How Caring Created Community???

Good ideas have the best kind of momentum. They don’t send an advance text announcing themselves, or launch with a multimedia ‘blast’. Good ideas just organically spread and appear, here and there.

Want proof?

   Just try driving in any direction for more than ten minutes, without seeing a Little Free Library. Odds are that the first time you saw one, you simply assumed it was a charming ‘one-off’, a thoughtful homeowner with a knack for carpentry and some surplus books.

    That was certainly true with the debut of the original Little Free Library. Back in 2009, Tod Bol’s neighbours in Madison, Wisconsin must have been intrigued, perhaps thinking it was a bird feeder or oddly large mailbox – just outside his front gate. Fashioning a wooden container to resemble a rustic wooden schoolhouse, he filled it with books instead of model desks. The concept was beautifully simple: Help Yourself. Some inspiration came from earlier community gift-sharing networks, as well as the ‘leave a book, take a book’ custom in local coffee shops.

    The biggest motivation was beautiful as well, if not nearly as simple. Tod’s mother, a schoolteacher and booklover, had recently passed, and he combined the two as an affectionate summation of her spirit. The initial Little Free Library was enough of a success that Tod and his partner Rick Brooks started to construct and install more Libraries throughout the American Midwest.

    What was that we said about momentum? In 2012, the Little Free Library officially acquired status as a non-profit entity. One year later, they received the Innovations in Reading Prize from the National Book Foundation, with Bol and Brooks garnering  the ‘Movers and Shakers’ Award from the American Library Association. Todl and Richard had another, very specific goal in their sights, though…2,510 Little Free Libraries. That number didn’t come from their favourite lottery guesses - 2,510 would surpass the number of brick-and-mortar libraries Andrew Carnegie had bankrolled in the early Twentieth Century. Later that year, the Little Free Library was Number One.

     It turns out that Momentum doesn’t really understand borders. By late 2019,, there were 90,000 Little Free Libraries across 91 countries. Pancreatic cancer would takeTod Bol in 2018, but in the days before he passed, he remained passionate about making a difference. 

    ‘I really believe in a Little Free Library on every block and a book in every hand. I believe people can fix their neighborhoods, fix their communities, develop systems of sharing, learn from each other and see that they have a better place on this planet to live.’ .

     Whether it’s sharing a single book, or building a library the size of a mailbox, or Whatever positive gesture has significance, don’t ever discount how far that one kind concept can go. Tod and Richard’s caring started as a box outside their front gate, and literally circled the globe.

     Now That’s Momentum. If you’d like to see how far your kindness can go, Link Charity has the people and the skills to get you going. Contact us today.