June progress & happenings

Aaron LaFromboise June 30, 2017, 4 comments

I am crazy, in that I have taken on a lot to do this summer. I went to Washington D.C. with my new high school interns, and I think they had a great time. They are kind of country mice, and so the whole experience was a bit overwhelming for them. I hope that they are a little more comfortable when we go to Chicago in October. 

The great thing about these girls is that they are very close in age (well, closer than I am) to the middle school audience that we will be engaging with Future Ready. With our travel, and them being new to the library, and the holidays next week we have not really made a huge progress toward the activity in August. Our community partners are still very interested, and we have been making sure that we keep in touch. 

We will have two more planning meetings in July, and our event will be August 7th & 8th. Now that it is a bit closer to the event, I am getting very excited. If it is anything like the work we have all put into the upcoming North American Indian Days parade, youth day, and library lodge, I am confident that we will have a wonderful program. I had an idea a few years ago about setting up a tipi during our powwow and having books to read, a place to get out of the sun, learn more about the library, and just relax. I have a story telling grant to go along with it, so we will be giving away free books for children and adults, we will have an information booth, a picture booth, and scheduled story times during the entire weekend. We are doing our first ever float (I'll make sure to share pictures with everyone) and we will be giving away books to kids during the youth day activities. 

I want to talk a bit about our library lodge, and I think many of the experiences we have this next weekend will help us recruit participants for the Future Ready program in August. One big question I always ask myself is, how can we afford to do all of this? I have never really thought of the things that we do as a partnership, but really, we have a great partnership with an organization called Hopa Mountain Storymakers. They get books and distribute them among different tribal organizations in Montana to encourage early literacy. This year, to support Youth Day and the Library Lodge, they were able to get many books from Scholastic, along with the regular Hopa Mountain books we currently have. The Talk Story grant is through the American Indian Library Association who has partnered with Toyota to provide small grants. I will be working with some of our regular patrons to tell both traditional stories, and other stories. I would also like them to talk about our community when they were young. Our kids will never know what town was like with a show house, but I remember when I was a kid before it burned down. There are older people who remember riding horses to school. I think those stories are just as important as traditional stories. The adult books that we are giving away have come from donations that did not make it into the library, and through discarded books from the recent weeding project I have done over the past year. I am so excited about giving books out because I think about how amazing it will be to get books into the vehicles of people who travel the powwow trail in the summer. I wonder how often most families bring books with them, but if they just keep a few in the car then they will be able to read on the road, while they are waiting for competition, and will be able to share with other people. I'm imagining that many of these books will be taken by people who are not a part of our community, but are here just for the powwow. My mind just floods with happiness every time I think about getting books into indigenous communities.  Everything else we are doing, we have been able to do for very little cost, and donations. I think of the Library Lodge as being step one in the Future Ready program, because it will help show our community that we do more than just stay in the library and shush people (which we really don't do). 

Not sure if you are reading this to the end, but if you have, and have any questions about our summer events, please ask questions!

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