Get Active: Ride and Read
Prince George's County Memorial Library System
Innovation Synopsis
The Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS) fosters the well-being of the community it serves by connecting customers to trusted health information resources, programs, and opportunities. The current strategic plan of the library system includes Healthy Living as one of the areas of focus. PGCMLS seeks to have a meaningful impact on the health and wellness of its customers by continually expanding the types of services it offers throughout the county. In January 2023, PGCMLS launched “Get Active: Ride and Read” at its Accokeek Branch Library location, hosting weekly sessions where customers 16 years old and up can ride stationary bikes equipped with tablets that provide access to the library’s collections of eBooks, eAudiobooks, and streaming movies and music.
Challenge/Opportunity
More than 70 percent of Prince George’s County residents are overweight, and more than 36 percent of the county’s adults have high blood pressure, according to PolicyMap data from March 2022. Seniors in the Accokeek community in southern Prince George’s County are also medically underserved, meaning they have more difficulty accessing health services. However, through “Get Active: Ride and Read,” staff and leaders saw an opportunity to share in-branch space and resources for a program to promote healthy lifestyles, as well as provide access to digital and print health and wellness resources to the seniors who are frequent users of the Accokeek Branch Library, and later, the Greenbelt Branch Library.
Key Elements of Innovation
“Get Active: Ride and Read” was launched at the system’s Accokeek Branch Library in January 2023, offering stationary exercise bikes with tablets that provide access to PGCMLS’ e-resources, including Libby for eBooks, eAudiobooks, and magazines, Kanopy for streaming movies, TV series, and documentaries, and Hoopla for streaming music. The PGCMLS Foundation, which provides critical philanthropic support for library initiatives, funded six stationary bikes and tablets to launch the initiative. Customers can ride the bikes for 30-minute sessions each week to stay active and learn with free exercise equipment and digital resources. The program provides an outlet for adults and seniors to build engagement with the community and each other. It also offers more programming for adults – and older adults in particular – who had fewer targeted program offerings to choose from.
Achieved Outcomes
Users have reported positive outcomes from the program, with retired customers having a place to exercise in the middle of the day, parents being able to exercise while children are in reach, and one customer even taking the opportunity to work out and learn Spanish at the same time. Since the launch of the program at the Accokeek Branch Library, it has expanded to a second location at the Greenbelt Branch Library in the northern area of the county. The proposal for expanding “Get Active: Ride and Read” was submitted to the Library’s Foundation Board just one month after the program was launched in Accokeek, and the Greenbelt program kicked off in September 2023. The programs at Accokeek and Greenbelt have hosted nearly 150 participants since their launch. “Get Active: Ride and Read” was an innovation for PGCMLS as a major staff-led initiative centered on health and wellness, paving the way for more health-focused programs systemwide.
