How Our Project Went Up the River

According to Rolheiser, “going up the river” wasn’t just helping for private charity, but to go further to find out where the problem came from and see how to stop it. Our project “went up the river” because we didn’t only help the library, we helped promote library awareness to students at local middle schools. By promoting library awareness, the students will learn more about what a library offers and how it helps a community.

The St. Joseph Public Library (Maud Preston Palenske Memorial Library) was having problems with its funding. So we went around trying to figure out reasons why they were having funding issues. Our mission was to find reasons why the library was in a crisis with its funding. What we did was interview board members of St. Joseph Charter Township, City of St. Joseph, and the library itself to question the funding problems and help find a solution for the library. But the library had a back up plan to become a district library, but in order for that to happen, both the city and township had to agree with that idea.

Another thing gathered from these interviews was figuring out ways on how the community can get involved to see if they can help. So we presented to 8^th graders, and hopefully they’d talk with their parents about the library’s situation to see if they can make a difference. Within our presentations, we told the students everything a library offers and we told them that they could help by writing persuasive essays about how a library helps a community and what would happen if a community didn’t have one. And we hope that this will bring about library awareness to the community. That’s the most that we can do for the library, and hopefully we made a difference.