It’s the middle of summer, and every day is a whirlwind of activity at the Healdsburg Regional Library. We enjoy seeing our local families take advantage of the free lunch program every weekday from noon to 12:30pm.
We have hosted extremely popular programs for families, such as Mike the Magician and storyteller Diane Ferlatte. Our teen programs continue to be successful, and we had great numbers for cooking with Jill the Veggie Queen and our Healdsburg Jazz presentation.
If you haven’t already, you can sign up for Summer Reading for all ages at the library or with the Beanstack app for iOS or Android. Read for several hours, and you can win free books and be entered into a drawing for additional prizes.
Social Services Fair
In mid-May at the library, we hosted our first Social Services Fair. This event provided an opportunity for community members to connect with important social services without leaving Healdsburg.
Oftentimes, our neighbors need to get one service set up before they can access another, and that can mean travel from place to place. Given the difficulty of transportation for many, not to mention other roadblocks—we all know that the unexpected strikes, well, unexpectedly.
With this in mind, our Social Services Fair helps provide access to services all in one place and time. We had excellent participation and community attendance at the event.
We are excited to announce that our next Social Services Fair is July 20, from 3–5pm. This time, we are expecting Alliance Medical Center, Buckelew, Legal Aid, Micah’s Hugs, NAMI, Providence Medical Group, Reach for Home, Redwood Empire Food Bank/CalFresh and Ruthless Kindness.
We hope you, or someone you know, will come by the library then so that you can learn about or get set up for services with one of these important programs. The library hopes to provide this series every other month, and will look for feedback on whether that is meeting our community needs.
Friday Flicks
Another fun experience we restarted this summer is our Friday Flicks, a movie series in our meeting room. While our community patiently awaits the opening of a new movie theater in 2024, we are happy to offer free movies.
The library has a public performance license that allows us to select movies from a list to display; we have restrictions on advertising, however, that make it hard for us to broadcast the movie titles. So our best suggestion is to pop by the library anytime we are open to get a list of upcoming movies.
To give readers an idea of what sort of movies we screen, recently we have shown Shrek, Puss in Boots—The Last Wish, Bad Guys and Wonder.
During the summer, our movies play at 1pm after the end of Lunch at the Library. We plan to continue showing movies throughout the year, most likely Friday afternoons after school gets out. And we encourage you to check in about that later this summer.
Rising Numbers
Not only have our programs been well-attended, but our door count numbers are still rising since we reopened a couple of years ago. We are pleased to report that our monthly attendance numbers are about 85–90% of our pre-pandemic in-person counts.
Even more promising is that, during the shelter-in-place portion of the pandemic, our in-person numbers plummeted to zero, while use of downloadable eBooks and eAudiobooks skyrocketed—and our digital numbers continue to be very high while our in-person numbers have mostly returned to normal.
We’re all grateful for our engaged, cheerful community that uses the library throughout the year. We look forward to seeing you next time you visit.
Jon Haupt is the branch manager of the Healdsburg Regional Library, 139 Piper St., open daily.
