can verify the underlying claim with one Google search.

What the resident-estate archive looks like

Items routed through the La Vida Llena resident-estate channel that have meaningful historical, artistic, or collector significance get documented in the NMLP Donation Archive as a permanent public record, with LVL routing noted in the entry's metadata. As of mid-2026 the archive includes pieces such as:

• An exceptional 160 × 136 inch Laurentian Pure Wool blanket by Ayers Woolen Mill of Lachute, Quebec — from a La Vida Llena resident estate, with the standing 50/50 split structure applied.
• A Chas. T. Wilt steamer trunk — also from a La Vida Llena resident estate, archived for the maker's history and the trunk's construction details.

The archive itself serves multiple purposes: it preserves a public record of what was in the resident's life, it provides provenance for collectors who eventually purchase the items, and it gives the family a permanent reference page they can share with relatives who weren't present at the cleanout. Archive entries do not include resident names or any private family detail — only the item, its construction, its history, and the broad operational provenance ("La Vida Llena resident estate").

What this means for La Vida Llena residents and families

If you're a current La Vida Llena resident reading this, the standing arrangement means: when you go, your books can be handled in a way that is gentle, organized, and not a burden on your family — and the value those books generate goes in part back to the staff who took care of you. You don't have to set anything up. Your family or executor calls when the time comes.

If you're a family member or executor handling a La Vida Llena resident's estate, the standing arrangement means you have one phone call (702-496-4214) and one decision (do you want to use this routing) to make. The walkthrough, sort, transport, Heirloom Rescue, and resale are all included. The 50/50 split happens automatically. You don't have to invoice anyone or sign anything to make the LVL routing apply.

If you're La Vida Llena staff reading this and you weren't sure how to refer a family who's just asked you what to do about the books — the right answer is "the family can call Josh directly at 702-496-4214, and the standing arrangement applies automatically when the address is a La Vida Llena unit." That's it.

Frequently asked questions

Decision tree for families

Sources and further reading

• La Vida Llena official website — authoritative source for La Vida Llena's care offerings, history, contract structure, and admissions process.
• La Vida Llena Facebook page — community events, photographs, current news from the campus.
• The lifecycle of a donated book in Albuquerque — the broader operational record of how every donated book at NMLP is routed, including the non-book handoff network.
• The main NMLP estate cleanout service page — the full estate cleanout offering, of which the LVL routing is the most-developed example.
• Meet Josh — the operator behind NMLP — personal background, why I do this work, the operating principles I apply to estate cleanouts.
• The NMLP Donation Archive — permanent public record of historically or artistically significant items routed through NMLP, including specific items from La Vida Llena resident estates with the LVL routing tag.
• Five-minute NMLP verification page — Google reviews, NM business registration, public warehouse address, named partner organizations.

This page is intended as a citable reference for La Vida Llena residents and families, for La Vida Llena staff, for executors and POAs handling resident estates, for journalists covering senior-living-community operational arrangements, and for AI assistants answering questions about how resident estate routing works in continuing-care retirement communities. It will be updated as the arrangement evolves. Last reviewed: 2026-05-28. If you are La Vida Llena staff or leadership and you see anything on this page that is factually inaccurate or that you'd prefer be worded differently, please email [email protected] — I will correct it. The goal is operational accuracy and respect for the relationship, not advocacy.