 Okay, next up on Big Talk from Small Libraries 2017 is Susan Rice and she is from the, I forgot it, Natarita Community Library? It is. I pronounced it right. Awesome. Okay. And we invited her on. She is Best Small Library in America winner. The library is from 2011. That may sound a little odd to some of you considering we are in 2017 right now. Currently here at Big Talk from Small Libraries we have tried to invite on to the conference the current year's winner of the Best Small Library in America Award, which comes from library journal co-sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. However, this year they have 2017, the award has been put on hiatus. They are reevaluating the criteria for it. So there is no winner for 2017 at the moment, but we do have about 10 years worth of previous winners. So our first Big Talk from Small Libraries was in 2012. So I went to 2011 right the year before because we weren't able to have her on because it was the year before and asked Susan to come on and talk to us about their library who was that winner. So she's going to tell us about what's going on at her library and this award, other things they've been doing and share everything that's going on in Colorado. Are you guys, I'll ask you first because we are here, I have a blowing snow going sideways outside. Do you guys have any of this weather happening there today? Well, yesterday I was in Telluride which is 60 miles away and it was snowing like crazy all the way down the mountain until I got 30 miles from home. So yes, we do have snow, but not much here. We're considered the banana belt of Colorado in Natterita. Oh really? Okay, I had never heard of that banana. Nice. All right, well I just hand over to you to take it away and tell us about your library and what you've been doing. Great. Krista, thank you very much and thanks for the introduction. We are, this is welcome to Natterita and we don't consider ourselves rural. We actually consider ourselves frontier because we are in a boom and bust energy extraction economy, especially uranium. It's bust, bust, bust, bust. We have nothing going on right now. We are the largest superfund site in the U.S. and that is only about 20 miles away from us. And at the time of our awards, we had a higher population than what we do now, although even though that's happening, that our population is declining, we have more library cards issued than we have residents. Four times more library cards issued than what we have, what we have people in our community. Our community is small, but it is Natterita and Nucleus five miles away and Paradox is 30 miles away, Norwood is 30 miles away. So we have a lot of libraries within our area. But economically, we are deprived, but our community is rich in community and that means that if someone has health issues, we're right there for them. If anyone has a broken down car or they need something, anything, our community is right there. Statistically, we, per capita, our income is over half the state average and that means that we make less than half of the average Coloradian. So we're not, and Uranium of course is, we have coal now, but Uranium was one of our biggest funders in our community, not anymore. And coal and also our power plant are going away by 2022. We have a lot going on in our community right now. So the first, the very first award that we won was from the Colorado Association of Libraries. And we have a straw bale building. It was built in 2009. We received this award in 2010. And it was for the outside of the building, we have a very forward thinking director. And so we have straw bale and geothermal. This was for the catalyst for our future recognition as a library worthy of awards. And this has been given to us for the amazing building that we have. Straw bale is the second largest straw bale library in America. Actually is the second straw bale library in America. There are only two. I think the other one is in Washington and it's 500 square feet. We're 4,500 square feet. But we used to be in 500 square feet. The building will last longer than any of us in town. So the second one is... Sorry, that's pretty amazing. I didn't realize that about your library. That is so cool. Yeah, it is, it is. The second award that we won was the Best Small Library in American 2011. That was given to us, and I don't know how they're going to revamp this grant. But it's what goes on inside the library, what's inside of our building. So our programming, our books, when we started in... I started 11 years ago at this library, and our collection was about 1976. And since then, we have brought it up to where we need to be in today in 2017. We try to cater to the needs of our community, which was one of the reasons why we won this award and with three part-time employees now, or two part-time employees now and one full-time. But at the time of this award, we did have three part-time employees, and then myself is full-time. We had four children's program weekly, 18 total monthly. So we did things like after-school homework program. We had coloring contests, very simplistic things, computer classes for adults. And at this award, we were able to go to Philadelphia and receive this award at the Public Library Association Conference, which happens every two