What is a Community Center?

Story of the day:

HCLS Wins $20K 2023 Maryland Makerspace Initiative Program Grant, Kristin Danley-Greiner, Ellicott City Patch

What will the funds be used for? 

HCLS will receive $20,000 to fund a feasibility study for a makerspace at the future downtown Columbia library.

Yes, the Howard County Library System keeps on plugging along to prepare for a new Downtown library. Attempts by some to paint the actions of  library as somehow furtive and nefarious seem ridiculous to me. Nothing truly first-rate comes into being without advance planning. HCLS is known both locally and nationally for creating programs and spaces that meet the needs of the community.

This is how you do it:

1. Thing big

2. Plan ahead. 

3. Do the work.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of our library system. When I read this social media post recently it made me laugh but I also felt a sense of self-recognition.

I had a conversation with a friend about the controversy surrounding the Lakefront Library at the beginning of the summer. I should let you know that this is an especially knowledgeable friend when it comes to Columbia/HoCo. I learned a lot from our discussion. We agreed on some things but not all. I shared my enthusiasm for library programs in other places where patrons can do laundry and connect with literacy programs.

Libraries and Laundromats: Transforming Spaces for Learning, Institute of Museum and Library Sciences 

My friend was equally supportive of such programs in concept but felt they didn’t belong in a library. “That kind of program belongs in a Community Center.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that. What makes a particular program a good fit for a library rather than a community center? Who would know best? Is a dividing line between libraries and community centers a specious or at least an unnecessary distinction?

Here’s my take: a library is a community center. It is possible to have different kinds of community centers. Libraries make connections all the time in the work that they do - - not just connecting people with books and/or information. They create programs and services to connect with parents and young children, schools, teens, the elderly, people who desire to be computer literate, young adults who want to complete high school and receive a diploma…

But wait. There’s more.

They can connect you with appropriate tax forms, information about voting in upcoming elections, and they can provide information after a natural disaster. Or during a worldwide pandemic. They are open as cooling centers when the weather is extraordinarily hot. 

A library is a community center. When library professionals see a need, it is because community members are coming to them with that need. They create programs to respond to their communities. Maybe it’s laundry and literacy. Or a tool-lending library. Or a literacy kitchen. Or a Maker Space. 

As a lifelong early childhood educator, I look at the world of learning as a hotbed of interconnectedness. It think it is a great loss that education becomes so much more siloed as we progress though the grades. By the time we become adults we can no longer understand the natural connections that exist across content areas and experiences.

One more thing: libraries always, always incorporate input from the community in what they do. Ours most certainly does. If you’re interested in participating in the Maker Space feasibility study:

With this grant, HCLS will invite stakeholders – consisting of community members, local businesses; and community partners – to join a Makerspace Advisory Board and provide feedback on the feasibility study next year.

What’s a Makerspace? Oh, boy. That’s another blogpost altogether.