Do you have a Friends of the library group?

[Corinne Eckhardt]

How do you start up a group like this of volunteers who would help us at the library?

[Shaw]

We just got active Friends of the library group going. We completed our first year. Lets see now if we can keep going for two years. They should have had election of officers at the last meeting but no one wanted to take over the president position. Person that is president will be moving in 7 months. An active Friends is very hard to get started, really need someone in the community that thinks it is important to have. We currently have 23 members but of course not all are active.
I have no words of wisdom for you. We had two years of publicity for Library of future so our library was in paper a lot - I think that helped plus they have a reason to fundraise.

[Michael Walker]

One of our media specialists set up a 30 boxes calendar for her volunteers to sign up for helping, right on her media center wiki. It made things so much easier to organize.

[Cher Seelen]

Hello Corrine,

The Library I work for has a wonderful Friends of the Library group. They are a hard working, wonderful group of people that the staff adores. They spoil us so much. They are a wonderful asset to our city and the Library.

[Corinne Eckhardt]

I am discouraged as I had only one sign up, now what can I do?

[Mary Ackerman]

I started a friends group 4+ years ago. I personally invited people to join, especially newcomers to town who aren't yet overwhelmed with meetings, and young mothers who want things for their children. One joiner said she was very flattered by the personal invitation. Now, 4 years later, we have had some very successful events, but the few active members we have are burning out. It's hard to know where to go from here.

[Lynn Carr]

Hello,
I am a member of the best Friends of the Library group if I do say so myself. We organized 7 years ago to start a library in our small community of Houston, MN. Yes, "start a library" as our community never had one! We legally organized our group and incorporated legally. We also filed for a 501 C 3. Then we started fund raising and applying for grants. From a temporary home in a city owned house we moved to our present location in a comfy brick building on main street, which was donated to us by a local business. We made improvements to the building, put in a parking lot , updated with handicap accessible door and bathroom. The town donated lots of books and materials, Bill Gates gave us computers, and the town formed a library board which gave us a budget and we hired a wonderful librarian. She is the only paid employee and the rest of the staff is volunteers from our Friends group. We have an annual meeting open to the public. We have monthly meetings of 10 Board members. The Friends raise money through various fundraisers. This year we had a soup competition and A Night at the Orpheum is scheduled for September 13. With funds raised we are now mainly buying books and materials as the budget is small and our needs are great. With the help of the Friends we have reached out to the community through starting a Lunch Bunch Book Club that meets every Wednesday. We have both teen and adult knitting clubs. Story Hour on Saturday morning for kids up to age 5 is very well attended. I can't imagine our library without the Friends who started it all just a few years ago. Personally, I volunteer about 15 hrs. a week cataloging and working at the desk. I guess that we are very lucky to have a group that works so well together!

[Brandi Canter]

We, too, have a FOL group in Royalton, but they are struggling. Generally only 2-4 people show up at the meetings, and the ones who do show up are getting frustrated. The group is only a couple years old, and they've had some successful fundraisers ~ lots of folks willing to show up to support the bake and book sales, but very few who want to help the group with ongoing decisions.

I'm curious to know if the size of the community makes a difference. Royalton has less than 1,000 people. Any small communities with strong FOL groups?

[Corinne Eckhardt]

Blue Earth is a small town (about 2500). We have doubled our membership from one to two friends. We have more retired folks here and a lot of choices for volunteering. People stay home because of the cold or go south for the winter. It seems as though we are competing with nature. BUT, I plan to start the group anyway with myself and two members. We can draft a plan to meet once a year to celebrate the existence of the library! Start small and build on sucesses.

[Karen]

Our community is about 2,000 people and has had a Friends group for about nine years. We have lots (30+) of dues paying members and rarely struggle with financial support from the community for library programs, but only have a handful of active members who come for the meetings. I don't think that this is a problem unique to libraries, however. Our local PTA nearly disbanded this year for lack of meeting attendees. People seem to be busier in general. One thing that has helped connect our active members is an email list. We organize and decide many of the "little" things via email, so even though our schedule don't necessarily mesh, we can still have a quick discussion about whether to bring cookies to the next author event, for example. I wouldn't suggest going completely virtual. Last fall when we were experiencing numerous schedule conflicts, we attempted a virtual email meeting, but it was very hard to follow.