Call to order the um February 23rd, 2026 meeting of the Indianapolis uh public library.

Can we have a call of the role?

Yes, sir.

Mr.

Biederman.

Present.

Dr.

Rotada.

Present.

Dr.

Closio.

President.

And Dr.

Riolo present.

Uh, we do have a quorum.

All right, and we've got one more person.

And Miss Woodard.

All right, perfect.

Perfect timing.

Perfect timing.

Um, good evening, everyone.

It's my pleasure to welcome you to the monthly meeting of the Indianapolis Public Library Board of Trustees.

My name is Ray Biederman, and I'm president of the board.

Tonight we are in a special setup from our traditional library bench venue.

We're assembled at the Mary Rigg neighborhood center across the street from our West Indianapolis branch.

Because of the limited space in the community room at our West Indy Indy branch, we're grateful to our good neighbor and longtime partner Mary Rigg uh to accommodate our board meeting tonight.

Uh thank you for your hospitality this evening.

Um as we begin our February meeting.

I also recognize that February is Black History Month.

At the Indianapolis Public Library, we honor the history achievements and enduring contributions of black Americans.

A wonderful example is our annual Meet the Artist exhibit organized by our library's African American History Committee.

For the 38th year, Central Library has provided a venue for black artists to share their work that is free and open to all.

Please consider visit visiting this inspiring exhibit at Central Library if you haven't already, as it will continue through the end of March.

Now some news.

So you've already covered the history, so I won't run through any of that.

But I will let you know a little bit more context.

So this area was once an industrial powerhouse.

So this neighborhood was known for the stockyards and the GM stamping plant that provided a lot of jobs here.

That plant sadly closed down about a decade ago, and the stockyards all closed in the 70s.

So we've seen a change in the population and the demographics here.

All right, if you want to go to the next slide, please.

All right, so who we are.

So we're a very small staff.

So myself, I'm the adult librarian and the branch manager, and then we also have a children's librarian that started last summer with us.

We also have one circulation supervisor, one library assistant too, one part-time juvenile public services associate, a part-time computer lab assistant, and then we have one library security assistant.

So we're a very small team, but I like to say we're small but mighty.

There's only seven us seven of us in the building, but you know, we keep that thing running and everyone does an amazing job.

Um we recently got um Secoa Dementia Friendly Certified because half of our staff have completed that training.

So that's another thing that we got going.

If you want to go ahead and go to the next slide, please.

All right, so to talk about who we serve, um, there's a lot of statistics on the screen and numbers can tell you so much, but I want to talk a little bit more about what these numbers mean for this community.

Um all of my data was pulled from the Savvy 2023 census.

Um I'm gonna go over this first, the languages spoken.

So 18.5% of the households in this neighborhood primarily speak Spanish, and the way that we serve that community is three of our staff members actually speak Spanish to a fluent enough level where they can have one-on-one interactions with patrons that come into the branch.

Um we see a lot of people that come in to um print documents, make copies of things, copies of passports, documentation.

So we have staff members that help them with that.

Um we're also seeing, due to recent current events, that a lot of these patrons aren't visiting us as often as they used to.

Um, in order to combat that, we're actually working with um WIDC, a development corporation, to put on an international festival in the fall to sort of invite that community back in and remind them that the library is a safe space for everyone.

Um the next point I want to talk about our poverty rate.

So, as I mentioned at the start of my presentation, this was once an industrial powerhouse, and when the GM stamping plant shut down, 600 people lost their jobs, and a lot of those people lived in this neighborhood, and suddenly they were without work.

Um, so we see that a lot of people in this neighborhood are fighting against living in poverty, they live in a food desert, um, and the unemployment rate is higher here than in other Marion County in Marion County.

Um this goes so 19.4% of adults are housing insecure.

We've got a 7.1% eviction rate and a 20% housing vacancy rate.

So, how does that impact what we do?

So, what we do at the West Indy branch, we do a lot of community outreach.

So we try our best to meet these people where they are and see how we can best serve them.

And maybe it's not what a traditional what everyone thinks the library would do, but we do a lot of social services.

So, what this means is we put together um hygiene kits, so they're small little bags that have deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, maybe some floss, soap, shampoo, basic necessities that we hand out to patrons.

We also do um in the winter we do warming kits.

So we'll put together a hat, gloves, socks, and some hand warmers and some information about um fighting frostbite and hand that out to patrons.

Um we have to thank our uh community partner, Eli Lilly.

They give us a lot of in-kind donations and they actually donate a lot of the hats and the gloves that we use to hand out to people.

Um so yeah, we sort of we've got a lot of patrons that comment that we're sort of a ministry and that they, you know, we're a lifeline for this community.

So we serve in a non-traditional way.

Um, thank you.

So, some more stats.

Um, I want to just focus on um one of our biggest services that we provide as well.

Um, computer usage.

So a lot of people that we see every day, they come in and they want to use our computers, they want to get on the Wi-Fi.

Um, 10% of residents in this neighborhood are without computer or internet, um, and that's compared to 7.9% in Marion County.

So, definitely a lot more people without that internet connectivity.

So people come in, they want to use the computer, they want to print things, if they want to watch movies, they don't have access to streaming.

So a lot of our circulation comes from people coming in to get DVDs as well.

And then the picture that I have on the screen there.

So I did mention this is a food desert.

There's only about maybe five restaurants in the area, and there are no grocery stores within a walking distance.

If you wanted to go to the grocery store, you would have to either go downtown, so take a bus downtown, or you would need to drive to one of the other there's a Kroger on Kentucky, it's 10 minutes away.

So a lot of people rely on Dollar General, Dollar Tree.

Those places don't necessarily have fresh produce.

So one way that the library is combating that is we're able to offer the seed library program.

