 Up next on Big Talk from Small Library 2021 is Beth Anderson from Burnsville Public Library and she's going to talk about how small yet mighty they are there. Hi everybody. I'm Beth Anderson, the director at the Burnsville Public Library in Burnsville, West Virginia. We're in central West Virginia. We're about 15 miles north of the Dead Center geographical point in the state of West Virginia. So that's pretty interesting. We have 1.03 employees, so that's why I say we might be small, but we really are mighty. We do a lot for having just this little bit of people. So sorry, I'm trying to get used to doing this. I've been director since July 2015. I actually started with the library April of 2015 as the on-call person though. That position was a very difficult position to fill. We've actually still got the position, but it's an open position because nobody really wants a job that they can't be guaranteed hours for. So it's difficult. The only reason I was able to do it is because I had an awesome teenager to take care of my little ones. He was an awesome and still is an awesome big brother, so that allowed me to go back to work. Our service population is 3,723. The total service population, our town is around 500 people though. So you can see our circulation is mostly made up of our children's collection. So that's because we're right across the street from our local elementary school. During normal times, we have everybody once a week that every class comes over. And we have 100% of the children at the school right now that have library cards. So they check out books once a week with their classes. So that really helps us with our children's items. We do have a special, we have eight computers in our Mary Susan Black public computer lab. So we're really proud of that. Mary Susan Black was our long-time director. And although she was scared of computers herself, she knew that that was where everything was going. She retired back in the early 2000s. And so she had several computers here before she retired because she knew that that was where it was going. So when she passed away, we named the computer lab as a remembrance because she was the director for around 25 years here at the library. So our programming changes, these are kind of 2014 and 15. We had to count things differently as did most other people in libraries. So the drastic jump really, you can look at 17, 18, and 19 to see really our growth so far for our programming. In 2017, we created our hands-on reading after school program. It's four nights a week. We have children from preschool to eighth grade that attend our after school programs. Monday is Lego night. Tuesday is movie night. Wednesday is book club. And Thursday is our steam night. So we have anywhere between 150 and 200 children a week or we did have before we had to shut the program down in March last year. So it was, you know, the program has grown because that first year in 2017. So we're really proud of the fact that we've been able to accomplish the after school program. 1920 was the first year that we really had a full time, the assistant was here full time with me for the for the after school program. I say full time just for that program. In 2017, 18 and then 18, 19 I had the program by myself three days a week. So when you talk about 20 to 30 kids in the library every day by yourself plus trying to board the desk and trying to help patrons, it's very difficult. So it was a big relief to be able to pull the assistant in and have her here. So it really made a huge difference. And these are just some of the pictures. This was our summer, one of our end of summer programs last year for our older children that participated in our drive through summer reading summer learning program. We did tie dye. They were able to tie dye shirts and stuff. And then this is a picture of one of our family STEM activities with our great volunteer. We have a wonderful resource in our lead volunteer. He has let me dress him up as a frog, as Clifford, as Curious George. He's been every one of the super why characters. He's been the Grinch. He paints our windows. He does all of our maintenance. He's wonderful. This is just some pictures from our after school program. The way that I was able to do the program without any help was I recruited and I just had our older children help. He's one of our older students. They and she is one of our older students. So they were always big helpers before our assistant Avis came in and was able to start helping us with the after school program. So we do have a partnership with WVU Extension Services and their 4-H program. This is our 4-H consultant. And she comes once a month and does activities with the kids, which really helps because it takes some of the pressure off of us to have to do something every, you know, it's only one day a month, but still that's one day a month we don't have to worry about. And then Jace down here, he came to our Lego Knights and he absolutely loves the program and his mom and dad called me and they said, is it okay if we bring Jace's birthday cake and we'll provide the plates and drinks and stuff, but he said that he wanted his birthday party at the after school program. And so, you know, we were like, sure, we made sure all the parents knew that the kids were going to be getting birthday cake and juice, but we always provide a refreshment anyway. So, but, you know, that's all he wanted was to celebrate his birthday with us. So we were tickled to death. It's always a blessing to see, you know, that you're touching kids so much that they want to be there and they want to share special events with you. And then last Halloween in 2019, this was our pumpkin decorating contest. So we had a rainbow fish and we had, I'm not sure what the other one was, what group, I think they were both from