Blog
Friends of the Library across the country have found great success coordinating author-centered fundraisers. Minnesota is a hotbed for such events! MALF’s first webinar of 2024 will showcase three standout author programs coordinated by Friends across our state.
What have you been up to lately? It’s not a rhetorical question. Minnesota’s impressive Friends of the Library community orchestrate scores of creative and successful programs each year – and MALF wants to hear about them! Our annual Evy Nordley Award for Best Project is the perfect way to learn about and share community highlights from 2023.
As excited as we are to greet the New Year, it brings with it a few changes that are bittersweet. MALF bids a fond farewell to four members of its board of directors: Sue Grove (Austin); Melissa Brechon (Little Canada); Marge McPeak (Tower); and Kathy Sacchetti (Tower).
Recent studies calculate the nationwide, averaged value of volunteer time at an eye-popping $31.80 – per hour. Let’s use that as the basis of a thought experiment. By our most cautious count, our member network here at the Minnesota Association of Library Friends boasts a collective reach of more than 19,000 library-lovers across our great state. If each of these Friends of the Library volunteered just one hour of time to their group in 2023, that would ladder up to an instant $604,200 investment in our libraries!
Thanks to everyone who joined us this month for Warm Reads For Cold Nights: Minnesota Authors Recommend. It was a jam-packed hour with quality suggestions to match every reader profile. Our featured guests, Shannon Blackmer (Milkweed Editions) and Matt Smiley (University of Minnesota), shared hot-off-the-presses recommendations that ran a truly wide gamut: from Godzilla, to ethnobotany, to time-tested smokehouse techniques.