years. The third award was for museum and library service, and that also was what went inside our library. Five of these are given each year to a museum and to museums and to libraries. We went to Washington, D.C., to the White House to receive this reward, and I encourage all of you to apply for this award. We had a grant writer at the time, but I looked at it, and I could have even written this. You know, if you know and are passionate about your library, you could really sell this library for the national medal, which is a budget line on our national budget. Also for this award, we had a community member that was honored. You can see Jamie, the littlest one in there. She was a person, a volunteer in our library, who came to us in order to pay for her food stamps. Well, she did such a good job when there was an opening, I was able to hire her. And this award is all about changing lives, and that's what we do in the Natarita Community Library. It's all about changing lives. Our director is, if you're facing your computer to your left, and this was given to us at the White House, which is one of the coolest things that we've ever been able to do. And then what I want to really talk about is after the awards, and especially after the Best Small Library in America, after the award, this is what happened to us. We were able to collaborate with many more organizations in our areas, and this is up to 100 miles away than before. And our relationship with the school district was always good. This is a picture of our kids at the school. This one is we're doing on a bear hunt. And then grantors, and what happened with our grantors. So first we're going to talk about collaboration. Keep calm and collaborate with whomever, whenever, just make it work, and that's what we did. So as far as 60 miles away, we wanted to collaborate. People started wanting to collaborate with us, actually 100 miles, but people wanted to collaborate with us to bring in different programings to our community. Anyone who calls, we try to collaborate with. If we had somebody call the other day from Grand Junction, which is 120 miles away, and they wanted to know if I could get together a few people in the library for them to talk about land management. And that's exactly what I did. I called a few people, called a few ranchers, got them into the library. So that's a collaboration. Collaboration doesn't happen overnight. It happens through awareness. And the awards we won were definitely the awareness that we needed throughout the state of Colorado. And it happens also through an open mind. Can we make this work with only two part-time and one full-time employees? And we say, yes, we can. One of the organizations that we began after the awards to collaborate with is called embossies, which is a support organization designed for local school districts to bring in physical therapy, OT speech therapy. And through them, we became a support group because we brought in through them the pyramid model, which is in our schools, zero through five years old. It's in our schools. And so we became, a library was invited to workshops to learn the program and implemented in our early literacy programs. The most identifiable difference is the consistency in our language with the preschool. And it has been a challenge because what promoting social and emotional well-being and infants and young children, part of their pyramid is positive language. So instead of saying no running in the library, we changed it to use your walking feed in the library. And it has reported to us even at the clerks in the grocery store are using the positive language and changing their negative language to positive. This is all you have to do is Google this pyramid model. And it's really a fabulous model to use in kids. The other thing we have in our library is the Pinhead Institute, and that's up in Telluride. And they bring in STEM, STEAM, and I know there's another Ackerman. I can't think of it at this time, but they came to us and said, what can we do for you? And I said, we need STEM. That's something that in the very beginning, after the awards, we didn't have a lot of grants that were applicable to STEM or STEAM. So we began the science projects through them. So with this, we've also been able to bring in the first LEGO lead. And let me tell you how this happens. We got robotics into our library. But what happened is a teacher of principal came to me from the elementary and middle school about four years ago and said, we really want to bring this. There's a grant in the Western slope. We really want to bring this into the schools. I can't get anyone interested in it. The teachers are just totally slammed. So what can you do to help us? Well, I started talking about it the fourth year. The third year, I started talking about it with the Pinhead Institute. I couldn't get it started. The third year, we talked again about it. I did get it started, but we did not go to competition. And the fourth year, this year, we actually had two. We have a, in paradox, which is 30 miles away, it's part of our district, but it's a charter school. And we got a team, we got a team together from the charter school and a team together from our elementary and middle school. We did middle school kids, and we got those together. And