Libraries are almost always one of the main pillars of a community. That tenet holds true for Wilton Library, which plays such a central role in the life of our town. Long an organization that has enjoyed consistent support–in time and funds–from the residents it serves, this year, a dip in fundraising coupled with a shrinking source of large donors marked an alarming trend.
Not only has Wilton Library depended on ongoing, significant financial support, but according to the organization’s leaders, it also relies heavily on a very large pool of dedicated volunteers. But there too, the library has started to see an attrition that could spell trouble for the non-profit.
GOOD Morning Wilton sat down with Wilton Library’s executive director Elaine Tai-Lauria and chair of the library’s Board of Directors, Glen Hemmerle to talk about what they see happening and what kind of impact the troubling trends may have–unless a new generation of supporters starts to invest in this most valuable of community resources.
GOOD Morning Wilton: Wilton Library is so important to so many people in Wilton.
Elaine Tai-Lauria (ETL): A patron sent me a beautiful letter the other day thanking the library, in particular one staff member that she had been working with. The writer lives at Ogden House and has a travel group–she is not quite homebound, but it is hard for her to get out, so they “travel the world” from their chairs. She checks out travel books and they read and discuss…they explore the world by these book discussions.
The world opens to you through books and libraries. The more people realize how essential it is….sustaining us, especially when we are not a public, municipal library is tough.
GMW: What do you mean, you’re not a public library?
Glen Hemmerle: Not a lot of people realize that we have to raise a million dollars. That’s no small piece of change. I don’t think the community as a whole understands that. I think they think, ‘Well, the town gives us that, we already pay for that in our property taxes.’ What the town gives us works out to about $500 a home, and they’re right–a good portion of their taxes come help support us. But we need more than that.
Our budget centers are really divided in two ways. We have our operating budget–the money used to open the doors, turn on the lights, pay the staff, to physically operate the library, the systems, technology. That is one portion of the budget, the one that the town supports, at about 75-percent of that cost. Last year the operating cost of the library was $3 million.
But that doesn’t put any books on the shelves, DVDs on the shelves, magazines on the racks–it does none of that. That’s the other piece of the budget, that matters the most–the collection. Our collections budget is almost $600,000. So we have to raise a million dollars a year. One million dollars a year.
We raise that through all of the fundraising events that we have. We used to have a significant amount of revenue coming from our video rentals; well, Netflix and Hulu have eaten into that dramatically. We used to get a significant amount of revenue from our late fees. Well, we changed our library software, our library system about four years ago. Now if you are a patron and you have a book out, you now get a reminder that your book is due at this date.
ETL: We are also finding is that some of the other revenue streams are also drying up. We do get some money from the state, but that has been declining, we can’t count on that. The first year I was here, I managed to get two grants, it came through the second year, funding for two major projects, but you can’t count on that every year. You lose some advocates who really help us to get that money and of course you are competing with all of these other organizations, too.
GH: We have lost over the last few years, some of our significant financial supports. Either through death or they moved and that’s going to happen. We’ve probably been hit more than normal in the last three or four years, and we haven’t found the replacements. People don’t want to step forward.
Editor’s Note: In concrete numbers, here’s the impact: The annual appeal fell short of its goal to the tune of $21,000. Donations overall were 38-percent lower than the previous year.
GMW: So, you’re speaking both to individual donors, as well as corporate donors?
ETL: Yes, we would love to get some more corporate donors.
GH: We do have those that are ongoing supporters. The Village Market, who stays with us and sponsors our wonderful summer concerts series. The Wilton Bank was always a big supporter of ours, until it changed and merged, but we are making some in-roads there.
ETL: Fairfield Bank has been a big supporter in helping us with “Wilton Reads” and many other programs.
GH: Gregory and Adams have been long term big supporters, so we have a handful of fairly reliable consistent assistance.
I think that there are some very wealthy people in Wilton that we’ve never seen grace our doors, who don’t understand what we do or how important we are to the community they live in, that we don’t reach out to, that we don’t know how to reach out and we haven’t been able to.
ETL: Advocates can be so important. Someone may not be able to give us a large donation, but they may know other people who are able to, if they can connect them with us and show what we are contributing to the community and how much that dollar gives back to the community.
One of the challenges for us is trying to let them see the monetary value in a way that we contribute or provide to the town. For example, we bring in world class musicians, especially the jazz musicians–for free! If you had to go see one of those artists in New York or Stamford or New Haven, you’re probably going to shell out at least $50 or more, for two or more tickets. Just that one donation of $100 could mean so much to us.
So many things we do contribute to the culture in this community. We really are the cultural and intellectual center. I like to say that we are “the classroom outside the classroom,” we encourage that continuous, life-long learning process. I had a new person join our literary discussion series, in that group you have a lot of retired teachers and a lot of retired college professors and he was blown away. He said, “That was like going into, not just an undergraduate class, but like a graduate level class, because the discussion is at such a high level.” For free. If you had to go and take that some place else, you are probably going to shell out a few hundred dollars even if you audit it.
I think the challenge for us is to let people realize what we are doing. We are really giving you that $500 back, tenfold. We’re particularly grateful, of course, to all of our donors and supports because that enables us to make it free.
GH: We had Art Garfunkel, a couple of year ago, and it was, I think net net was a zero to us. It was free, but we had to take care of him. In the Brubeck Room, to see him on stage with a guitar, probably was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had in this library.
ETL: The Brubeck brothers–playing Brubeck, in the Brubeck Room, on a piano, signed by Dave Brubeck, next to a bust of Dave Brubeck, in his town. Those are quintessential experiences that this town offers and we are proud to be part of bringing that to the public.