Rainbow Fish and then we had Pete the Cat and then we had Bob the Tomato from Veggie Tales and then the kids each got to pick a book from our, from our stash that they could take home was their prize. We do monthly during our regular hours we do when we don't have COVID to deal with. We do family steam movie nights at least once a month and these are just some pictures from the from those events. My son is going to be horrified that people from all over the country saw up his nose. This is my youngest son, Joshua. Again, we always have at least two children for programs because my kids come and so we always know we have a cushion of two but this little girl, she absolutely loved Clifford. She fell in love with Clifford and led Clifford around for like 45 minutes straight. My husband is in the Clifford costume and he loves to play with the little kids and you know everything but he was wore out when he got out of the Clifford costume because she led him around the library 400 times. But there he is as the Grinch. This is one of our, we always do the how the Grinch stole Christmas at Christmas time. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do it this year because of COVID but we're hoping to maybe start back with some outdoor movie nights soon. This is our, one of our New Year's programs. We were shooting for, we were shooting for a just an adult community program. We weren't discouraging kids but we were hoping that they would, you know, that adults would come and also, you know, we had food, we had, you know, we had the party hats and everything. It ended up being mainly children but these were, you know, and we did a best dressed competition. So these two young men were our winners. This is my son and this is our assistant Avis's son. But they were the ones that dressed up so, but the kids had a really good time. We turned the lights off and had a, had a glow party. We had balloons that had glow sticks in them and the kids really loved it. You know, they played chess and the bigger kids, you know, I think they broke out clue and chess and, you know, they played board games and just sat and talked and the bigger kids helped the little kids play so it was really nice before everything changed. This is just some pictures of our, of some of our, well mainly our one volunteer. He also paints our windows. So he does either by holiday or by season. He's getting ready. He's doing spring and then the next ones will be our summer reading windows. But then we were lucky enough a couple of years ago to have the youth poet for our area come and do a program for our after school kids. And this was one of the activities he did. He used one of my children's soccer balls and he tossed around the ball and whoever caught the ball had to add to a story. But Darren, these were at the school. The school has been really good to us. We, you know, if I get a special guest like Clifford or Curious George, they allow us to come in and visit the classrooms. I read books when they visited and stuff. So it was, it's really nice. And there's Clifford getting his flu shot. While we're on this slide, we do have actually, multiple people have been asking, where do you get the character costumes? We are fortunate enough to be in partnership with our West Virginia Public Broadcasting Station very well. We're one of their inquire within libraries. So part of that program was you got so many visits, you got so many, you got so many visits with different character costumes. So because we're a part of that program, we were able to get that. But reach out to your West Virginia, reach out for your, to your public broadcasting station and see if they can arrange for you to get some, some of these costumes. Ours, these, these we had to box up and send off. But I know our West Virginia Public Library personally, not Public Library, Public Broadcasting, sorry, they personally own the, all of the Super Y kids. So they own all of the costumes for Super Y. So we can get those, we can get those almost whenever we want. But these, it's a little more, it's a little harder, but reach out and, you know, they'll help you figure out how to get them if you need them for a special event or just want to visit. Oh, cool. And somebody else is just sharing, and this is great, we get input from our audience too. A company or website, costumes specialists.com. I just looked it up and they, they rent character, children's book character costumes. We've got Sonic. Sorry, I'm making a note of that myself. Yeah, costumes specialists.com. Awesome. We're, we're very fortunate, like I said, my husband's a good sport. He's disabled. So he comes over and where he doesn't work, he, he lets me dress him up. And like I said, Curious George, Clifford, he's, he's been Princess P from Super Y. So I mean, he's a really good sport. Great. And while we're here, just because it was just a couple of slides back, your family steam, the family steam movie night, they wanted to know more about that and how about attaining the movie license for doing that. Okay. Yeah, we do, we license with Swank motion pictures through our library consortium. So all of the movies that we show are licensed through Swank because we have a blanket license. We have a similar thing here in Nebraska here at the Nebraska Library Commission. We actually have funding and we purchase license for all of our public libraries have access to have that covered. That is totally awesome. It's a statewide movie license. Yeah, so check in with your, yeah, with if you can't do it yourself, check in with your state library and they might have something. Yeah, I know there's a couple of different options. Swank isn't the only one out there. Swank, but Swank now covers a lot of the Pixar, it covers the Disney, the Disney movies, it covers a lot of the Fox movies now. They've