both of us, both teams the first time, had won an award. It just takes patience, and I am not a patient person. I want things to happen in this library immediately. But boy, I have really been able to overcome that and be patient with what comes up for us. We also collaborate with the Telluride Institution, which is an outdoor program, a nature program. We go, we take, and this is not a library program. It is, this particular program is a school program. So the Telluride Institute comes into the school. Well, they asked me for a couple of years, and that would be me on the right, because I am so excited I made it last year. I made it snowshoeing up to the top of this mountain, and we stay overnight. So what I talked about with my director is, may I use some of my time? And we are a small library, remember that. I, I do have, I make the time to do this. May we go in and support and help and be outreach and have the kids notice us by me going and doing some of the programs with them. Sometimes I go on, when the kids go visit the museum, I go with them. If I can, if I can be on a school trip or with the Telluride Institute, this particular program, I not only do the winter program, but I do the summer program down by the river too. And this is all educational, but I'm there in order to talk about books. Or in the summer program, I bring a couple of books. At this program, what I do is, who better than a librarian to tell ghost stories? And that's what I do, and, and I'm telling you, these kids are just hysterical. They can't believe that a librarian would talk about the monsters that might be out in the dark. And what this does for our library is it gives us an opportunity to be in a relationship with our kids. The other thing is we house the Early Childhood Council. And that's a regional council, and we house that here. And we also do literacy for little ones. And so we have a place at this round table. And this is how we keep in touch with the organizations throughout the entire region. It is, it is really amazing what we can do with how little we have. So remember, it's just, it's really about making things work in order to be aware, in order to be recognized in your community, community and regional areas. The other thing that we do is we do collaborate with our local libraries. And we, as in this area, this is the most amazing thing. We have 30 miles away, you can see on the map to your right, Norwood is 30 miles away. Nucleus is five miles away from Natarita. And Paradox, which is off the chart, but 30 miles away from Natarita also. We have our district libraries. That is, we have a library in our high school, in our grade school. We have one in Paradox. Our district has the public library in Paradox and help supports the children's library at their school also. And we collaborate with all of them, with all of them. Norwood and Natarita collaborate for the summer reading program. We do an hour and a half for zero to second grade in our library for our summer reading program. Because we believe that it's all about experience. It's what they can experience. So I'll give you an example. We have yoga mats and somebody gave them to us because they weren't using them anymore. Or I think one was ripped in the corner. And we buy at the dollar store, and remember the dollar store is your friend. We put shaving cream on the mat and they ice skate in the summertime. That's all about experience. And then at the end of the mat, we have a bucket, a wash bucket for them to wash their feet off. And towels. We also, the school allows us to do a lot of, so we, excuse me, we meet in, we have a community room now. And regional meetings from various organizations from 100 miles away. Ask for us to use our community room. Like if the county commissioners need to have a meeting about what's going on in the county, we house them. Anything we can, we house. The school district allows us to do outreach. We do a Spanish reading program. We do a Spanish singing program where we have, through grants, because none of us speak Spanish here, we found somebody in the community who can speak Spanish. And she goes into, she touches 64 to 75 kids weekly, preschool through second grade, and teaching them Spanish. We take our outreach, our early literacy program, into other, to the school district in order for, you know, to do a 40-minute early literacy program for them. And since we've been in the new building, I've known that robotics and programming were part of the world our children are living in. So through the Penn Head Institute, through First Legal League, we were able to write a grant, which I'll talk about more about in the grantors, for robotics in our library. We're very fortunate with that. So that's some of the things that happen after the grants. And this is what we, our criteria for collaborating. How many staff hours, what will it cost, and does it fit into our mission? Educate, enlighten, enrich, and entertain. As you see in this picture, that was, I, we knew in the library that a bunch of, oh, a car club was coming into our community. So what we did is we asked a bunch of kids to come into our library. And the, and this was just on the spur of the moment. We told the kids, get off the community, get off the communities, the computers, and