First of all we need to welcome three new board members, James Coyne King from Boston and Richard Strock and Sam Featherstone from the Silicon Valley.  Check out their backgrounds and thoughts about working with Riecken Community Libraries here.

In November many of the board of directors visited Honduras and attended a country-wide meeting of librarians, community volunteers and even some of the mayors.  Many of the Hondurans had traveled for many hours on local buses to be able to meet with the rest of the Honduran Riecken network for their annual (ARBICOR) meeting.

Board Members, Jim King and Sam Featherstone, playing chess in Copán Ruinas, Honduras.

There were wonderful stories of young library volunteers eager to promote literacy telling of doing story hours for the youngest visitors outside because there was no electricity.  One young librarian said he had a computer in his library but laughed when asked if he had an internet connection.  ”I don’t know because we don’t have electricity.”

In 2012 librarian training was held in both countries with more to come in 2013.  Sessions included design of programs to encourage reading, proper techniques for organizing book collections and administrative skills.

Librarians in training in Honduras.

Late in the year we completed our 2012 Impact Study which you are welcome to view on our website and very recently we posted our 2012 Annual Report which discusses all of our successes for 2012 and our hopes and dreams for 2013 and beyond.

Literacy starts here.

In early October five Riecken team members in addition to a government representative from both Guatemala and Honduras were invited to attend the Beyond Access 2012 conference, entitled Local Alternatives for Global Development: Rediscovering Libraries in Washington, DC.  Beyond Access is a global community of public library advocates and practitioners who believe libraries are an untapped resource in addressing the world’s most pressing development challenges.

Earlier this year two Riecken libraries were selected among the twenty teams from nineteen different countries who were invited to participate in the conference.  Biblioteca Comunitaria Rija’tzuul Na’ooj in San Juan La Laguna, Guatemala and Biblioteca “Arturo Flores Aguiluz” in San Luis, Honduras were the two libraries accepted as members of Beyond Access.

The teams presented their innovative community ideas to over 300 participants at the conference.  Participants presented their project proposals to a panel of judges and the voting public. Each idea was  refined over a two-day period by Beyond Access teams and each team worked with a graphic recorder to present their idea on a poster for the innovation fair.

The winning teams in each of five categories will be awarded $10,000 along with additional coaching by the sponsor of the conference, IREX.  The hope is that this conference (attendees represented 40 countries) will mark the beginning of a movement to use public libraries to move beyond the traditional model and to use their facilities to promote development in developing countries.