Then there’s the Innovation Station. We were the first to bring 3-D printing to the public for free in this community, and fortunately we are still able to provide STEM and STEAM initiatives.
We started our health and wellness series and we are up to the third one which will be mid-September. I am really happy that we are able to bring that kind of program.
And we really are very happy to partner with other organizations in town. We do that now and are partnering with more. A few years ago, we started partnering with the American Legion, the Veterans, and every Veteran’s Day we do a program jointly with them..
GH: And the relationship we have with the Wilton Historical Society…
ETL: Yes, our annual lecture series with the Historical Society.
GH: People just need to take advantage of what we offer. I’m sure, if and when they do, they will become quite generous in their support.
GMW: Someone once told me how Wilton Library is often the first book tour stop for an author, or even the only stop in New England because publishers know this is a welcoming place where audiences embrace the authors words.
ETL: Publishers are getting to know our reputation for having a wonderful audience and inevitably, not just authors, but speakers, in general, will say that the questions they have gotten from our audience are so well thought out, that this is such an intelligent community and they like coming because of that.
GMW: One of the major conversations going on right now is how Wilton has very few amenities, few shopping attractions and other things to pull people from other places or even amenities that inspire Wilton residents to get active in Wilton.
GH: You’d be amazed at how many people outside of Wilton come to us.
ETL: When we’ve brought in big authors…we’ve had people come from Albany and New Haven to come to our programs. We attract all these people–6,000 people a week, on average, come through our doors and that is a captive audience for the town I believe, because if they are in the Center you can get them to do other things while they are in the Center. People come to some of our programs, our concerts and many times, including myself, go to dinner with your friends after. That’s driving traffic to the restaurants. We do have an economic impact on the community and it is often misunderstood or just taken for granted.
GH: People should know, we are very frugal and very efficient, in how we invest and our staff here is just great. Over the last number of years the entire staff here has become very financially conscious. The money that comes to us, that is donated to us, is spent incredibly well.
ETL: For instance, the gardening….
GH: The gardening, we do it all. We don’t pay for it to be done.
ETL: We really squeeze every ounce of value out of every dollar–we have to.
GH: Important donors know that, that we just don’t go out and hire painters to paint the outside, we figure out how to do it ourselves.
GMW: You’ve said that the other issue the library is facing is a decline in the number of volunteers willing to contribute their time to the organization.
GH: Our volunteer group is of an age, as a group, that we are going to be losing them.
GMW: I don’t know why that volunteer bug hasn’t filtered down to the younger generation of Wiltonians in the same way.
ETL: I am hearing the same from other organizations in town, it is the same people volunteering on several different committees. I can appreciate when you have children in school it’s hard. Your time isn’t your own. I certainly wasn’t able to become more involved with the library until my son was more independent. Volunteerism is down, in terms of numbers.
GMW: How many volunteers do you have?
ETL: Somewhere between 250 and 300.
GMW: That’s incredible and the library would not survive without volunteers. Just the value of the services you’re providing and work-hours, that you’re not paying in salaries. Is there a way to quantify the volunteer hours and what that translates into cost savings?
ETL: There are services that would be difficult for us to provide without some of the support out there.
GH: We’ve tried to quantify it in our budget presentations to the town when we make our annual requests, but it’s just a nightmare to try and keep track of.
Our volunteer groups do yeoman’s work. For instance, the art shows. The art program is really one of the most significant ones because it is something that everyone sees when they walk through the doors of the library. It’s not magic. It takes a lot of time, effort, energy to remove the program, put up a new program. And it happens every month.
ETL: That is like a full-time thing. Volunteer Ed MacEwan and his team, he schedules the artists, they have to take them down and put them up. And every art show is very different, because of sizes.
And, we do get a percentage from the sale of pieces. It’s not a revenue stream that we know what it will be, but nonetheless, the time and talent in doing that pays off, in dollars and cents when we are able to sell.
GH: Then there’s the book sale, it’s an enormous undertaking. The volunteers who make that happen. It could be an hour a day, or it could be an hour every other day. It goes on all year–sorting, pricing, organizing the books. It doesn’t stop when the book sale is over. The day after the book sale ends, we start again. That is a year long, never-ending project. You go down to the basement and volunteers are there every day, it’s just an never-ending task.
ETL: Those book sales are critical to us. They bring in a good chunk of money each year that we really depend on.
GH: In total, probably about 10-percent of what we need to raise every year is done in the book sales–$90,000 to $91,000. And it doesn’t come easy at a dollar a book.
GMW: Those volunteers pay off. And I imagine that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure there are other jobs that I don’t even know about that are handled by volunteers.
GH: We couldn’t do it without them.
GMW: Part of the issue for people who are hesitant to volunteer is the thought of time….and when you talk about how much time volunteers are committing there are a range of opportunities?
ETL: Some people may volunteer two hours a week or five hours a month and some are here 15 hours.
GMW: Sometimes the biggest obstacles is that you don’t even know who to talk to about getting involved. What is that process?
ETL: On our website. Always at the Circulation Desk or Reference Desk. I’m always available and I’ll put them in touch with people.
GMW: Is there any other way for people to support Wilton Library?
GH: We have a wonderful facility here that is open and available to the public to lease. We have two wonderful meeting rooms here, some of the community associations and condominium associations have their regular meetings here. If you have a need or an opportunity for a place that is conveniently and centrally located, we are here. We have the Brubeck Room for special events…if you are going to have an event or something…is available for rent or for lease. We have had bar mitzvah’s here. We even had a wedding!
ETL: Every dollar counts, you know. It’s never too small.