So our patrons can come in, get some seeds, take them home, start a garden and have fresh produce, which is something they wouldn't otherwise have access to.

And then in 2025, we had 396 programs offered.

We had 4,250 people in attendance.

So what that means for us, we've got a ton of adult programming.

So we do weekly cheer yoga, weekly crafternoon, which is an arts and crafts program.

We do a monthly book discussion to talk a little bit more about the Crafter Noon.

It's a small group of patrons that come in and you're invited to bring whatever creative project you're working on.

I usually bring my crochet to work on.

Some people will bring painting.

And it's just a tight-knit group where we can sit together and just work on something creative.

We also have the book club.

It's another really tight-knit group.

We recently had a patron that was a regular at the book club move away, and she is blind, and so she's unable to get here easily.

And we had another patron offer to drive her to the program so she could continue coming.

So I think that's a testament to how close everyone is at these programs.

We also do for our teens, so we have a monthly teen zone program, which is actually happening right now across the street.

So they have a Wii that they can play on, they're offered some snacks, and they can just work on some coloring or just do whatever they'd like to do.

We're also working on starting a teen Dungeons and Dragons group in the spring.

That's we've heard from the IPS schools in the neighborhood that's a really hot topic right now.

So we're gonna get that going.

And then for our children's programs, we have actually two weekly groups come from Mary Rig.

So their after-school group comes over twice a week.

We've got an older group and a younger group.

Um both come over to work on Steam programs.

So the older group prefers working on the art part of the STEAM, so they like to do more of the arts and crafts.

Um, and the younger group likes doing engineering.

So our children's librarian lays out stuff for them to work on.

They've made buildings out of um marshmallows and spaghetti.

Um they've made cars, they've made so many, so many things.

Um we also do weekly story times here at Head Start.

That's connect that's a facility connected to Mary Rig.

Um, and we also do take home craft kits.

And this past Saturday, we actually offered our very first family game club.

So we had we actually had a good little group that came out and played some board games together.

It was really sweet.

Um, and then finally for our outreach.

So I talked about the hygiene and the warmth kits.

We also operate a little free laundry library.

So if you've ever heard of a little free library, um, down the street at Morrison, Belmont, there's a laundromat, and we um, yep, there you go.

We have a little those shelves, and we um restock that on a monthly basis, and that's been a really fun um thing to see develop throughout the years.

Um, people will actually leave food at the little free library, and I think that just shows you know, this community is they're looking out for each other.

Um another um, so community partners, we also work with a lot of these people.

Um, there's a yearly event called Winterfest, and it's every holiday season, and we offer it at Daniel Webster, the IPS School on Reisner, um, and a ton of community partners work on that.

Lily, West Indian Development Corporation, um, the church helps us with that, and Mary Rig, of course.

Um, and we put on this event for families to come, they get a free meal, usually a hot meal, they get free hats and gloves for the kids to take home.

There's usually books.

We also have pictures with Santa because if you don't live right next to a mall and you don't have the money, you're not gonna have that experience.

So it's a great way to get um community community together, and we also offer resource tables at that event as well.

Um this past year we had 452 attendees, so it's a very popular event.

Um so yes, all of these community partners, I'm not gonna read through all of them.

We work with all of them almost on a daily basis.

Um we're very blessed in this neighborhood to have such tight knit partners, and everyone is so amenable to helping each other out.

Um we worked a lot this past year with the Wes Morris Free Methodist Church.

Um the city actually opened uh emergency warming shelter down the street from us at that church.

Um so we've worked with them a lot in getting um some patron donated food down there and just um letting our patrons know that that's an option.

If you want to go to the next slide.

Okay, so I've just got some fun pictures for you.

Um on the far left, that's our summer reading display from last year.

Um our children's PSA is super creative and she does amazing displays, and she turned our glass display case into a cave to go with the history theme.

Um that center picture is one of our Mary Rig after school groups.

Um they're posing with their building that they engineered.

Um and then on the far right, that's a picture from uh last May.

We had an adult book discussion, and we actually had the opportunity to um chat with the author of the book that we read.

So we read a book called Blind Ambition, and one of my patrons is friends with the author, so we got her on Zoom, and we got to ask her some questions about the book.

So that was a really neat experience.

And that's all I got for you.

Yeah.

All right, so what what questions uh comments from the board?

I I'm just really impressed with how you've branched out to create a community.

And I don't think people go into librarianship thinking they're being social services, but you've combined that really well.

So thank you for that.

Thank you.

Um I also want to commend you with the little free library that's at the um laundromat, are those books that they just swap, so they they don't have to check.

Right, yep.

So those are books that are they're not actual library books.

Um, they're either donations that we use, and yep, they can just grab them and they don't have to return them.

Great.

Yep.

Just commend you for the partnership with Mary Riggs as well.

I've been to Mary Riggs many times, and the partnership between the library and Mary Riggs is just it's just one of the best.

And the kinds of things that you're doing together and collaboration make all the difference.

Just one quick question about it.

When you think of the kinds of things that you're doing together, what are you imagining that is a possibility for the future?

The two of you.

We did such a nice job.

Thank you.

I'm definitely Heather, I don't know what you've been thinking, but I've had on my mind Mary Rig recently opened up their food pantry.

Um was it has it already been a month, a couple weeks now?

Um so now we have that in our community.

I'm been thinking about how can the library better support that, and I've considered opening another little free library for people as they go.

I don't know if you guys have heard about the new Mary Rig food pantry, but it's grocery style, so they're able to pick what they want and get that autonomy back in their lives.

So I think it would be great to collaborate and get the library in that space a little more.

I think that's a great idea.

And uh as Megan mentioned, you know, the opportunity for our kids to have such easy access is huge.

