the national medal for Museum and Library Services is the nation's highest
honor for libraries and museums that are serving their communities in exceptional
ways Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County the Eva Jane Roma Kum
director Kimber Fender and Community member Amina Tuki traveled to Washington
from Cincinnati Ohio to receive the national medal and spoke to imls about
how the life Library impacts the community the public library Cincinnati
Hamilton County is one of the largest busiest and oldest public libraries in
the country and our mission is connecting people to the world of ideas
and information and some of our goals include a number of things but one of
the critical ones that we've been working on is really working with
literacy and lifelong learning we are very interested in
making sure that the kids in our community have the education that they
need this was partly driven because we learned last year that Cincinnati had
the third highest rate of childhood poverty in the country and so we needed
to do things on two sides of that issue one was to help the kids who are in
poverty today get the basic Services they need but the other is to make sure
that they get out of poverty so that this does not continue in future
generations and we think education is one of the keys to raising children out
of poverty so that's why we've worked very hard with kindergarten Readiness
with the readon program to get kids reading at grade level
and to make sure that they stay in school and graduate on time first when
I'm started to come to library I come for homework center with my
daughter she do her homework there because I
can't we established homework central as a new Department as part of our main
library reorganization and it's intended for any student who wants to come in
after school and get some one-on-one help we have staff working there but we
also have volunteers they have a quiet place and staff they're doing homework
with it and when they need help like a school they raise their hand and they
come to help them she's 12 years old she's in sixth grade she's a student
excellent and I'm proud of her libraries are really well known for being involved
in lifelong learning because you can come to us at any age or stage of your
life life and um learn something either through a self-guided learning by just
checking out books coming to programs that we offer so we really do plan to
have programs and services that meet all of those different needs at different
ages and that can be quite challenging but it's something we're really
committed to originally I'm from Ethiopia and I didn't have ucation that
all even for my not language and
I can't even read my language but now I come to the library for
reading writing speaking The Adult Learning Center is
the homework central in the mornings before the students get out of school um
we realized that we had adults coming into our main library into our tech
center in particular who needed more assistance than we could provide for
them in that setting so we took the staff from the uh homework central and
have them working in the mornings in The Adult Learning Center to help prepare
students for their GED test to help them with English with computer skills those
kinds of one-on-one things that we couldn't do for them in another
setting every week two hours one person sit with me to help me
to read how to read help me how to write how to spell
how to speak gramas that's what I get every week it
really does get to that idea of lifelong learning of realizing that not all
learning takes place in a structured classroom setting that this is a way for
people to keep learning who need to learn English so that they can do all
the things that they need to do in our society to be able to do their their
grocery shopping help their children with homework apply for jobs online all
of those things that require that basic knowledge of computers in English and we
think it's something that's vital to our our goals and missions being awarded
this medal has just been a tremendous experience for us um we've worked very
hard to have an impact on our community we feel very strongly that it's
important for libraries to be involved in the communities and I think it uh
shows our community that we have their interest at heart but I think it's also
a reflection on the community support of the Library part of this is that they
come in and use our services very heavily and without their support
financially and in use we would never have been able to offer the level of
programs and services we currently
provide