Thornton Community Center, CO

 The idea of libraries built in parks or community centers is not new. What is less common, however, is the idea of not just collocating but blending facilities together to create more opportunities for collaboration across governmental units.

That idea is being put into place in New Jersey, Virginia, and Colorado, among other places, where public librarians have found ways to join community services and parks and recreation departments to create blended facilities.

The difference between co-located libraries and blended community centers is most evident in Colorado, where Anythink Libraries (formerly Adams County Library) recently announced that it is working with the City of Thornton to incorporate a library into the rebuild of the existing Thornton Community Center.

According to Stacie Ledden, director of Strategic Partnerships at Anythink, there was an Adams County Library branch in that same community center back in the 1970s, but the difference between then and now could not be more profound.

Then, the library in the community center was inward focused, a passive space to come and check out books. The new library in the community center is focused on weaving itself throughout the entirety of the space, whether by creating rotating library displays in the café (especially popular among older adults), hosting special programs in the boxing gym, or inviting fitness instructors to lead free introductory classes in the library side of the facility.

The library has also worked closely with the parks and recreation department on the maker space, one of the facility’s completely shared spaces. The parks and recreation strategic plan discovered large interest in having a makerspace for teenagers, one of the department’s primary audiences. The library had expertise on that topic, and so is leading the its development. The makerspace will have longer hours than the rest of the library, matching the hours of the community center to ensure teenagers have access to it whenever the center is open.

COLLABORATING IS THE KEYWORD

North Bergen, NJ, library director Sai Rao said that “collaborating services became a keyword” in her city. Rao said the North Bergen Community Center and Library started with a conversation with her counterpart in the town’s recreation department: “We had jovial conversations” along the lines of “you use my space and I use your space so why can’t we have one space that we share?”

Both the library and the recreation department wanted to have spaces downtown, and in 2013 the library opened a storefront branch in an existing space.

The recreation department successfully bonded for a new downtown community center, and at that point Rao joined the conversations with the idea of adding a library to the new space. Rao said the recreation department has involved the library “in every single conversation with the architects and the furniture” suppliers, and every other critical dialogue about how the shape will emerge.

In contrast, when Virginia’s Fairfax County Library identified an opportunity to join in the new County Neighborhood and Community Services’ Lorton Community Center, the library opted to furnish its part of the facility separately, leading to a delay in the opening, since the different partners were navigating different supply chain issues.

That issue illustrates some of the challenges libraries navigate when they start blending facilities with other entities.

In Colorado, Ledden said that Anythink has intergovernmental agreements for both projects—the library is also working with the City of Thornton to create a Nature Library in North Thornton—“but really it’s a lot of conversation, not just on logistics, but shared philosophy and values. What we’re excited about is the ability to take [a] holistic approach to service.” The library hopes to better provide “support of the whole person through this relationship.”

Regular, open, ongoing communication has been key to all three projects’ successes. So too is being up front and clear about what libraries bring to the table. As Jessica A. Hudson, director of the Fairfax County Library, said, the goal of all the partners (the Lorton Community Center also includes a nonprofit) is to “provide a spectrum of services for a variety of needs, with the library more on [the] educational end of things.”

Hudson added there is a “pressure to be all things to all people in libraries today, this question of mission creep. [In Fairfax County] we know what our job is, and we are very good at our job. While we can collaborate and cross pollinate, we can partner” to amplify rather than replace other entities.

Hudson is excited about being able to use the new community center space to expand the library’s educational offerings. She said the community center provides expertise on cooking, with a full commercial kitchen. The library has done “culinary programming for many years using hot plates” and she can’t wait to take things further thanks to this new facility. Also, the community center has a music booth. The library already does podcasts, “but with this structured permanent space they will be able to do programming out of [community center resources]. Among the partners there will be no dead time with the space.”

Similarly, in New Jersey, Rao said the existing storefront library “isn’t big enough for our programs—we go out and seek opportunities for external spaces.” Rao told the recreation department, “I will be using [their rooftop turf field] more in the summer than they will be.”

Rao has worked at the North Bergen library for 32 years, and over that time she has meticulously cultivated relationships across North Bergen. She said, “all the staff in the library and recreation department understand the relationship and benefit from it.” As an example of how the staff will be blended in the new space, she said, “we are talking about having parks staff doing healthy living at the library training in the library’s meeting room, and then taking participants downstairs and showing them how to do healthy exercise and healthy eating” in the gym and kitchen facilities.

Ledden added that Anythink leadership hopes that this relationship also supports the well-being of library staff. In the library’s conversations with partners in the City of Thornton and the city’s Parks, Recreation & Community Programs, they have been discussing “how do we support the well-being of staff and community through a focus on nature and mindfulness? This work feels like such a natural extension of that work already underway; we have a lot to learn from them and they have a lot to learn from us.”