Bright Ideas | May 2025
Booking Time with Family for a Great Día Challenge
It all started with a book. Our library has seven Storybook Walks, which feature a new title each month for our patrons to read. To keep them supplied, I’m always keeping an eye out for fun books to add to the rotation. One of our Walks is specifically geared toward our local Spanish-speaking population, and we strive to include various bilingual titles. Book Fiesta!: Celebrate Children's Day/Book Day by Pat Mora was one of the books from our collections that I wanted to review.
This beautifully illustrated picture book exposed me to a holiday I had never known. An entire holiday centered around celebrating children's imagination and promoting early literacy? Now that was a perfect match! But more than just a good read for the Walk, the entire idea behind the holiday seemed perfect for our library to explore.
After researching the holiday and having discussions with our youth staff, I took what I learned to create a new April Beanstack Challenge: The Book Fiesta Challenge. The Challenge began on April 1 and culminated on April 30—El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children's Day/Book Day).
The challenge encouraged celebrating children and families across all cultures, and the joy of reading. Participants were tasked to complete any 10 of 15 badges that consisted of a mix of reading and spending family time together by attending library programs and exploring our offerings. Five badges were specifically about reading together, and the other ten badges were:
- Cooking or baking together
- Making a craft together
- Enjoying the great outdoors together
- Exploring a new language
- Playing a game together
- Going on a Storybook Walk
- Attending a library program
- Watching a movie based on a book
- Creating music together
- Playing at the library
Each badge included a helpful link to a relevant collection item: our reservable hiking kits, board games, kitchen equipment, media, foreign language materials, and more. Reading badges included links to suggested reading lists. We particularly highlighted some of our cultural programs, including Spanish and Mandarin language learning for preschoolers, anime and manga clubs, inclusive storytimes, and more. Programs were tagged as part of the reading challenge throughout April to allow our patrons to narrow down their search on our program calendar.
The St. Charles City-County Library was delighted to embrace the diversity of our population through a wonderful celebration of the universal: the power of books in our children’s lives.—Kymberly Maine, St. Charles City-County (MO) Library
A Shifting Approach to Reach Underserved Families
Librarians are practical and librarians are dreamers. Though these two philosophies seem diametrically opposed, we have to have a balance of both to serve the patrons who come to us for information, resources, and answers, and those who want to connect, create, and escape into the world of stories. People need both. Communities need both. And the two work especially well together when we plan and implement programming. We want programs to spark interest, but they also have to be assessed for their rate of success. Sometimes adjustments and pivots may need to be made. Though we have big ideas and the drive to make them happen, we have to be honest about what’s working and what isn’t.
We had to make this type of assessment and redirection with the Greenfield Hearts and Minds outreach program we implemented this past year. The idea for the program started with the knowledge of a newly arrived and underserved group of families. In 2023, refugee families from Haiti arrived in Greenfield to live in emergency shelters in our small city. Having moved into our brand-new library building around the same time, we wanted our mission and resources to be on the radar of these families.
Initially, we wanted to welcome these families to our fabulous new building by bringing a children’s author who spoke Haitian Kreyol for a storytime. We wanted to offer books in their languages and art and early literacy activities that parents and kids could do together. After early meetings with the directors of the two family shelters as well as a number of other local community resource organizations, we were thrilled that the Greenfield Hearts and Minds outreach program was received positively overall. However, as logistics were discussed, we realized that there would be big challenges to hosting a storytime at our library—transportation, scheduling, and a number of other issues. It became clear to us that if we stuck with this plan, turnout from these families wouldn’t be likely.
Given this feedback, we decided to focus more on visiting these families onsite at the shelters and bringing multilingual books and library programming with us. We hoped to become friendly faces that would develop into familiar faces around town, which would eventually lead families to the library once they’d learned more about us and what we offer. Funding from the ALSC/Candlewick Press “Light the Way” Grant made it possible to put this plan into action.
By mid-August our children’s librarian had visited one of the shelters for seven consecutive weeks and brought a total of 93 books for children of varying ages (0-14) for about eight families to keep. Books in Haitian Kreyol were preferred, and we were able to source many books in that language or in a bilingual format with English. We learned that families also spoke Spanish, so books in Spanish or bilingual Spanish/English books were our second priority. We also tried to provide as many children’s books as possible set in Haiti or making reference specifically to Haitian families and culture.
The activities our children’s librarian brought ranged from outdoor fun with bubbles, chalk, water sensory bins, and science experiment kits, to indoor color and collage art kits and Lego blocks for both younger and older children. Almost every week children participated in these activities and sometimes together with a parent. After every visit, the books, kits, and toys were left in the playroom of the shelter for other families to access during the rest of the week.
Unfortunately, the outreach program was less successful with the second family shelter. Though we initially had the participation of the director of that shelter site, when visits were due to begin, multiple attempts at communication went unanswered. Some books and activity supplies were purchased for the families at this site, but gathering those items came to a pause when we were ultimately unable to link back up with the site's leadership.
Though our initial ideas shifted and changed, and we had some setbacks, we were able to wrap up the Hearts and Minds outreach program for the year with a wave of success. The books that were intended for the second family shelter found a home with a local youth organization called Twice As Smart. This program sponsors more than 30 at-risk children, including children of Haitian refugees, “providing them with a learning environment that is both trauma-informed and strength-based, to launch them on a path to continuing education and purposeful lives.” Remaining grant funds were used to bind and publish books written and illustrated by these bright students. The books were displayed in the library this past spring for the community to read and check out.
Overall, we are beyond grateful for the opportunities the ALSC/Candlewick Press “Light the Way” Grant has afforded us here in Greenfield. It’s given us the chance to meet more underserved children and families and to partner with the organizations that fight for them. This outreach has given us insight into better ways to promote literacy and education in our community that we can carry into the future.—Ellen Lavoie, head of Children’s Services, Greenfield (MA) Public Library
Editor’s Note: For more information about the ALSC/Candlewick Press “Light the Way” Grant, visit our website. And, many thanks to Candlewick Press for making opportunities like these possible through the "Light the Way" Grant!
