Sometimes, the best ideas are born in the midst of a crisis.
And perhaps that’s something that can be said about the transformation public libraries in Middlesex County have experienced over the last five years. During that time, they have gone from being, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary, “a building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for use or borrowing by the public or the members of an institution” to what they are today: Resource centres where community members can find assistance to solve a great variety of problems they may be facing in their lives.
In fact, county staff don’t call them simply libraries anymore; instead, they refer to them as “comprehensive community hubs.”
And the Strathroy Public Library was the first of its kind.
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“There’s no one definition of what a community hub is,” Said Lindsay Brock, CEO of the Middlesex County Library system and who has overseen the community hubs project.
“But for us, it’s that one stop place where people can access information, resources, help, government services . . . things that go beyond the traditional library mandate and extend into community and social services.”
The comprehensive community hubs project began in early 2011 in response to the closing of the Government Access Information Network (GAIN) Centre in Strathroy.
This organization, which operated for over a decade at the Kenwick Mall on Front Street, offered similar services to what Middlesex County community hubs do now: employment counselling, meeting space for social services, and public computers for job search and e-government services, among others.
While open, the GAIN Centre, which was run by the library board, assisted hundreds of people every month.
That’s why when in 2011 the provincial government announced it was cutting funding to Quad County, the organization that administered the provincial employment services at the GAIN Centre and allowed other partners to offer their services at low cost due to the sharing space available, the county decided to find solutions to keep those key resources available in the community.
“There was the fear that those services, which were based mainly in London where their headquarters were, were going to leave the county and we would lose that connection,” Brock said. “But because the library already had that connection . . . we saw the opportunity to transition those services to the library.
“But we needed more space to do that.”
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Losing the services offered by the GAIN Centre was seeing as a big blow to the municipality by many members of the community.
Proof of that was the decision of the Strathroy-Caradoc council at its March 7, 2011, meeting to invest more than $400,000 in the renovation of the public library to help with the transition of services from the GAIN Centre to the facility at 34 Frank St.
“We didn’t want any of these services to entrench back to urban centres like London; we wanted to make sure that we can offer all these services in our own municipality where people are comfortable, and that’s one of the biggest reasons why we did it,” said Strathroy-Caradoc Mayor Joanne Vanderheyden about the investment.
The library board then used some of the provincial funding it still had available and paid the more than $400,000 to complete the library’s renovation.
The project included the expansion of the building itself to create new offices that could be used for delivering social services, the addition of an enhanced reception desk, and a waiting area for clients and patrons.
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The renovated library re-opened in May of 2012 and since then, said Brock, the new community hub concept has flourished and avoided the creation of a vacuum in social services that would have negatively impacted the community.
“Transportation is a big barrier for people in the county, especially the farther away you get from London . . . And many of these services, if they weren’t in Strathroy, people would have to go there (London), which would be the closest,” she said.
Proof of this growth is also the increase in the number of partnerships the board has created with community and service groups since moving to Frank Street and the actual number of residents using the resources available, Brock added.
In February of 2016 alone, the library board estimates that close to 300 people accessed the services offered through the community hub just in the Strathroy branch. The board also logged almost 5,000 computer sessions there.
And given the success seen in Strathroy, county council has expanded the implementation of the community hub idea to other three branches in the county – Parkhill, Dorchester, whose branch is in the process of expansion, and Lucan – with a vision for a fifth hub in Glencoe by 2018.
“As long as our partners are on board, and they are still using the space, that indicates that there is that community need and that there are those clients who still need to be served in the county,” Brock said. “That’s the real indicator of our success.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Jonathan Juha
Quelle/Source: Strathroy Age Dispatch, 31.03.2016
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