recently expanded. So a lot more of the movies are covered by Swank. So we've kind of figured that Swank gets us the most bang for our buck. Yeah, ours is through a company movie licensing, movie licensing USA. So yeah, I think that's actually where ours technically is, but I go through the Swank website. That's the company that authorizes the movie licensing USA. I believe I think that's what my certificate says anyway. But what we do is we pick a movie and then we try to find a few steam activities that kind of go along with that theme. The kids come in and do the movie or do the, we spend about an hour with the families in the front part of the library. We're a two-room library. So we set up the front room for the steam activities. The one activity that is being shown here, this was a coding activity through the 4-H program. And so they were doing that activity. This we were making slime, hence the plastic on the ground. And we do have some older kids that are coming. So it's fun. This was our Christmas program because they're making snowflakes out of toilet paper tubes. And then this was a balance program that we did. So we had all kinds of balance activities. It's one of our more popular programs. So it's really good. We really enjoy it. We usually have about between 15 and 20 people, which for us is really good for a program. So we have had upwards of 36, 36, 40 people. We have done some where we have people dressed up as the characters of the movie. Like we did Moana and we had a young lady dress up like Moana-ish. And we printed off pictures of Moana and she took a Sharpie and like signed, you know, did autographs for the kids. So it's really nice. We do popcorn and water usually, just because water is healthier. Plus, if you give pop to kids, it kind of winds them up and they get spilled all over the floor. At least water is only water. It doesn't stain or anything. Yeah. Right. But we really do, like the Christmas one, we try to make it a little more special. We try to do like a fruit tray and cupcakes one year. We had a volunteer that made a cupcake cake and she did it and it was the Grinch and every kid got a cupcake. She made Grinch punch for us. So it was just, it was really fun. This is just some of our outreach pictures. I really try to get out of the library as much as I can. Unfortunately, that's not a lot. Most of our outreach happens either on Fridays and Saturdays when I'm not scheduled to be in the library or in the evenings after we close. This picture up in the corner, it was, I attended our local parents as teachers group. And these are a couple of the parent educators. And I did some activities with all of the families that came. We have a really good partnership with our, we have a Burnsville Dam and Lake and we have a, they have a couple of campgrounds. So our Army Corps of Engineers Rangers, they contact us and these pictures here are some pictures from some of the programs I've done. This was like a read aloud program and they made raccoon puppets because we read a pocket full of kisses. And this was a camping program. We made s'mores, but it wasn't the traditional s'mores. It was waffle cones and fruit and chocolate chips. And we wrapped them in foil and put them in the campfire to melt the chocolate and the marshmallows through them. We did many marshmallows and each kid got to pick what they wanted in it. So it was fun. And then we read, and I had as many adults, if not more adults, than I had children attend that one. So it was pretty interesting. Our town does a Christmas parade usually every year. So a couple of years ago, I was actually nominated and won one of the citizens of the year awards for our town. And this was our library float and my citizen of the year float. We had a board member that had a little generator. So we were able to light up the float because it was an evening float. So it was really nice. And this is another program we had at the lake. It was a Halloween program. And we got to set up and decorate and do activities. And then they did trick or treating through the camp ground and we got to give out candy. So I always try to participate and dress up and everything. So I channeled my inner witch. And then this is one of the pictures my husband did a couple of years ago on our windows. And one of our younger patrons was excited to see it. So he lifted her up and so she could see it. And then we have volunteers that do outreach as well. This was at one of our outreach events for our small libraries create smart spaces community events that we had a fifth grade student that helped get community input for us. And we'll talk more about that in a little bit. These are just some more of the PBS special events that we've done. And other special events. This is the super wide kids. My husband is actually super wide in this one. And then my now 13 year old is Alpha Pig. He was 11 at the time. And then I have a couple of friends that dressed up as Princess Pee and Wonder Red. But we did PBS kids summer camps. They've got super wide and they've got oh gosh. I just blanked on the program. It's the math program. Were there special agents? Thank you. Odd Squad. My assistant just jogged my memory. Odd Squad. So this is Odd Squad camp. And this was super wide camp. Odd Squad is math. Super wide is phonics. Again if you're interested contact your PBS station and they can help get you. They have the complete curriculum. You don't have to develop anything. It's all right there. It's wonderful. And then we did a Princess Party a couple of years ago. So I dressed up my sons as princes. And they met the princesses at their car and escorted them into the library to try to make it a little more special. And this was one of our Halloween activities. We had a visit from Darth Vader. And then we did a happy birthday Dr. Seuss. And