Green Team Committee
The Little Free Library and Butterfly Garden
First Presbyterian Church has a Little Free Library!
Tell your friends! It belongs to everybody – church family, neighbors, friends, and people we don’t even know yet. Anyone can use it. Here’s how:
- Take a book. If you see something you’d like to read, take it. Look inside and see who may have donated it and who may have read it.
- Share it. Return it to any Little Library or pass it on to a friend.
- Donate a book or two of your own. Leave notes in them. Pay it Forward!
- No record keeping, no charge!
The average LFL gets 20-100 books donated per month. The Green Team members will check our library regularly, but we invite each of you to do so too, as it belongs to YOU. Enjoy sharing books with everyone!
The History of Little Free Library
In the beginning—2009–Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a model of a one room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother, a former school teacher who loved reading. He filled it with books and put it on a post in his front yard. His neighbors and friends loved it. He built several more and gave them away. Each one had a sign that said FREE BOOKS. Rick Brooks of Madison, whom he met at a seminar on promoting green practices and a vibrant local economy for Hudson, entered the picture as a colleague exploring potential social enterprises. The two saw opportunities to achieve a wide variety of goals for the common good. They were inspired by many different ideas:
- Andrew Carnegie’s support of 2,509 free public libraries around the turn of the 19th to 20th century.
- The heroic achievements of Miss Lutie Stearns, a librarian who brought books to nearly 1400 locations in Wisconsin through “traveling little libraries” between 1895 and 1914.
- “Take a book, leave a book” collections in coffee shops and public spaces.
- Neighborhood kiosks, TimeBanking and community gift-sharing networks
All Little Free Libraries are registered. By January of 2014, the total number of registered Little Free Libraries in the world is conservatively estimated to be between 10,000 and 12,000, with thousands more being built.
Butterfly Garden
Our Sunday School children helped the Green Team plant a butterfly garden around the Little Free Library today. It will be great to see it grow over the coming years. A big Thank You to all involved!