Um, I'm sure overlaid with everything Megan said, we have a major transportation issue in this neighborhood too.

So for families to have easy access when their kids are either here for aftercare or somewhere can't makes a huge difference to getting our kids in the library.

So really appreciate that continued opportunity as well.

I I just want to say thank you for everything you and your staff of seven do.

This is amazing.

This is um looking at the stats.

You're going way above and beyond what I think the library um gonna say should do, but in in the eyes of many people, you know, you think you go to the library, seems like you're going out and like it being said, forming that community, investing in the community, making sure the community is uh having a bit more of a lifestyle than they would otherwise.

So I appreciate everything you're doing.

Stats are alarming, but you you're doing I think a great job trying to do what you can with uh what do you have here?

Thank you.

Yeah, um, I I would have thought you had a staff of 25.

They're all hard workers.

All right.

Any any more comments from the board.

All right, hearing none.

Uh thank you very much.

Thank you.

All right.

Uh tonight we have an additional area report uh regarding volunteers and interns.

Um so while uh Miss Wendy Johnson is stepping forward, I want to mention that our organization is powered not just by our dedicated paid employees, but also by dedicated unpaid volunteer workers representing about 45% of our workforce.

So, Ms.

Johnson, we look forward to hearing your report.

Thank you very much.

And thank you very much for inviting me back.

I know it's been several years since I've seen you, and some of you are new to the board.

Um, so I have some really great things to share, and we can add those to the list of Megan wonderful things that the library is doing as well.

So I appreciate your time.

My name is Wendy Johnson.

I am the volunteer resource supervisor and internship program coordinator.

I gave myself that title because there wasn't a program before me that was formalized.

I have been an MPA for a while from the IU, and I also carry the certification of certified volunteer administrator, which is an international credential that I maintain on a regular basis.

I also am extremely pleased to be able to present to not only you but also on the national platform all about volunteerism and brag a lot about what our library is doing and how we are moving forward with our librarian internship program, how we're integrating volunteers across the board.

So I'm very proud to be a part of this organization.

Next slide, please.

When we talk about volunteers and interns, we always talk about numbers first.

It is a professional hazard that we have put upon ourselves as a volunteer leader.

We always want to talk about how many volunteers did you have and how many hours did you have?

And um, so you're gonna get to see those first, and then we're gonna talk about why those are important to us.

Um we have far exceeded our pre-COVID numbers.

We have rebounded extremely well.

We are looking at our volunteer engagement in a different way, and that has really given us the opportunity to strive beyond that.

The 1,000 volunteers that we saw, individual folks over 2025, did approximately 27.4 hours all in all.

We convert them as well.

This is one of those crazy things we do when we talk about numbers, is we convert that to a dollar figure.

We use independent sector to use that value, and for Indiana, that value is $31.5 cents an hour.

So when you convert that over, that's a little over three-quarters of a million dollars.

In HR speak, I look at this in a totally different way, and I say, Oh, well, that's a little over 13 FTUs or full-time equivalent staff members.

And that's all the numbers you're gonna get in the big scope of things.

Next slide, please.

We always have a curiosity about where are our volunteers coming from.

Because I'll tell you a secret, I don't do a lot of recruitment.

Volunteers come out of the woodwork when they hear we need help.

And they are coming out of the woodwork individually, and as corporate entities, they want to be part of our organization.

So we went and put this crazy map together.

Thank you, Maggie Ward, for doing this crazy map.

Because I honestly thought that most of the individuals are coming from the outer edges of Marion County.

And as you can see, I was sadly mistaken or happily mistaken.

Um there are two desert areas on this map.

One is uh in the airport in the lower left-hand corner.

That's airport industrial.

And we also kind of identified the area on the eastern side, sort of midway down the map, which tends to be more of an herbal or rural landscape.

So we don't see a lot of homes in those spaces.

So I'm not feeling too bad about this map.

We have a lot of next slide, please.

We have a lot of community partners as well.

Last year we engaged with 28 different partners.

When I started in this role over 10 years ago, my goal was to have 12 a year.

Uh, one for every month.

I thought that was a big goal.

And now I'm turning people away because we don't have the projects for them.

So 28 was great.

This year I'm hoping to do 35.

We'll see if I can negotiate that with our staff.

Um, as you can see, we have a large list of those partners who come and help support.

Those partners come to us because they are a part of a corporate social responsibility strategy within their organization.

And we embrace them with all one-time hit projects, four hours, three hours.

They might refresh a library, they might be coming to help us with seed packaging.

They might be coming to help us with an event or an activity.

So we are thrilled to have these organizations with us.

Many of these organizations also have what's called a Dollars for Doers program.

What a catchy little name, right?

The dollars for doers, it gives us the opportunity to say if you volunteer X number of hours, your organization will donate X number of dollars.

And most of those folks who volunteer with us like to give us the money as opposed to maybe somewhere else.

So these corporate relationships are important to us.

And that is an exciting way for our foundation to engage even deeper relationships with these folks.

Next slide, please.

We have some pretty standard activities that our volunteers do as individual volunteers.

They work on collection support.

That's the number one thing.

That is everything that has to do with those books on those shelves.

It has to do with our collection support.

Whether it's polling material or if it's weeding or if it's looking at the dropbox and processing holds, it is all of those things.

It is the number one thing that can support our staff.

Secondarily to that is our program support.

Program support really grew after COVID.

I won't say it was COVID that did it.

I will tell you it is because of our youth protection policy.

When we implemented our youth protection policy of having two unrelated adults in every single youth program, it was a major stress on our staff.

Imagine Megan's world of seven and having a youth program, and now she has two people who have to sit in a room because we're doing a story time, which is great for our community.

It was a big stretch.