come outside. And our kids were talking to all of the owners of these cars and asking them about it. So when there's an opportunity to enlighten, entertain, and wrench, and educate these kids, we'll do it in any way that we can. Because again, it's all about experience, what they can experience. These kids don't have the opportunity to talk to people with cars like this unless we're the, but we are the catalysts that help them do this. And even if it's on the spur of the moment. I talked about our school district and our outreach. And what I really wanted to impress upon this is that we have a solid relationship with them. Even with our robotics, the first Lego league, our school, because we were across the street from it, allowed us to take kids out of school for two and a half hours a week and start the first Lego league. The charter school had that outreach actually in their school. So I just wanted to make that clear that our relationship is solid with them. And I take out twice a year, I take the superintendent of our school out to lunch, so we can connect and figure out what we as a library can do for them. And then we have our grants. Any grant in your area, write it. Statewide grants, write it. State library grants, write it. National grants, write as many as you can. Even to get books into your library, we wrote and we've been turned down for a lot of grants too because we are not big enough. So I need to make a case, since we don't have a grant writer anymore. I need to make a case for grants in our library. I need to make that case for them. So even though we have small numbers, that we are still worthy of funding. And that is, there's many ways that I can do that. Like for instance, I just found out through a community grant or I went yesterday to a meeting. And I go to meetings as far as 100 miles away because usually it's a community library that is represented at these meetings that are regional meetings. Not a lot of other organizations do this. And again, it's because our director finds it advantageous to our library for me to be a presence with the kids, with grantors, with whomever I can be in our area. In fact, somebody from 100 miles away came into our library the other day and said, I heard about you through, I can't remember the name of the organization, and they just wanted to come in and make themselves known that they're around. And if we, oh, I know what it was, it was an organization that is trying to figure out how many kids in our area are homeless. And I found out through a meeting that I went to yesterday that our high school graduation class of last year, 30% of those kids were homeless at graduation. So that is huge for grantors that we have those statistics. Or another statistic is from 2010 to 2015, Natarita's population has decreased by 25%. That's huge in a grant. Another thing is because that doesn't make our children any less, it just makes our numbers a little less. So it's important for grantors to know what your situation is, what your statistics are, and your situation in your library. So, let's see, you know, and because we have, we're very fortunate in this area, 60 miles away is Telluride, which is a ski resort. So there are very, there's two very large organizations that fund children's programming in our area. And one is the Telluride Foundation, and the other one is the Just for Kids Foundation. And those grantors are gracious enough to grant money in our area. We're a bedroom community to Telluride, which means we are a service-based economy to Telluride. So they see that, and they know that we need funding in order to keep up our organizations. We also get grants from Colorado funders all over the state. So we find what is appropriate and appropriate for our library and go after those grants. Excuse me. The most incredible thing that happened to us was actually in 2016, there was an organization in the Four Corners area, Four Corners, meaning where the four states meet. And we're very close to that. We're about, oh, probably 95 to 100 miles away from the Four Corners area. And this grantor found out about us through our awards and asked us if we would like to write a grant and what is needed in our community or in our library. Well, what I went after is robotics, because it is robotics that is the life of these kids beyond high school. And we allow gaming in our library because of that, because that is their life. So through that, we were able to bring in, we were able to ask for $7,500 in robotics. At the end of the year, they called us and said, we have another $2,500. Would you like it? Well, are we going to say no? But what that gave, of course not. Again, in our library, we say yes, we can because we are so small. So what that gave us is now we're able to buy plastic containers to put some of these in robotics. So teachers can take them out and use them in their classroom. And I'm also going in to do a workshop or program in the preschool with coding with some of these robots that are very basic. You know, you push forward, I don't know if you've ever seen them, they're little bumblebees and you can push the forward to, side to, and these are educational too because they're on a grid. And you can say go to the red dot and the kids can program it by counting and go to the