Earlier this week, we broke ground on our new library! This moment has been years in the making! A big thank you to everyone who’s volunteered, donated, helped us spread the word, and more to help make this dream a reality. Also, a big thank you to everyone who turned out to support us on what ended up being a beautiful day, perfect for a groundbreaking ceremony.
Friends of the Berryville Library gather around as Mayor Tim McKinney signs a proclamation celebrating Friends of Libraries Week.
This week is National Friends of Libraries Week, which means it is the perfect time to celebrate and tout our very own Friends of the Berryville Library group!
In early November, our Berryville Library Building Project launched a fundraising challenge: raise $300,000 before the end of the year. If we reach this goal, we have an anonymous donor who will donate $100,000 to the building fund. The combined $400,000 from this challenge would get us to $3.2 million already raised since April 2021 and allow us to set a date to break ground in 2024. The plan is to then raise the remaining $300,000 needed during the building process.
In November, we raised an amazing $150,000, 50% of our goal, through a mailing, radio spots on our local KTHS and KUAF stations, and a telethon on KTHS.
We cannot thank the people who donated and helped us with the telethon and mailing and other fundraising efforts enough. However, we still need to raise that other 50% to reach our goal!
If you’ve been following our blog for any length of time or are a resident of Carroll County, you likely know about our quest to raise money for a new library building. Whenever people ask us what they can do to help, donating to our Berryville Library Building Project fund probably comes to mind first. And, of course, that’s a fantastic way to help. But if you really want to help, we ask that you also join the Friends of the Berryville Library.
This week is National Friends of Libraries Week. Friends groups are indispensable allies for libraries everywhere, but our Friends group is particularly important to us because it has been one of the driving forces in helping us reach our goal of building a new library.
As we’ve done the past two summers, we hosted a fundraising/reading summer challenge--every hour read equals a dollar for the building fund. Except this year was our boldest challenge yet–25,000 hours for $25,000 in just 8 weeks. How’d we do?!
Summer is soon upon us, which means it’s time for our annual summer program, as well for some new recent additions to our summer traditions at the library–a summer reading challenge and a storywalk!
But the work is not over! We still need to raise another $1,500,000 to build the 10,000-square-foot building that would allow us the space we need for our collection and programming needs.
Last year, we were able to raise $20,000 for the campaign in honor of Library Giving Day, and we’re hoping to do the same thing–or even better–for Library Giving Day (April 6) this year. In fact, we’re stretching it out to be a Library Giving Week, April 3 to 10. 🙂