So volunteers have stepped up and been that second person in the room.

And that has been an amazing feat for us.

And partly why our numbers are growing, because now I can say to people, you may not get to read to the kids, but you can still sing and dance with them.

And they love that.

They think that is an engaging opportunity for them and a small commitment of time once every week, once every other week to do.

They have 25% of our overall numbers.

They come every single week.

Those 70 volunteers know each other.

They give rides to each other, they send each other cards when some crazy medical thing has happened.

They miss each other when they've gone on summer break or gone south for the winter.

This organization has done such an amazing job of building that community with that particular group of volunteers.

They are the heartbeat of the bookstore.

The bookstore only has one and a half staff members.

Without them, we would not be able to raise those funds that support the foundation.

Next slide, please.

2026 is adding a third partnership, and that is the Canon Companion Program.

The Pause to Read Program enables young kids, young readers to read to an dog that is non-judgmental.

And that is a great way to build some confidence.

The Pause to Breathe program enables us to provide support to those that are in stress, anxiety, trauma.

When we can bring a team in at the end of the school year during finals and provide those that team to the teens that are coming into the library branch.

When we can provide a team to our own staff when trauma has happened to our staff, that is pause to breathe.

And that those two programs together, the pug and the lady holding the pug, that's Maggie Ward.

She's my supervisor.

She's amazing.

She coordinates all of those fun things.

Next slide, please.

You heard about food deserts from Megan.

Volunteers are actively packaging seeds.

In order for us to save money, we are buying seeds in bulk and breaking them down into small packets of 10 to 12 seeds, depending on what the item of produce is.

81% of the seeds that were distributed last year were packaged by volunteers.

I expect that number to go up.

I also expect that we'll be seeing more seeds on the shelves.

We grew this program as a library system from one individual branch, and now we're seeing all of our branches participate, and it's taking an entire village to package the seeds and to get those seeds out into the hands of our community so that they can be prepared with fresh produce and pollinators and herbs and all of the fun things that come along with being able to grow something in your own hands.

So thank you to our seed library folks.

They're great, and I'm glad to see you've great, great seed library picture.

Thank you for illustrating that.

Library Express is our homebound delivery program.

It's run within my team.

The homebound delivery is in a way for us to reach those patrons that don't have access to a library.

They can't get to a library for whatever reason.

We don't even really ask.

If they say they can't get to the library and they want materials, we will figure out a way to get them materials.

The first front line of that is for us to say, let's match you with a volunteer.

Let's have that volunteer deliver materials, which is that clever bag right there with a zipper on the top.

We want to get those materials to those patrons as frequently as they need them.

We also see that we have some patrons that are heavy hitter patrons, they're VIPs for us.

They're the folks that you think, oh my gosh, how do they have 126 books on hold at all times?

And those folks are serviced through our outreach department and through one volunteer who delivers to them every Tuesday.

He comes, he picks up a bunch of bags and delivers off to a corner of the city.

Those patrons will no longer want volunteers because he's so amazing that they don't want to give him up.

So we've done a lot of work in that arena as well to grow this program.

We have capacity for more patrons.

We would love to put this at a hundred patrons.

So if you know of a person who is in Marion County that is looking for library services to be delivered to them, please reach out to me and we will get them the services that they need.

Next slide, please.

So this is my baby.

This is the intern program.

Oh, with an ER.

Wonder where that came from.

The intern program started uh two years ago, two and a half years ago.

We had an internship program within the library, but it was sort of hit or miss.

We were having interns come to us and they say, I want to do library science, or I want to do something that we offer as a career path.

And we were not really providing the best service to them.

So I raised my hand and said, I know how to make this better, and built an internship program that has the boundaries, the screening, the services, the academic requirements are being followed, the relationships with schools are being built, so that we are providing the best quality experience to any academic student who comes to us for an internship.

We grew that internship last year, doubled it, which makes me very excited, both in the high school arena as well as in the college and university arena as well.

We have interns that are in for library science, which is what you would guess.

We have, as you've met Danielle Girton with social work, we are now hosting three social work interns, and that may bump to five.

I've asked her what her total is, and she thinks five is her max.

I'm all about it.

Bring them on.

It's all good.

We've also had interns in our communications department, and you've heard from Adam about facilities.

He's had two interns over the last two summers doing great work in determining whether we are following our environmental guidelines as lead certified spaces, tracking whether our solar panels are doing what they're supposed to do, all kinds of nerdy engineering stuff.

So I'm very excited that our internship program has come off the ground, that we are solid, and that we are beginning to get a lot of referrals from the scrolls that are out in our communities who are hearing about us and now learn that we can do a great job of servicing those students as well.

Fun fact 12 of our volunteers and interns were hired last year alone.

Um Tisha very happy because she's always said, it's a pipeline, make a pipeline.

So yes, we're building a pipeline, not only in our volunteer arena, but also in our internship arena.

Next slide, please.

Huge thank you to everyone that's making this possible.

Our volunteers, of course, I have to say thank you to them, and I say thank you to them every time I see them.

Thank you, Dr.

Lisa, for volunteering all around.

Um I want to make sure that you were aware that volunteer coordinators are placed at every single branch.

A volunteer coordinator wears multiple hats, but they are the front face that serves those volunteers as they come to the branch.

They help make sure that the screening is there and that those volunteers are welcomed and have meaningful work to do.

We never make busy work.

I want to also make sure that you recognize that the branch managers and department managers are also a big part of whether this program can be successful.

When I started 10 years ago, we did not have volunteers in every single branch.

A lot of our branch managers said, uh-uh-uh-mm, scared.

No, mm-mm.

And now I'm proud to say that our every single one of our branches has engaged in volunteers in some way or another.

They are amazing people to work with.