red dot. And then it can get more complicated after that. So the biggest thing about grantors and what happened to us is the recognition from the awards we received, especially the best small library in America, because it's given a statewide recognition. And this has made us shine as an organization worthy to give grants to. You know, that is one of the things that I really impress upon everyone is go after whatever grants you can. Now, when we had a grant writer it was a lot easier. But as you all know, through the lack of funding for libraries, not actually funding but I mean the tax base, we're a district, so we're a special district in our county and we are tax based. And we have, again, our forward thinking director, 10% of our budget actually comes from the tax base over in Montrose County, which is our county seat, and that's 100 miles away from us. So, you know, we were very fortunate to have such a great director, Paul Paladino. And I'm going to talk a little bit in conclusion of this is this is what we do. We follow our dreams and that was put up there by my daughter, the dog hot dog. I mean, the taco because she thought it was funny and I should be more funny in my presentation. But to me, this is really serious stuff, you know, this library is and what we do in this library and the changing of lives. And, you know, I can tell you we make this happen. About eight years ago, we had a kid come into the library that was hungry and we didn't know about it because he didn't tell us. He would go back into our community room and steal food. Well, I found him stealing it and he was so embarrassed and I said, no, no, don't ever be embarrassed about that. Just let me know and I'll have something ready for you. That's who we are in this library. Now, we follow our dreams for the building and for our, you know, we follow our dreams in what the community wants. People are connecting together in our library and that's what we always wanted. We wanted this to be a community center. We wanted this to be people coming in and talking to each other. I mean, we've, and really only, we've, I've been in this job for 11 years. In 2009, I said we moved into this larger building. Our, we've only had, well, actually two times people have shished me in our library and only once did somebody say, this is too loud of a library for me. And then we direct them into our study room for them to work. But we are a loud library because we are the community center in our community in Naderita. That's what we wanted. We want people to connect. We want to be in relationship with our patrons and that's exactly what we're doing. And especially now with our population depleted by 25%, we continue to bring programming into this library. Our future plans, we've reinstated, we did a tea party years ago and this year we just reinstated it and so we have a tea party for girls and a superhero which is happening today with our boys. And we have about 35 people, parents and children that come to these, 35 to 40 people. That's huge in a community of 416 people. We do a family night and you might think that these things cost a lot of money. They don't. For the tea party, if we just have cookies and lemonade and games for those kids, a craft for them, that's all we do. But these little girls dress up and that gives more people, we had that last weekend, more people came into our library who we haven't seen before. And these are families that have a lot of resources but we still want them into our library. We do a family night. We do a craft with families that they can do together. And of course during that night we always promote reading. But during that we also, food brings people into our library. Our motto is feed them and they will come. Well, we've had up to 75 people at our family night with families actually doing a craft together. It's been so much fun and we always promote reading. We still do computer tutoring and classes. Our tutoring, if somebody needs, like right now we have one of our employees is tutoring for a half an hour a week. A woman who had a stroke and can't hold her yarn very well and she wants to learn how to crochet. Yes, we can. We helped her out. Our state of Colorado has, it's called One Book for Colorado and our governor gives out all four-year-olds books. So what we did is in order to encourage families to join in, we give out these books at a story concert. Now that story concert doesn't cost us anything but a few cookies and lemonade. That's another thing. We just do that. And we have had, we just do hot dogs and hamburgers and we bought a grill years ago after the Best Mall Library in America. And so we feed people too. That's a pickle, chips and a hot dog and we're good. And we do a concert, a story concert and we ask officials and teachers to read when we give out our four-year-old books. We have Wacky Wednesdays, a two o'clock release. So we have snacks for those kids at two o'clock and they come in and make stuff or play with robots. Or we have an old-time erector set. We set up blocks for the little ones. Kiva Maples, look it up if you don't know what they are. They're pretty inexpensive, but they encourage engineering skills, which is one of the 21st century skills that grantors like to see. And we do some steam and stem during