these were our participants. They got to eat birthday cake and make some special crafts. And then just summer reading programs, summer learning. We have a great partnership with the school system. They provide us funding and interventionists. And this is the interventionist a couple of years first several years. And the students that participated. This is just a picture of our library during one of our projects. We had volunteers that came and they did galaxy t-shirts. So they took black t-shirts and twisted them. And then sprayed bleach on them. And then they got to paint them. And they used white paint. It was just tempera paint. And then, no, I'm sorry, not tempera. I think it was acrylic. They used acrylic paints. And then they flipped to make the stars. They just flipped white paint, a little bit of white paint from the thing. If you're small, you take help any way you can to provide positive and interesting programs. This lady is a local crafter who does a little bit of everything. She's come and done wonderful programs for us. Again, this is a WVU extension person. And she comes every year that we can have programming. She comes and does yoga gorilla with the kids. This gentleman is from the cranberry glades. Monongahelia National Forest. And he brings snakes. So this is actually a timber rattlesnake on his pole. He brings a rattlesnake and a copperhead because those are the two venomous snakes that we have in West Virginia. But then he brings a bunch of other snakes that the kids can actually handle and touch. And then this was just some other activities. This was wonderful. We partner with our food bank. And they came and did a program for us. And they brought a cow. And the kids are actually milking the cow. Of course, it's not a real cow. But it's the same. They have got it rigged up to where it's the same motion of them milking a cow. It was one of the favorite activities of the kids that summer. We also do some adult programming. Although most of our programming is child or family-oriented, we are trying to branch out and do some adult programs. We did a 2020 adult reading challenge where each week we added something else to the basket. Unfortunately, it wasn't met with much participation. So we're going to take 2021 off and maybe try to revamp it. And then you always have adults that love the PBS Kids characters. So this is one of our school teachers. And she had to get her picture taken with Clifford. And then this was just one of our patrons who was here when my husband come out in the curious George costume. And she was like, do you care if I take a picture with George? I love George. I'm like, not at all. We've done kitty adoption fairs. So we had a cat rescue in our county. And so she brought some kittens and we did a rescue. And these two actually came home with me that night. This was a wreath class. We had a lady in our community that volunteered to do a wreath making class. We did charge, but it was strictly for the materials because these were not materials that we had on hand. And the lady bought the materials and we just provided the space for it. And then these are some painting programs. Again, we have a professional that comes in and guides these. So there is a charge, but it's only for her because she provides all of the materials and her time to help guide the class. And then we have a history alive program in West Virginia. And it's people that dress up as different historical characters. So we have Benjamin Franklin at the library. We had an evening with Benjamin Franklin a few years ago. And then we tried to do some adult crafting classes. And this was one of our adult programs. They seemed to do okay once or twice, but then they kind of fizzle and lose interest. So we're trying to find the right recipe to try to do adult programs like we've been able to do our children. And then this is just COVID is not going to stop us. We have a question about one of the things you were talking about just before you jump into that. I want to make sure you want to know how did the basket work for adult reading? We had we set up like a checklist. And if you did 25, there was like 40 things on the checklist, 40 different books. It wasn't specific books, but it was read a book that was published the year that you were born. An audio book, a nonfiction book, a biography. Hey, Abis, we have a so it was just and you had to read, I believe it was set up, you had to have 25 on the checklist checked off to get your name in the drawing. And then if you did all 40, you got another ticket. And then out of all of the people that turned them in, we drew the names and we actually only had one person. So it was a really easy draw. But I really think COVID kind of hampered our success in that one, because it was just, I lost track of putting things in it some weeks. And then, you know, we didn't really promote it while we were out while we were shut down that much, because we were close to the public from March, mid March to June, the middle of June. And then we had people, of course, that said, well, you know, when we announced it, that that our winner had won. Well, I didn't even know it was happening. And I'm like, we had it in the newspaper, it was on social media, you know, we had flyers up at the library. I'm not sure, you know, short of taking a skyrider out. And while we're looking at these pictures, because some of this is in your library, right, correct, some of these pictures. And you mentioned you have just two rooms there, but someone wants to know what is, it looks like a pretty big building. What is your capacity for in there? We have 1,982 square feet. So we 36 to 40 is probably busting at the seams. I'm not sure exactly, fire regs, I don't know, because we've never even come close to actually meeting that. But with 36 to 40 people in