Friends of the Library had significant impact in providing over $2 million in direct support to the Hennepin County Library for collections purchases, capital improvements, and support for numerous community services including youth literacy programs, jobs and small business centers, senior programs, services for new immigrants, and programs in adult and juvenile corrections facilities. As examples, our grants enabled the Library to purchase approximately 10,000 new collections items – all of which are available free to the public and heavily used. Our funding for the Homework Hub program provided for 14,000 individualized tutorials for 2,800 students. 69% of the students came from households where English is not the first language. Programs for new immigrants included assistance with employment, education, citizenship, health care, housing and language acquisition. Over 8,000 individuals were served in the immigrant programs. More than 10,000 teens were served in such literacy building programs as the Teen Tech Squad, Guys Read and Hennepin Teens Read!, and History Hullabaloo. The Friends conducted 55 free arts and cultural programs, and an additional 10 ticketed author programs, attended by over 15,000 people. In addition to author programs, events included a series of films and arts activities for children, a series exploring current issues of globalization, and programs on the intersection of arts and the community. The Friends also provided extensive public awareness activities (newsletter, e-news, website) to raise use of the Library, which had a record-setting year with nearly 17 million items checked out and over 16 million website hits.

Our goals are based on are mission areas – funding for the Library, conducting author and other public programs, and public relations activities to increase use of the Library – and organizational improvements. Our funding goal is to provide $750,000 in direct cash support to the Hennepin County Library for an array of programs and services as determined by the Library. (Note that this figure was previously higher due to the capital campaign for Library.) A focus of efforts is to increase our membership numbers by approximately 20% from 2,900 households to 3,500. Our programming goals are to increase the number of free events to 75, and to institute a series of new programs in the suburban ring (most events currently occur in Minneapolis). These goals are designed to accomplish greater use of the Library, as well as to encourage increased membership and involvement in the Foundation. For PR activities, our goal is to increase the number of website and social media hits by 20%. Internally, a major goal is to complete a three-year strategic planning process, to include a revised mission, vision and values; major goals; comprehensive implementation plan, and dashboard for our Board to monitor progress. A second major goal is to assume coordination of the current 26 local library Friends groups in Hennepin County, and establish at least 10 new groups in Minneapolis. Friends groups coordination will include significant improvements in communications, membership, legal status, training, better coordination of book sales, and external promotion.

We support the 41 libraries of Hennepin County Minnesota and the patrons of the library system.

The library system directly serves Hennepin County, but also provides some services to the greater Twin City metropolitan area and the entire state of Minnesota.