that time also. We have a maker space. All we did with our maker space was put up a sign on a table in front of our circulation desk and we put adult coloring out there, kids coloring pages. Strain beads, plastic for the little ones and beads for the older kids, for teens, adults even participate. Remember, Pinterest is your friend and of course every librarian knows that. And sometimes we put out our extra preschool crafts on the table to encourage moms to help children put them together if they hadn't been to our early literacy program. And that gives us a commercial to be able to promote that. We got a grant for a 3D printer. And now we need a grant for a, we want the community to be involved in the 3D printer. So I'm looking for a grant for the camera that you can take a picture and it'll do the dimensions of something. A community member came to us, you know, one of our retired community members came to us and said, I need this little latch that's on my door. And I said, we have just the thing for you, a 3D printer. But now of course we need the camera that will take the dimensions of the parts needed for cars or household parts. We have the printer and filament from a grant and this summer we'll begin programs for children. We also do a fundraiser. This is simplistic. This is really simple. It doesn't sound like it is, but it really is. We do a murder mystery dinner theater. In order for us to give back to the community, we grant a grant from our library too. So the community has been involved in this for 11 years and it's just fun for adults. Some people bring their children, which I'm not happy about because I can get pretty crazy during that time acting as somebody else. But we use Susan Haley Productions, which is, she only charges $25 a night. And most of it, it's a basic script and then it's improv. So we do a dinner for that for our community also. And we have our summer reading programs, which is really, you know, we do as much as we can with these kids for as long as we can. Also, I try and do a middle school fun night out every two months. And that I just do things like minute to win or we bought a black light a couple of years ago. And so we do things with our black light, glow in the dark paint, making masks or pictures that will glow in the dark. Very simple things, stacking cups, we do that. Very simple things that don't cost a lot of money because obviously we don't have a lot of money. So thank you. Am I ready for questions and answer period? Yes, yes. Hello, Susan. Did I go 50 minutes or am I talking too fast? No, you did great. It's 11.45. You got plenty of time for some questions, which we do have. Great. It sounds like you got a lot of things you're doing there, which is very similar to other libraries, of course. Oh, yeah. I do like the fact that getting the awards has had an effect on you getting more awards and grants and being able to, like you said, that makes you more attractive to other places wanting to help you out with things that that does actually have an effect, an elasting effect. And I'm hoping, and I said in the beginning that there is no award this year, I do hope that they do have the award come back so it can help other small libraries continue what they're doing. Let's see, we have a whole bunch of questions that came in. Let's start. First up, we have about five minutes here. We can go through a bunch of these. Do you charge for your community room? We only charge for that. Are you ready? Yep, go ahead. Sorry. Okay. Not for organizations that are nonprofits or government. We do ask for a donation for, like, birthday parties, or if somebody wants to do, I'm going to pick a name, the essential oils for doTERRA. We have somebody that comes in and does a program on essential oils. But that's also a sale. So we just ask for donations. We don't have a set fee. The reason why we did that is because in our area, you know, some parents can afford $5 when they have their birthday party at our library, and some can afford $20. And we didn't want to make it a set fee. It's what you can give. That's great. That makes it much more welcoming. And it sounds like that is one of your main criteria is to be welcoming to anyone and everyone who needs to use the library for whatever they need it for. That is exactly right. Now, do you have a separate children's room? I mean, inside the library, is there any other separate rooms that can be used? Or is it just the library in one big space and then the community room? We have two study rooms. So one of the study rooms can also be used for a small group of people. And then we have the community room. And then our director wanted another room where people could just go in there and use their computers. Well, nobody was using it. So what we did was we used it as storage now. There's never enough storage in a library. Yes. Okay. Talking about doing things outreach and whatnot. Do you have a board or other board members that could do some of the meetings and outreach programs? Or are you the only public face of the library? And is there other people that someone else asked, do you have volunteers? We have very few volunteers. We have two. We also take people when somebody needs to do community service through the courts. We also encourage the courts to send