here, we were, we were not crammed in like sardines, but we were pretty tight. So in order to do the painting nights, I actually move all of my public library, my public access computers, I move them and bring in tables and chairs. And we've gotten really good at utilizing every inch that we have of space, because our building, the front part of our building is an octagon, which makes it very difficult because there is just a lot of empty, useless, taken up space. Yeah, odd shape, yeah. And then our back room, half of our back room has bookshelves in it, because which is one of the things we're trying, we're raising money and funding to try to put shelving on the walls to try to free up the space in the middle of the floor. Sure, yeah. So we can do additional, we have more room for people, because we're almost at capacity with the with the program, with the after school program. We actually have a former, one of our former directors is now the town secretary. And she tells me all the time that I need to, I need to find a grant that will pay for an expansion because I've got grown the building. Yeah. Which is a nice, nice problem to have. It is, but it is frustrating and got to figure out what to do now. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then this is some of our, whoops, sorry. This is some of our COVID stuff. You know, we didn't let COVID stop us. These are some of our summer volunteers. We did kits. These are some of our kits. And this is one of our, some of our families that did the kits they sent in pictures for us. We actually served with a partnership between the Mountaineer Food Bank, Braxton County Schools and local sponsors for our kits. We were able to provide 3,862 food bags, 5,100 meals and nearly 1,600 activity kits to at least 1,500 children in our area from mid-March to the beginning of September. So, and the school system provides funding and typically an interventionist for us for the summer. We didn't get the interventionist because of course we couldn't have anybody here. But we did partner with the WVU extension. They provided seed kits. And this is some of the seed kits that were planted and taken care of so the kids could grow their own vegetables. And then this was this year's pumpkin decorating contest entries. And they're the winners. COVID has really, we've tried to keep active, but COVID has really put a hamper on some of our stuff as it has everybody. We only had to the two entries for the pumpkin contest this year, but we're hoping that this coming year it'll be better. This is just a list of the grants that I've received, not I, the library. We've been really fortunate in our grant writing. We've been really prolific. And my assistant and I actually sat down and I've written since I started in July of 2015, I've written approximately 60 grants. And we've received most of them. We've not received 14. So it's a pretty good ratio. A lot of our programs, a lot of the stuff for our after school program has been provided by grants. And then just a lot of the extra stuff we are able to do is because of grants. We did receive a PLA digital lead grant, which allowed us to get 11 hot spots. And we had approximately 130 checkouts for the year that we had the hotspot grant. And just today we were able to, we secured the funding. And just today we put data back on the 10 hotspots that we had remaining. And we replaced the one and we were able to purchase another one. So we'll have 12 hotspots next week to, for next week to check out to people. I was really fortunate a few, several years ago to be an AmeriCorps VISTA for a year. And that program trained me for my grant writing. We did several grant writing trainings through the VISTA program. So that's how I learned how to write grants was through the VISTA program. And our board has even asked, we have, I have to do a monthly grant report now for our board. Because we've just gotten to where we have so many grants happening at, you know, occurring all at the same time that they want to know, you know, what, what we're supposed to be doing, how much money we've spent, what we've spent it on, and everything. So that's a pretty big deal. I was keeping them updated monthly before that, but they wanted it in writing. So that was no problem for me to do because I use Trello to track my grants. You can, I love Trello as a free, free service. And I just use it for myself, but I can invite other people to share on Trello. But I just use it to help keep track of my stuff as well. So I don't lose track of any of my grants or anything. So this is just a snapshot. Yeah, Trello is a great, you know, just management program that you use. It's free online option to just keep track of what you're doing in projects or multiple projects, especially like this. We have so many things going on, definitely. Yes, yeah. It's wonderful. It actually, it took me about a week to get everything set up because I've got multiple boards and everything and to get everything on each board that needed to be there. But once I got it set up, it's no time to maintain it. And it helps me, you know, I open it first thing in the morning and, you know, I look through it and see if there's anything that needs to be done. And, you know, it's really, it's really changed the way I am able to function because before it was all paper and, you know, different file folders and my memory and everything. And so the Trello has really made a big difference. Someone said you're talking about grants. Someone wants to know, and this might be one, if you have any suggestions for lesser known grants for small libraries? Once they're, people wouldn't normally hear about, you know, hear about ALAPLA, things like that. If you need, if you need to add to your collection, the Libre Foundation and the Pilcro Foundation, I haven't received those in a few years, but those are really great. I'm not sure if they're still giving awards or not, but they do annual awards to help you with those two are just for children or teen, children, juvenile or teen books. Look into your local foundations, your community foundations. Most every county or at least here in West Virginia, almost every other county in West Virginia, but the county I'm in, of course, is covered by some kind of a community foundation. They're good. Reach out if you have corporations in your area, like we have warehouser. We typically, every year we've gotten warehouser from 2016 to 2020, we received grants. 