My branch of the Geauga County Public Library has been lucky to have a long standing partnership with a local 4-H club. Our branch is the home to a vibrant genealogy reference department. Over the years library staff and 4-H clubbers have worked on family trees, family history projects, photography and scrapbooking. The library staff shares expertise with the members and in turn the members help create local history displays in the library and plan library volunteer parties.
Don’t have a genealogy department? Here are some ways that other library youth services departments are partnering with local 4-H clubs:
- Small Pet Information day – club members brought in gerbils, rabbits, etc. in cages and spoke about how to care for pets (also a Chicken Day and a Rabbit Day!)
- Agricultural Literacy Day – club members read farm stories to young patrons, passed out gardening informational materials and introduced 4-H to young children
- A Pet Club judged one library’s pet show on the library lawn.
Live in a city? Don’t think 4-H works in your area? Many suburban communities also have 4-H clubs and here are some projects that work anywhere:
- A drama club performed short skits at Saturday Morning storyhour
- A rocket club demonstrated rocket design and showed how to make small “rockets” to shoot indoors.
- A food club set up a grill at the library summer concert series and sold hot dogs, pop, chips and homemade goodies. The proceeds were shared with the library.
- The 4-H organization offers hundreds of project choices. When you think of 4-H you may think of sheep and chickens, but these are also current 4-H projects: gardening, sewing, recycling, fishing, bicycling, robotics, and astronomy. The possibilities for partnership topics are huge.
Where do I start?
- Ask around your staff and patrons if anyone has a connection to 4-H.
- Call the local Cooperative Extension office in your county. In every state 4-H groups are organized by county and overseen by the Cooperative Extension Service headquartered at that state’s land-grant university. Here in Ohio it is Ohio State University, in Montana it is Montana State University, etc.
Have other 4-H partnerships that have worked at your library? Please add them in the comments!
–Judy Lasco, Geauga County Public Library, Ohio
Member of ALSC Liaison with National Organizations committee
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