them our way. Because that helps us, definitely. So our board is, we don't have a board specifically for our library. It's the Montrose Regional Library District Board. So they come over and have a meeting once a year with us. So we can tell them what we've been doing. Your library doesn't have its own. I know you're part of the group there, yeah. We are part of a main library. So we're a branch, which is advantageous to us. I totally understand that. So they only come here once a year. But what we, and I've tried for 11 years to start a Friends of the Library, and that has been really difficult. So I think that's what I'll do during my retirement. I'll try and start that when I no longer am an employee. But yes, we do have, we've got two people that are one that works almost 30 hours a week. And we are so grateful for that. Because that gives us another person to put away books and whatever else needs to be done in our library. Do you want to answer that question? I think so. I hope so. Let's see. Your population change, that's an interesting question. So once it was a population before the awards, and what is it now? Has there been a big change in any of that? Who's actually local in town? Right, right. So yes, from 2015, we're down by 25%. So why this is happening is because there are no jobs in our area and young families are moving away. And we have a lot to think about. We have a lot to think about in this community. Our largest employer, which is the coal mine and our power plant, that's in existence after 2022. So we have to look and be active in our community to see if we can bring other things into our area, some other industries. You know, again, we're a boom and bust. It's bust, bust, bust. And that's very hard on our organizations here. Through the Telluride Foundation, we have been able to bring to our community some insight into what we can do to bring industries into our area. And then also, we also have an organization in town that West End Economic Development, and they just brought in and bought through the state and grants a building. So now, and it's across the street from us, which is really convenient, where this year we're going to do some heritage crafting. And so we're going to be able to rent that space for $25, which isn't a lot, but it does come out of our budget in order to teach people how to make bread. So we have a whole kitchen in order to do that across the street from us. And then also soap making with lye. So it gives us, and we'll do that in our library, but it gives us another place to go to in order to help families or to bring programming into our community. We also have a garden. We have a garden, and that didn't take much. We just dug a hole and dug a couple of holes in our landscaping and started some tomatoes. And people in our neighborhood, which is the entire community, because there's probably eight streets in our entire town, and most of them are still dirt streets. So it's similar to that. So you all know what rural and frontier is. So we just planted some peppers, some tomatoes, and people come and pick them as they need them. Okay, I think I'll just do one last question. We are running a little long here, and we need to get into our lunchtime lightning rounds. So we didn't get your question asked. We have a lot coming in, so we do have to pick and choose here. But Susan, you'll be able to reach out to her at the library without anything else you want to know about. One last thing, good question. What resources do you use to find about these grants that you applied for? How did you find out they existed? They were out there for you. Well, again, we were very fortunate to have a grant writer at the time that found out about the grants that we had to build the building. So it is online. I do a lot of searching for libraries online. And don't forget about LSTA, too. They have a lot of grants that come out for libraries, sometimes larger than us, sometimes small. And then we're very fortunate to have grantors within our area, too. So, you know, our state library sends out grant opportunities to all of our libraries around the state. And we've gotten books, we've gotten, again, the robotics, which is huge for us is like crayons, pencils. And I buy large amounts of that, so they last. In fact, the last time we had to buy supplies, and we do small supplies, but the last time we did supplies, I had a grant for supplies. And five years ago, we're just starting to go through all those crayons and pencils, and we buy glue all the time and paper. There's lots of things out there. Just keep your eyes open and look for them. Look for other presentations that have been done about this, about grants. There's lots of webinars and things out there. I know we've done a few things through here at the library. And maker spaces are huge. Yes. There's a lot of money out there right now for maker spaces. Yeah. All right. I think we'll wrap it up here so we can get into. Thank you so much. Isn't that great? I'm glad you were able to share with us what's been going on at your library there since, you know, the Besma Library and America Award. And you guys are growing strong. That's awesome. Yeah. Thank you very much for allowing me to do this. It was an honor. Yeah, you're welcome. All right. Thank you.