Our executive leadership team who supports all of us in the work that we do.

And of course, I have to say thank you to you because after all, you're volunteers too.

So thank you for your time and your energy to make this organization the great and marvelous place that it is that volunteers and interns want to be a part of.

That's all I have for you.

Do you have any questions for me?

Well, thank thank you.

You're welcome.

Um, are there any questions from the board?

No.

All right.

Your first system.

I was just wondering if the internship program contains uh educational component, like mentoring or uh cohort type uh meetings.

Yes.

Um, so the question is is there an educational component?

And the answer is yes.

That educational component comes in the form of the match that I've made to them to their supervisor.

Um, and that is a staff member who has basically signed my agreement that says this is what you will do with an intern.

You won't just throw them out there.

Um, that you will provide the education that they have required.

We've also been working really closely with the advisors of each of those students to customize their internship experience.

Some of our interns want to do archival work, which we don't really do a lot.

That's not our that's not our jam.

We don't really do a lot of that.

But when they come to a public library, it's important for them to understand what is a public library.

So when they do go to archival work, they can say, I know what public library is about, and I can refer people that direction.

So we're always very close with our advisors.

We check check base twice a twice a semester.

We're working really hard to make sure that we satisfy those academic requirements.

Thank you.

I want to first of all say um the report that you just provided is riddled with impact.

And um, I've heard a lot of branch reports, all of them have been amazing.

This one by far has blown me away because you are meeting the community exactly where they need to be met.

So I want to offer you that um just acknowledgement, just to say amazing job.

Thank you for the data.

The data has been amazing to be able to take volunteer hours and convert that so that individuals can see that without volunteers, without the community, a lot of the things that you offer would not be able to happen.

Um that's very powerful.

And so I'm gonna lean in a little further.

You talk about the C program.

Yeah, um, amazing.

I love that.

Do you have a return on investment?

Do you know how many individuals are using that?

How it's um, do you have any data around?

And if you don't, it's okay because it's I do not because Erica Irish and uh Jill Edwards in the program department manage the seed library.

Um I jokingly refer to myself as eHarmony for volunteers.

Um I know where the I know where the things are that we need, and I know the projects we're working on.

I know the volunteers want to help, and my job is to do that match.

investment do you know how many individuals are using that how it's um do you have any data around and if you don't it's okay because it's I do not because Erica Irish and uh Jill Edwards in the program department manage the seed library um I jokingly refer to myself as eHarmony for volunteers um I know where the I know where the things are that we need and I know the projects we're working on I know the volunteers want to help and my job is to do that match so Erica Irish would be the person who will give you all of that data and she is meticulous so she will happily give you that return on investment no sounds good I'm not I I just want to acknowledge it thank you just to see I mean I don't know if other branches have a need like that but if you have that type of data in the future to share out I think that's great one other question do you know if training is provided so if a patron comes in I love the idea that we're pushing you know kind of um you know self-sustain us sustainment um do you offer training with the seed program that helps patrons to understand how do you how to how to plant I don't I have plants and they're all dying so you and I are in the same boat um so the answer is yes um Megan unalluded to it as well we as an organization through the program and department have created an entire series of educational programs for adults and teens primarily and then there's some kid things sprinkled in there all the way from I live in an apartment on the second floor and I want to grow my own tomato plant how do I do that to what if I get those creepy bugs in my tomatoes um all of our programming is geared from beginning to end and it's staged throughout the life of a garden so today's the day I should be planting things that's when the program is offered to me it's exciting also to be able to say to you that we are working with master gardeners from around Marion County and the surrounding counties because master gardeners have to have volunteer hours so they come and they help us with our programming they help us manage and maintain our seed libraries so yeah there is definitely an educational component to all of that the seed library has grown a lot over the years it was just vegetables and then we added herbs and now we're into these gorgeous flowers and all kinds of things and Erica and Jill decide what seeds to get but then once they're packaged each branch manager requests for my branch we want this many of this kind of seeds so it's actually individualized to the community's needs as well so it's a really great program but yes volunteerism is very rewarding but volunteering in every organization is not the same some organizations are not quite as organized or as fulfilling as what you've made these programs so there are others I have quit early this one I'm in 18 years so yes thanks Lisa was a docent when we opened the building at Central that gives you a clue wow any other questions for me just a quick one you had mentioned um so many things with support you say collection support program support public commuter and administrations what is the public commuter support public computer support did I miss a T Sorry about that yes um public computer support um imagine that you are a staff member and you have this bank of 20 computers and this person needs to print and this person needs to upload photos and that person doesn't know how to use a mouse that volunteers there to do as much of that as they possibly can to help support those those patrons as they come in and use a a computer connect to the internet all of those pieces and parts it was the it was the T Sorry wait where is that page yeah anything else I can do to answer questions for you and the library express is just phenomenal it is amazing tell your friends absolutely it's even short term so if they just you know broken ankle and they need rehab for six months we'll be happy to bring them books for six months yep well thank you again Miss Johnson thank you so much I appreciate the time all right now we will proceed to public comment uh miss Gilbert do we have any individuals requesting public comment today all right look at that we just we just made up five minutes right there all right uh moving on to approval of minutes uh there was a rescheduled regular meeting from January 30th 2026 is there a motion to approve the minutes of the regular meeting rescheduled that was held on January 30th 2026 removed is there a second second it's been moved and seconded uh any discussion hearing none will have a call the role uh doctor matata approved Dr.

Clausio approved doctor approved miss wood approved and mr viedman approved and it's motions carried great we just saved another four minutes look at us look at us go all right uh moving on to the finance committee uh doctor white is the chair but doctor white is not here today so do we have uh a chair for today I am here and taking a nice floor doctor white we don't have any resolutions that need to be taken care of but we do have a presentation excellent great thank you very ranking please pick

White.

