From Library Director, Tristan MarshallAs I wrap up my second year as the Director of the South Milwaukee Public Library, it has been especially gratifying getting to know many of you at the library and through our outreach events.
Your library is truly a community gathering place. It provides a myriad of vital services for thousands of patrons, including:
- Completing and submitting job applications
- Accessing local and national government website resources (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, community events, etc.)
- Providing research technology, including local history
- Great fiction and non-fiction books
- Entertainment and educational DVDs
- Assisting parents with their children’s literacy
- Offering age-appropriate programs from pre-school to seniors
It is the library staff's mission and great pleasure to help patrons in any number of ways.
As we gear up for next year, our newly published Strategic Plan will help guide our important decisions. Thank you to the many community members who participated in the plan’s survey. It explicitly helped us understand community needs and will help us formulate tangible goals for the next few years. We will diligently work to make the library an even more welcoming, comfortable and relevant destination. Community outreach will also be a priority.
A generous grant from The Bucyrus Foundation was instrumental in funding the comprehensive Strategic Plan. The plan will be critically important over the next few years as we work within an inevitable challenging funding environment. Diminishing resources will impact services, which could lead to difficult decisions going forward. Most of our funding comes from the City of South Milwaukee, and for that we are exceedingly grateful. The generous support we receive from the Friends of the South Milwaukee Public Library helps with some of our programming, including the popular Summer Reading Program for children. General community donations, either through the Friends or directly to the library, are most welcome.
Because the City of South Milwaukee faces extremely tight year-to-year budgets, the library has endured years of budget reductions. Over the last several years, the Board of Trustees has creatively and thoughtful worked to absorb these cuts in the least disruptive way to services. These are largely temporary, unsustainable “solutions.” Unfortunately in 2023 and 2024 our short-term financial fixes will become less viable. Regrettably, we have begin the process of service and staff reductions.
We hope these anticipated service reductions will only minimally impact the community. It is our plan to fully continue our more popular services such as Children’s Storytime, public use computers, internet services and checking out materials without interruption. We hope you will understand, though, that we may not be able to provide all the services we previously offered. We are always exploring alternative funding options, such as grants and community partnerships to assist in securing additional resources.
We hope by creating a more robust fundraising platform, we can initiate more revenue to support the library. Some of our smaller fundraising efforts are already visible when you visit the library. These include selling snacks, library swag and mini fundraisers. A larger effort will be made through an annual fundraiser that we are in the process of planning.
The South Milwaukee Public Library is not alone in these funding concerns. Many libraries are facing tough operational decisions. What is important is that we continue to listen to our patrons and community members and provide the best services we can with available funding. Thanks much for your continued use and support of the library. We ask for your understanding as we try and work through some very real funding challenges.
Sincerely,
Tristan Marshall Library Board of Trustees
Library Director Lynn Meidam, Board President
