Greetings from Ferguson, Missouri!
It has been another great year at Ferguson Municipal Public Library!
Our focus this year has been on refining and streamlining our services that help our patrons struggling with poverty, and help cross the digital divide.
We reduce barriers of time, cost, and lack of opportunity, by making faxes and prints and copies free, being fine free, and generally purging out any costs to patrons over the desk. We improve access by bringing the library to the patrons, holding programs in schools, daycares, parks, and in partnership with other organizations in the community. We continue to have a weekly outreach in the hardest-to-reach and poorest part of the community, so that residents along West Florissant Road, near the Canfield-Greene apartments, don’t need to have a car, ride a bus, or walk over 2 miles to get help with reference questions, resumes, email access, or finding a good book. We bring the library to them!
We are now doing up to 50 one-on-one technology help appointments each month. The vast majority are done by our Adult Services Librarian, Taneesa. She will sit down with a patron and spend an hour or more walking them through every step of filling out government forms, or making a resume, or just teaching them how to use the computer. A lot of the patrons she helps have barely touched a computer before, or do not have functional literacy skills, or are new to how job applications or government services work. Others are having problems with their technology, and just want a welcoming, knowledgeable person to help them sort it out.
We continue to offer free wifi, and training and assistance to those who need help accessing new technologies. We offer hotspots for patrons who don’t have internet access at home, and a school hotspot program where students and teachers can check out a hotspot for the entire semester. We make sure all our digital services will work on cheap phones. We find any path we can to meet our people where they live and help them however they work – concrete, practical ways to help our community get online and get work done in their own homes, schools, and parks.
We had a strong push to increase voter participation by helping patrons with registration, early voting, voting at the polls, and learning how to run for office. We ran programs, hosted get out the vote organizations like the League of Women Voters, put information up online and in posters, ran candidate forums, talked patrons through the processes, and everything else we could think of to make sure American citizens used their right to vote! We also pushed back on election-related misinformation, using trusted sources to get correct data into the community conversations.
There were a LOT of voter-related notaries, which we love to see! We have 4 employees (of our 15 total) that are notaries, and we provide over a hundred free notaries every month. This year saw voting- related increases, but also patrons signing up for government services, filing legal documents, selling and buying property, and caring for each other via power of attorney. We have a constant flow of people taking charge of their personal lives. All the time, we hear from patrons who are thankful the service is available, who felt trapped trying to find a notary since banks and others limit who can use their services.
One library thing you might not think of is support for women who cannot afford period supplies. But we are very strongly connected to our community, and can be a central hub for services. We partner with a St. Louis area non-profit org to distribute personal hygiene kits. We’ve been giving out over a hundred kits a month. Some go to unhoused patrons, and some to women who can’t afford the costs due to limited funds, and some who are having a sudden emergency and need it right now. Some of the kits are specially made for girls experiencing their first periods, with more options and instructions and information on resources within the kit. One patron told us that this service was a godsend to her and her daughters. Money was tight at home and these kits helped relieve the financial pressure.
We provide direct help for the people who need it most. That’s what libraries do. Every library, including your local library, brings stability to help their communities, and we have been fortunate enough to have great staff members who are willing to step up and do more for our community.
Our partnership with CAASTLC to help them provide rent relief and relieve heating costs has grown immensely. We are helping over 200 patrons a month to get assistance. That’s a huge relief for families struggling to improve their situation.
We have joined a larger consortium, the Missouri Evergreen Consortium, which lets our patrons access more than 4 million books and movies they could not easily get before, pulling resources from 70+ libraries all over the state of Missouri. That has required moving to a new cataloging system, which has been a heavy focus for all of the staff members for the past 4 or 5 months.
We’re always doing more than I can put in a letter. We constantly push into the community, reaching people who’ve not been reached before. It is thanks to your donations that we are able to do all that we do. Libraries are force multipliers for our communities, helping our communities build cohesion, diversity, and skill sets. Every community is stronger for its local library.
We hope you are staying safe, and getting any and all the help you need. Give your time when you can, let others lean on you, and allow yourself to lean on others. In the meantime, our little library will continue being as open as we can, and do as much as we can.
Please support your local library. And, if you want to help us again, please donate! We promise to use
your donations prudently and effectively. https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=F3GBBACKU3852
As always, THANK YOU!
Scott Bonner, Director
Ferguson Municipal Public Library District
FergusonLibrary.net
35 N Florissant Rd, Ferguson, MO 63135
The Ferguson Municipal Public Library District (43-0899661) is registered (per a Section 218 agreement) as a state or local government agency. We are tax deductible under this 170(c)(1) designation, for political subdivisions. Our type of organization is listed specifically in Publication 526 Charitable Contributions, as being tax deductible as long as the donation is being used for a public purpose, and we use all donation money to serve the public.