We don't have any resolutions that need to be taken care of, but we do have a presentation.

Excellent.

Great.

Thank you.

Mary Rankins.

Please pick it.

This is the treasurer report for January.

So the next slide, please.

So our revenue part of the slides missing, but oh, there.

Thank you.

What happened there?

So we're at the beginning of the month of the year.

And so our actual will be the year to date.

And it shows the budget here on the left side of what we expect to get throughout the year.

Property taxes were not expected to be received in January.

We won't receive those again until the summertime.

And then again in the winter.

Intergovernmental, the largest part of that was uh e-rate.

We received um approximately 84,000 of that month to date.

And then other than that, it was the regularly monthly distribution from the county.

And then charges for services, the largest was public printing at 23,000.

The miscellaneous revenue 127,000 of the 137 was interest revenue.

Um with the rate the highest rates being the Husser fund at 3.8% and Trust Indiana at 3.6%.

So we're moving right along.

And then to show it in a graph on the next page slide.

Intergovernmental is up.

That's because of that e-rate, which is not regularly received.

And fines and fees are higher than budget.

And charges for services are a little under what we received last year.

And the miscellaneous is a little under.

So the next slide is expenditures.

And we've spent approximately 10% of the budget at $4.2 million.

Approximately $4.3 million.

And there that's because there were three pay dates in January, as well as our beginning of the year contribution as an employer into the health savings accounts.

Uh co-pays, which have grown over the years.

You know, it's been that way for several years now.

Supplies, um, the smallest category, and uh we're 107,000 or 5% of the budget.

Other services and charges, um about 700,000.

Um that's legal security, cleaning services, um, technology, and capital outlay is our books, and um it's pretty low uh under 5,000 for January, which will ramp up more into February.

Um we had uh we have to wait until budgets get loaded in January into um the book system before we can pay all the invoices for books, and then the graph presentation of this is on the next slide, which shows on the left the bar chart uh comparing the month to date versus where we were last year and the budget, and our budget line is um allocated divided by 12 instead of by pay period, so that's why it looks a little high there over the budget, and the line charts on the right year to date, which would be the same figures.

So that's why it looks a little high there over the budget.

And the line charts on the right year to date, which would be the same figures.

Um that's all.

Um we have a couple updates, just we're in the pre-audit compilation of our financial statements for 2025.

And uh Lilita did an investment presentation to the Marin County Board of Finance that was successful.

Are there any questions?

Any questions?

All right.

Uh is there a motion to accept the report of the treasurer for January 2026 for filing for audit.

So moved and seconded.

Any discussion?

Here none will have a call the roll.

Dr.

Matata.

Approved.

Dr.

Palacio.

Approved.

Dr.

Riolo.

Miss Woodard?

Approved.

And Mr.

Bieterman.

Approved.

The motion's carried.

All right.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Appreciate you.

Anything else from the finance committee?

No, there's nothing else we have to take care of today.

Excellent.

All right.

Let's move on to diversity policy and human resources committee.

Dr.

Palacio, you're the chair of that committee.

So uh Ms.

Galarsa will present one resolution that we have with uh along with uh Roberta Jaggers and I'll pass it to you.

Thank you so much.

Good evening.

I'm here to present resolution 06-2026.

Is the amendment of policy 101.9 regarding the naming of uh organizational assets.

I'm gonna give you a high level review of the policy, all the policy it is in your packet, and we have extensive um discussion on this policy throughout the last few months.

So if you have any questions, please let us know.

But this is the high level, otherwise we'll take a long time here.

Okay.

So the changes in the policy.

This allows the CEO to name the spaces of staff in recognition of a mayor gift or exceptional contributions, ensures naming decisions aligned with the library mission, vision, and values, and establish a consistent process for approval, management, and removal of the name.

All right, so there is two types of naming uh available.

One is the gift-related, which requires a financial gift, uh, but with the foundation, with the library foundation, and the other one is the honorific naming.

So it recognized individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the library or society, but then have to be approved by the CEO and by the board, and then the assets that are eligible eligible for naming is physical spaces, so we have community room, study rooms, children's areas, gardens, and others, and also we have have staff positions name after um people that have been recognized before.

Okay, the policy also address uh the removal of the name.

So in extreme circumstances that we decide that a name should not be present on any space or a staff position, the CEO will recommend to a committee the evaluation of the removal in but after that decision, then um the space will be removed, the naming if approved, and this policy address every single uh detail on how to be removed or the naming of the spaces.

Thank you.

Did this receive a recommendation?

That's received a favorable uh recommendation for doing pass.

Excellent.

Uh resolution 6-2026 regarding amending policy 101.9.

It's like a radio station.

Uh regarding naming of the organizational assets, received a positive recommendation from the diversity of policy and human resources committee.

So the chair would request a second to such recommendation.

Any discussion.

All right, hearing none, we'll have a call of the roll.

And Dr.

Matada.

Approved.

Dr.

Palacio.

Approved.

Dr.

Riello.

Ms.

Woodard?

Approved.

And Mr.

Bieterman.

Approved.

The motion's carried.

Thank you very much.

All right.

We'll we'll work on the uh Ray Bieterman CEO position.

And that comes with the donation.

Quick.

All right, let's uh move on to the facilities committee.

Uh Dr.

Dr.

Lisa Riolo, you are chair of that committee.

I am chair of that committee.

And we've got three resolutions, and I ask Adam to come present those.

Good evening, everyone.

Um we have to do the resolution or the public hearing first.

Well I have it first here, but the way we would do that is um recess the meeting for the public hearing and then present the resolution.

Typically present the resolution.

Typically presents resolution during the public hearing, so that's where.

