 Okay, so welcome to our lightning round sessions at Big Talk from Small Libraries 2021, we have four sessions we're going to go through quickly in the next hour for you. First up, Kate Cozier back with us again from Clifton Community Library in New York, and she's going to talk about poverty relief using story time so go ahead and take it away Kate. All right, can everybody see my new slide show here. Have you seen the slides and your camera all good. Awesome. All right, well, welcome everybody. Thank you for listening to me a second time. I promise this one will be shorter. So, we have a very small area here in Northern New York that we serve the town of Clifton. And in that town are three villages, Cranberry Lake, part of Star Lake and Newton Falls. The little red dot you see on the map there is Newton Falls, which was established in 1894 as a mill town. And in its heyday, close to a thousand people live there. Nowadays there are fewer than half that number. And I will show you why the main industry for well over a hundred years was the Newton Falls paper mill. And unfortunately, although it went through many changes in ownership and that sort of thing in 2011 it finally closed. So this is a picture of it before it closed and this is what it looks like today. As a result, Newton Falls as a village has fallen into pretty great disrepair. There is a good bit of drug activity and crime up there. But there are also a lot of children and they're very easy to see just drive through town during nice weather and they're all over the place up there. You can see them running around having a great time. So, I was approached by a member of our local community fund, the Clifton Vine Community Fund, to come up with some way of engaging the children in Newton Falls. They really can't get to the library in Cranberry Lake. It's about a 15 minute ride and most of them can't get there. To put together some sort of program that combined literacy with poverty relief. And so we devised poverty relief story time. So I'm going to talk about how we did it. So, first of all, we partnered with the local fire department in the village and they agreed to let us use the fire hall to host our weekly event. We decided we would have a six week story time. And so then once we got it all framed out, we started doing some advertising in our local papers. And we also partnered with the school who let us send home flyers directly on there's one school bus that services that village. So we were able to put flyers directly into the hands of the kids there. And then we scheduled it. So we knew that in the summertime, the kids are running around and you know that we're not going to probably be able to encourage them to come sit inside for a while. So we decided to do it in the dead of winter when, you know, times are tough and there's not much to do. We thought the kids would be more interested in coming out and having a good time in January and February. The way it was going to shake out is that we would read a story, then the kids would either do a craft or learn a new skill and have a snack. And then they would take home an item of poverty relief. So we hoped that we could put some things into their hands that maybe they needed. And that was our plan. So as well after we did all this, we ultimately had just about 10 children sign up. So I'm going to go through some of the books that we did and tell you about what we did. So we did no more water in the tub by Ted Arnold. And the kids made finger paints for the bath. And then they brought home toiletries. We did stone soup and they learned how to make soup with a member of our local PTO and then they brought home everything they needed to make soup. And we had one kiddo that went home and immediately insisted on making soup for her entire family. We did the Mitten by Jan Brett. The kids did snow painting, just where you mix like shaving cream and glue and paint. And then it makes like a puffy paint. And they brought home mittens and hats and scarves. And here's a couple of the volunteers, the lady sitting here was our fire department liaison. And then we had a, and at one of our exchange students that year came and the kids also made like rice bags that they could heat up in the microwave and then snuggle them in bed with. And there they are painting. There's a little girl's painting. And then our last week we did curious George makes maple syrup and we had a big pancake party and the kids learned how to make pancakes with again the lady from the PTO. So I'll show you a couple of more pictures. Okay, so here's some more PTO volunteers just teaching them how to make they made sun catchers I can't remember what book that was for but we had, you know, really a good crowd of kids and it was warm safe and dry and the parents got a break and the kids had a great time. So by the numbers program lasted six weeks. It cost about $900 $750 of it was funded by the community fund grant that we had. And then the extra 150 came from a grant the library receives an annual endowment. And so we took it out of there. So it ultimately cost the library nothing to put this program on. We had 10 children participate. They got, like I say, toiletries food outdoor where they got new pajamas, all kinds of good stuff. We had five volunteers plus the library and involved every week. And we strengthened partnerships within three community groups the school, the library and the fire department. And then later, because of this the library was invited by another community group the Newton Falls church to participate in events at their church they have like a Halloween party and a Thanksgiving party and a Christmas party for the kids. So we started attending that, and we were able to put a book drop on the church porch, so that people in Newton Falls, if they can get books, they could drop them off there. And we gave all the kids a library card to so that if they could get up to the library they certainly can use it. So what happened next, the, the partnership with fire department did not stop there. We wound up receiving a grant from the foundation for rural service and we installed a free wifi hotspot inside the fire department. Newton Falls strange leaf spite poverty is the best spot for cellular service in our area. And so people go up there, and they check their phones there all the time, but we know that kids don't always have phones, especially young ones and given the poverty rate. People don't always have phones either so putting in the wifi hotspot allowed people to drive in with some sort of a device and check whether they had cell service or not. And that turned out to be really helpful with the pandemic, when you know kids were expected to be able to log in and do school work online. And all of this ultimately led to us receiving the outstanding partnership award by the North country library system. Thank you very much. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Kate. We do have any questions. Yes, we do have questions that came in. First, we have up. Do you have the numbers about how many, I don't know if you did, but how many family members, how many family members benefited. Do you have those numbers. Don't. We certainly know a lot of these kids ourselves so we might know that they come from a family of six or something but I don't have hard numbers. Yeah, but actually never get. And what age were these the, how about what were the age ranges of the kids that were involved in the programs. The youngest kids were five and the oldest kids were 10 and 11. Nice range. Okay. Do you have any issues or and if you did what were the solutions for transportation for these kids to get to the programs. We didn't. The village is super, super small. The fire department is right in the middle of the village. So, you know, certainly ran around a couple of the kids are related to the fire chief. So they had easy rides, but it wasn't a problem. I mean, we're talking about, you know, maybe three blocks. All these kids came from so. So everybody can just walk everywhere pretty much in the town. Yeah, you are the smallest one in the community we have today. So not surprised. Yeah. And this is something interesting when you did publicize it. Did you, what words did you use meaning did you advertise the poverty relief component or kind of just downplay that. Yeah, we didn't want to like stigmatize people into thinking they were coming for some sort of charity. Yeah, like a Newton falls story winter story hour. And, you know, we had a sign up sheet where they did have to indicate like clothing size or food allergies. So that, you know, we didn't run into anything where we bought double extra large pajamas for a kid who was four years old or something, but we did not use the words poverty really. And how did you ensure that the kids who attended were children in need? I mean, the small community. Did you just know or was there more sort of an official. We didn't require any sort of documentation or anything, but we, we know these kids are right in your community. Yeah. So we just had a session about grants. Did you already have this idea in mind when you applied for the grants or was the money already available and then you came up with this. How did you end up connecting this using grant funding. So the 1 of the women that's on the local grant committee approached me because every year. We thought this grant does not get enough applicants last year. They only had 3 applicants and they have $15,000 every year to give away. So she said the money is there. We need to get into Newton falls and the library needs to go there. So how are we going to do this? Let's approach this by looking at how we can engage the kids. Through community politics. Most people outside of Newton falls don't have a lot of use for the adults inside of Newton falls. Unfortunately. So the kids had to focus of the program. Sure. Sure. All right, so it sounds like it's big success. Are you planning to do it again, or I know it was grant funded so I don't know that it will be done again. But I certainly would encourage it. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. Thank you so much.