The $15,000 Family Place grant will help buy furniture and toys to create a center in the children’s room at Central Library where parents can play with their children. The grant will also support a five-week workshop for parents of young children where they can speak with specialists in child development.
The other three programs were developed by city librarians who attended a state library leadership conference last fall. Each secured a $5,000 grant for programs aimed at making services relevant for local residents. With city resources especially tight, the grants allow for the creation of programs that would otherwise not be funded, library officials said.
“We were given an opportunity to apply for grants for each of our branches,” said Lyda Truick, a children’s librarian at Central Library. “We had to come up with a program that would be applicable to our individual branches. Every branch has different things they want to focus on.”
Truick’s program, “Extreme Make-Over: Tween Edition,” will be targeted to local fourth- through eighth-graders who rarely visit the city’s libraries. Truick will survey local students and then use the grant money to create a program aimed at bringing them into libraries more often.
“The only time we really see fourth- through eighth-graders is when they’re here to use the computers, or they are here because their parents are at work,” she said. “We wanted to find a program that would cater specifically to this age group.”
Two branches in south Glendale will create outreach programs for neighborhoods that host a large number of non-English speakers.