All right, I will now recess the regular meeting and convene a public hearing.

Um this is for authorization to consider uh grant of fee simple right of way to uh Indianapolis Public Transportation Corporation.

Uh 26, 27, 26, and 2810 East Washington Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, as advertised on February 13th, 2026 in the IBJ and the Indianapolis Recorder.

Please.

Okay.

So this is similar to the um multiple resolutions that um have occurred between us and indigo uh prior.

Uh we've even had one previously at um East Washington branch.

So uh this is regarding the blue line uh that is running down Washington Street on which East Washington Street branch is uh if you see uh there is the overall lot structure of the East Washington branch um property on the west side with the shaded area is the 563 square feet that NDPL or sorry Indigo has requested.

Uh they would like to uh create a um enhanced bus stop structure with a shelter uh that is more ADA accessible.

This is a benefit to NDPL patrons uh with easier access to our facilities and services.

There are no ongoing fiscal impacts regarding this property, it is undeveloped, it's grass and sidewalk and concrete.

Uh we're receiving uh would receive a compensation of four thousand six hundred dollars from Indigo, which we deem fair and equitable again with community impact promotes equity and is also um saving public funds by agreeing to this uh rather than uh extending out the uh negotiating process my last slide.

All right, thank you very much.

Um now at this point I would invite uh comment from the audience.

Is anyone present that wishes to comment on on this proposal?

Okay, uh there are no comments.

Um I would love to consider a motion to close the public hearing at this time and reconvene the regular meeting.

Second moved and seconded.

Any discussion on that hearing none, we'll have a call of the role.

Dr.

Martada, approved, Dr.

Palacio.

Approved.

Dr.

Riolo, approved, Miss Woodard, approved, and Mr.

Beterman.

Approved.

The motion's carried.

We are now uh public hearing is now closed.

Now we're back in the regular meeting.

Very exciting.

All right.

Uh so resolutions uh seven and eight.

We need to vote on the resolution.

Oh, resolution.

Oh, just voted to close the public meeting.

We just oh very good.

We're halfway there.

Sorry.

So now I would love to um have a uh motion on the uh resolution four-2026 regarding authorization to grant fee simple right of way to Indianapolis Public Transit Corporation at 2726 and 20810, East Washington Street, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Um did it receive a positive it did receive positive recommendation to the whole board.

Great.

So it received a positive recommendation, so I would just need a second.

Second.

All right, any discussion?

Hearing none, now we'll have a call of the roll for to approve resolution four-2026.

Dr.

Martada, approved Palacio.

Approved.

Dr.

Riello, approved, Miss Switter, approved, and Mr.

Bieterman.

Approved.

The motion is carried.

Okay.

Now we'll move on to the next one.

Okay.

There's a bit of a skip from resolution four to resolution seven.

Um so resolution seven and resolution eight are uh sister resolutions uh for amending and extending uh land lawn and landscaping services with our two um service providers.

All right.

Um so um seven and eight, um we were uh potentially gonna consider them together.

Um does everyone consent to considering those two resolutions together.

Yes, okay, very good.

Okay, great.

Uh resolution seven um is with uh Davy Tree Company, and they along with uh Providence who's the vendor in resolution eight um were awarded the initial three-year um contract in 2021.

They have each subsequently been awarded two uh two additional one-year extensions.

Both of these resolutions are uh requesting approval to extend for a third and final one-year extension through April 2027.

Davey Tree has uh offered a zero percent price increase from 2025, and they offered a 2% price increase in uh for 2025.

And they're um what you can see is the difference between 2023 and 2024 is we actually had a third vendor.

Uh we ended the contract after that, uh we ended their services after that initial three-year period and reassigned those via a quote process to Davy Tree.

Uh their 24-25 expenses are more reflective given their increased uh portfolio, and we expect approximately 113,000 again for 2026.

Uh the vendors based in Indianapolis.

Uh Davy Tree is a uh multi-state entity, but they do have a um a local headquarters here in Indianapolis, and they are not a city certified XPE.

And then resolution eight is the same contract.

Uh a third and final one-year extension with Providence Outdoor.

Uh Providence is offered a three percent increase in price, and last year, converse to Davy, uh, they offered a zero percent, so they're basically just flip-flopping their price increases every other year.

Uh their annual cost is approximately 130 to 140,000, and we expect that to maintain given the modest three percent price increase.

Excuse me, Providence Outdoor is based in Novelsville, Indiana, and they are not a city certified XPE.

That's the last for those two.

Okay.

Okay, so resolution seven-2026 and eight-2026 regarding approval of the third amendment to lawn and landscape services contract with the Davy Tree Expert Company and the uh Providence Outdoor Inc.

respectively received a positive recommendation from the facilities committee.

So the chair will uh request a second to such recommendation second, all right.

It's been seconded.

Any discussion?

Hearing none, we'll have a call to the roll.

Dr.

Martata approved, Dr.

Placio.

Approved, Dr.

Riolo, approved, Miss Woodward, approved, and Mr.

Riderman.

Approved.

The motions uh carried.

Right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, that's all for facilities.

Unfortunately, that's all we have for you.

Okay.

We'll have to wait.

I'm I can't wait.

Well, let's move on to uh library foundation update and report.

We actually have a president here this time.

I've been promising that you are coming for months, and here you are.

Glad to be back.

Um, also very happy to have with me uh Bethany Watson, our vice president.

And so we're going to take care of a couple items.

First of all, in your report, uh in your board book, you have our standard report.

So um some things we wanted to share with you that haven't already been mentioned to this meeting.

First of all, we were just so thrilled to support Meet the Artist, and we um we're really um pleased with how that event went, and we want to just congratulate everybody involved with that and circulate night at the library tickets are on sale.

You can get early bird tickets through March 1st.

