Having only a church-based foodbank, Covington relies on surrounding cities for services. The library’s central location created an opportunity to bring community agencies together for monthly resource fairs at which people could learn about receiving services as well as getting involved. Connecting with community members unfamiliar with library services was challenging. We knew through experience that food bank customers often don’t want to be identified as such, making outreach to these sites unviable.

The most important element of this project was establishing mutually beneficial community partnerships. We connected with food banks, the county housing authority and other relevant community service agencies to learn their needs as well as the needs of their customers. We built the series to meet both, holding 21 programs over three months on topics like cooking, small space gardening and raising urban livestock. Our partners supported us with direct promotion to our target audience.

Of the 19 programs we recorded attendance for, we had 558 in-library attendees and 25 teen outreach attendees. Twenty-five percent of in-library patrons completed surveys. Of those, 80 percent came to the library to attend a program and 30 percent indicated it was the first library program they’d attended. Twenty-four percent learned about the programs outside of the library and 11 percent indicated that place was one of our partner food banks.