2021, we did not, we were not awarded for this year. They had given out additional help, so they didn't have as much to give for grants this year. But look, look at those places. Look at, you know, like Dix, if you're trying to do some kind of a healthy living, I know Target and Dix do healthy living. And the big thing is don't create a program to try to work for a grant. But if you have an idea for a program that you haven't gotten started, write the grant. The most they can tell you is, no, we're not going to fund your grant. And then you can try somewhere else. Exactly. And you can always put a pin in it and keep that on hold until you get the funding for the program. So really, you know, and some of the, some of the, like Gilder Learman, I don't know if that's history, the Gilder Learman Association or the Gilder Learman Foundation, I think it's a foundation. They do, you can sign up to be an affiliate library. And then they do several times throughout the year. They give little, they give like grants up to, I think it's $500 or $1,000 that you can do history programming with. That's how we were able to bring Ben Franklin and some of the other history alive people to our area was through those grants. Like the ARST, that's the Radiological Society of Technicians for, and we were able to, we applied and received a partnership grant for that for National Radiological Week. So we were able to buy a lot of like health books and puzzles that were, we bought Lego kits that were like hospitals and ambulances and stuff like that. So if you just, if you look, it's hard because there's a lot of grant programs that you can buy and pay to subscribe to. I've not had much luck with those. It's just happened to different webinars and different people talking is really how I've found all of my, you know, and don't, don't knock Google, don't knock doing a Google search for, you know, places that write library grants in West Virginia or if you have a specific program in mind, do the specific program and, you know. And I would say I do grant help libraries with grants here in Nebraska and think outside the box if not just library, but public service or community. You're part of the community and you're a public service and the grants might be called that instead. And then when you get your reading into them, it's like, ah, yes, we do fit their criteria. Now I can do it. So don't limit yourself just to the library. Yeah, exactly. We we've partnered and we've gotten grants for our after school program. And sometimes be creative. Like you said, think outside the box. Sometimes it's not, sometimes you have to think outside the box and like the previous lady that was talking about the grants, think big. You know, I wrote, I wrote my grant for warehouser one year for $14,000. They funded me for $3,200. But you know, it was something. Yeah. You know, I was able to do a portion of what I wanted to do. And that program that they didn't fund is still in the back of my head. And if I can find a way to get it funded, I will. And if you have a program that is big, you can also use multiple grants for one program. Yes. I know people apply for us. And they say, I've already got this much money from here and here from this foundation. But we still need this much to fit into, you know, do the whole thing. And that's okay too. Yeah. Yeah. And, and a lot of small libraries are afraid to write the big grants to ALA to not so much PLA because it is public libraries, but or at least the ones here in West Virginia. So they, you know, my theory is if you've got, if you want a grant and you've got the perfect program for that grant, write it. The most they can do is tell you no. And my philosophy is it's kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall. Eventually, something is going to stick. So throw it out there and eventually something's going to stick. So I've actually written several grants where I was like, I don't even know why I wasted my time. They're never going to pick me. And it ended up that I received the grant. So don't just because you're small or, you know, you don't think you've got a good proposal. Don't just write it off, you know, hang in there. And every grant that you get, most of them don't critique your, don't critique your proposal. If you get the opportunity, like the library's transforming communities, focus on small and rural libraries, we were, we're one of the first round recipients of that. They actually critique critiques and offered assistance on your grant proposal. So I really, you know, take advantage of that because it will help you grow as a grant writer. Okay. Oh, sorry. Nope. No. Okay. Let's go ahead with you. Okay. This is some of the equipment and some of the stuff that we did for our small libraries, Create Smart Spaces. It was OCLC Web Junction and ARSEL. It was supposed to be an 18-month process, but it turned more into like two years because of COVID. But thankfully, we were able to get most of our, most, if not all of our community engagement part done. This was our 11-year-old, fifth grade person. He was, he's my son. The school actually allowed him to sit at the table for the end of the year award ceremony to ask