Be a Friend of the Library

One of the fun things about my first year of being director here at the Liberal Memorial Library is watching the rebirth of our Friends of the Liberal Memorial Library group.   Established long ago, the group had dwindled in membership, and as with most groups you lose a couple of key people and it gets hard to keep things together.

Friends groups are an excellent way for community members who want to volunteer or give back to the library to participate in the energy that the library generates. Friends are wonderful advocates for what is going on at the library and spreading the message about what the current library has to offer. As advocates they are essential. As I am oft to say, as employees we get paid to make sure the library is an awesome place, as trustees we are appointed to make sure the library is awesome place, but friends volunteer to make the library an awesome place. They give of their time and money to bring about enhancements and to fund special projects that are not always in our budget.

In my first meeting with the Library Board it became a topic of discussion that we would like to see the Friends group up and going. So we set about the task of making it happen. Luckily even without a club being active, the previous director had kept the group’s tax status in place and the group still had an active savings account. Now just to find the people!

We sent out invitations, printed up brochures, and began pounding the pavement looking for members. Within a few short months we had a small nucleus of people willing to put the time and effort into getting the group off the ground. A big thanks to Sheila Wells and Amy Thompson for their effort in this regards. With their help and enthusiasm our friends group is now up to about 50 members.

With the Friends group in place it was decided that what we needed was a project that would help the community. The first project that the Friends of the Liberal Memorial Library has taken on is called “A Baby’s Bookshelf.” The idea behinds A Baby’s Bookshelf is that parents who have recently had a child can come into the library every two months for two years and pick up a free book for their child. At the end of the two years they would theoretically have 12 books. Studies show that having physical contact with books and reading materials greatly increase the chances that a child will learn to read at an early age. The books that we purchase through money generated by the activities of the Friends touch on the different aspects of pre-literacy skills that positively position children to learn how to read.

The Friends group has two avenues of generating income to fund these special projects. The first is through membership dues. At $5.00 for individuals and $10.00 for families this is a pretty good deal. Just one individual membership in the Friends group helps to purchase two books for the baby’s bookshelf project. Our second big fund raiser is our Annual Book Sale in April. This takes place each year during National Library Week. The benefit of being a Friend during the book sale is you get to shop the night before everyone else.

That is just a sampling of who the friends are, what we do, and the ways they enrich the community. If you are interested in being a Friend of the Liberal Memorial Library, please stop by the library and ask for Royce, or go online at our website www.lmlibrary.org and click on the Friends tab, or follow us on Facebook at: Friends of the Liberal Memorial Library.