people to write down what they wanted for the community on our leaves to add to our wish tree. So he spent a whole day sitting and asking adults, you know, hey, please write down what you wish, what you would want to see in our community, not related to the library, but just our community as a whole. And he filled up our wish tree because when you're, when you're a one or a two-person staff, you don't have, you can't dedicate a whole day without volunteer help. So we were really fortunate that the school allowed him to sit, which I mean, if it had been an instructional day, he wouldn't have been able to do that. But because it was the end of the year, they weren't really learning anything. They were watching movies. So he gave up his time watching movies to sit and help us. This is just some of the equipment we were able to purchase. We really can't wait to be able to start this, start programs with this equipment. And we do have, we have started one, one of our programs has started and it's our children's cooking video series. My children are two of my children, my 11-year-old Josh and my 13-year-old Aaron and I do a monthly cooking video. Do we have enough time to show a couple minutes of that, Kristen? Yeah, I want to show it. Yeah, hold on just a sec here. I've got it over here on my screen. There we go. We've got Aaron and Josh here with us tonight again. We're going to be making quesadillas, parfait yogurt parfaites and peanut butter. So for our quesadillas, you need a quesadilla. You can use flour tortillas or corn tortillas. We personally like the flour. You can use them in any size. Soft shell, taco shells, tortillas, fajitas size. Then we have shredded cheese and then we have some pre-cooked fajita meat. It's chicken or beef. Aaron's going to be making our quesadillas tonight. Then we have for our yogurt parfaits. All right, I'm going to pause that right now so we don't run too long. Yeah, this is great. I didn't realize when you showed me this. This is a 20-minute video that you guys have here, almost 19 minutes. We actually, the first one was 30 minutes and I actually thought since we stepped through the ingredients and everything on this one, I thought it was going to be longer. But I didn't realize it was quite so choppy until I just sat and watched it. Oh, that's probably just coming through here. It's not actually choppy on my side. It's just, I think it's just coming through on the, through the GoToWebinar software. But no, it's nice and smooth. So we'll have this one for everybody. So if anyone wants to watch this, you can watch it without the bandwidth issues. But my boys really enjoyed doing that. The first month we did tacos in a bag and guacamole. And my son, my 11-year-old loves to learn new things and loves to learn how to cook. So he's all about it. My 13-year-old is a typical 13-year-old boy. I'll do it, but only because mom tells me I have to. That sounded like that. Yeah. So, but we do have a gentleman in the community. This is music, music and sound production. And he does podcasting. So he's going to mentor anybody that wants to start podcasting. We've got a cricket and a heat press. So people can come in and make t-shirts or decals. We did get a green screen with a video camera and a 35-millimeter DSLR digital camera. We're going to be doing some programming once the weather breaks with these things outside since we, right now under COVID restrictions, we have been increased to six people allowed in the building before we were at three. And one of those had to be, we had to have staff in here. So it really took it to two or one if both of us were here for something. But we're really, we utilize this for a lot with our after-school program or family movie nights. And I did want to mention that we have a wonderful group of volunteers that helps us with feeding the kids at the after-school program. We had parents that brought in snacks. And then we had a grandma and a great grandma that actually made food food. They made pepperoni rolls and they made spaghetti. They made lasagna, I think, one night. They made, so they actually, they made ham salad and tuna salad sandwiches. They really kept us fed. And then we had a community volunteer that brought in pepperoni pizza for everybody one night. So it was really nice to see that the community really cares and supports us. This is just a front picture of our building. It went through a facelift back in 2014. But the front part of the building has been here since 1976. So and this is all of my contact information. If you have any questions or would like some help finding a grant or learning how to do it, reach out. I'm always welcome to help or any programming questions. And we do try to keep up with our, Facebook is always the best one, but we do try to keep up with our Instagram and our Twitter. And we just started our YouTube channel. So currently there's only cooking videos on there, but we are hoping to start putting more videos on there. Well, that's a good place to start cooking videos and cooking shows are very popular. Absolutely. All right. Thank you so much, Beth. This is an awesome ideas and so many things that you've done there at the library, even with COVID. And you know, as we saw when you started off, you know, you're open actually while you're there. So if some people coming in do need to still wear the mask. So yes, yes, you're doing that. Yeah. Great ideas. I think lots of good comments and great, great creativity and ideas and so many things that you're doing. It's just amazing. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much. And there's all best contact info. Reach out to her just like all the other ones. The slides will be available with the recording. So you have all the information there again too for if you want to reach out to her with more questions.