So please uh join up join us by getting some tickets.

We wanted to make you aware also of some of our bigger donors that have come through, our corporate and foundation donors, um, particularly.

So um they're they're listed there, and if you have any interactions with them, please thank them for supporting us.

And then this month in January, rather February, we provided about 240,000 to the library, and some of the things that we're funding this month are the bunny bag program with concert series, history on stage, and steam kits.

So we're excited about that.

Before and then before we move into the longer form report that you all have requested of us on a regular basis to give you a little bit more insight into the foundation.

Do you have any questions about our basic report, our normal report?

Okay.

Beg your pardon.

I didn't mention expand.

Oh yes, uh, I wasn't planning to, but the Marion McFadden Memorial Lecture is coming up on March 19th.

Okay.

And it's RL Stein and check the website for information on that.

We're proud to fund that, and the library's programming department does such a great job of putting that on each year.

Okay.

So we do have a presentation, and this is born out of our meeting that we had last year when you all said, can you please come to us and give us just a longer form update so we can get a better sense of what's going on to the foundation?

Beneficial not just for us but for viewers at home.

So this is we did have that our that broader audience in mind when we came up to this.

But before I get into this, I just wanted to share with you that we recently had a donor contact us, and she said that she has begun watching library board meetings at home, and she watches every month and seeing the board operate and seeing the executive staff.

Um, she says that makes me feel even more excited about supporting the library, that she really appreciates everyone's thoughtfulness and dedication to the mission.

So I just wanted to let you know that I heard that nice nice anecdote, and she told me I could I could pass that along to you.

So this is a really good opportunity for us to be here.

And um again, um next oh wait, this is us.

We can we can we have the power.

Okay.

So again for the I had a She-Ra moment, but I'll let that go.

Um, but um, but you know, again, for people who are at home, our mission is to elevate the Indianapolis Public Library by activating the community's generosity, we're a separate not-for-profit fundraising arm for the public library.

And then I'm Roberta Jaggers, president of the foundation, and this is Bethany Watson, vice president of the foundation.

And if we go to the next slide, um the big story is we had a really phenomenal year last year with fundraising.

We raised about 3.6 million dollars.

And um, as I mentioned earlier, that we did have some extraordinary gifts last year that may or may not repeat annually or ever.

We're not exactly sure.

We're going to steward those all of our donors the best we can.

But you can see that we got um the blind share of our giving came from foundations or donors who give through um institutions like donor advised funds.

We also received a lot from individuals, nearly a million dollars from individual donors, and then our next biggest was corporate donors at 178,000, and then government and organ organizations.

So we had, for example, the Lawrence Township trustees office and a few others, and that was about 75,000 in contributions.

So we're very um appreciative of all the gifts we've received.

Um, if you go on to the next slide, um, this is showing us what we wanted to show you here were our how we stacked up in 2025 compared to our one-year goal and our three-year strategic plan goal.

So um, again, we had an extraordinary year.

We shattered our our 2025 goal, and we're on our way to meeting our three-year goal.

So that's very exciting.

This slide shows us how many donors we might we have, and we this is something that I'm super proud of, and um, is that we actually saw an increase in um our number of donors.

So in 2025, we had about almost 1,500 donors and separate most of them are individuals.

Um, and in 2024, we had 1,220 total donors.

So we had about 200 more donors in 2025 than in the previous year.

And the blue number is what our goal was in our strategic plan.

We wanted to have about 1,250 donors per year.

Um, and same thing with new donors.

Our our goal was to have about 350 new donors a year in our strategic plan.

In 2024, we had 331 new donors, and in um last year we ended up with 487.

So we just saw a lot of growth at different segments of our donor base, which we're really excited about.

Here's where the magic is.

If there's magical numbers, this is it.

And this is our donor retention rate, and this has always been very strong for us.

So um donor retention are people who give one year and then give again the following year.

And so the overall for all donors, the overall donor retention rate is about 46%, and we had a donor retention rate of 64% in 2025.

And we had a donor retention rate of 64% in 2025.

So that means that 64% of the donors they gave in 24 gave again in 25.

Our goal in our strategic plan was about 0.58% or 58%.

So we knew we were already high, but we went even higher than what we were aiming for.

Additionally, new donor retention rate tends to be a bit lower, but we were at 27% actual compared to our goal of 20% and industry benchmark of about 19%.

So we are really excited about good donor retention rate.

So that shows that we're really working, and that's one thing about our operation is that we actually spend probably more effort stewarding our donors once they make a gift that actually asking, and that's what these numbers reflect.

So this reflects the hard work of a lot of people.

And to give you all a little bit of more insight into what we do to raise this money, Bethany is going to share some of that with you.

So this next slide is called How We Did It, but I would be hard pressed to go into detail about every single thing that we did in 2025.

We are a staff of nine.

We are a small but mighty team.

I think we accomplished a lot.

But this was our attempt to kind of uh uh compartmentalize all of the high-level strategies and projects that we did in 2025.

Uh some new, some continuing, some uh different efforts that we have on an ongoing basis, but overall, um, some of the things that we worked on in 2025 to meet our fundraising goals and to have a great donor stewardship uh donor retention rate.

So come on, next slide.

So portfolio management, um, we kind of just wanted to give you a lens into the development team and the work that we do.

Um, so portfolio management in fundraising is kind of the highest level of what a donor would go into.

Um, it is the most amount of attention that it would get from a development officer if they are put into a portfolio and they are the most likely to make a uh annual or uh some sort of recurring uh major gift, which we consider to be a thousand dollars and above.

So if they meet those criteria and we have a relationship developed, they are placed into somebody's portfolio.

Uh Roberta and myself have our own portfolios as well as two gift officers.

Um, and they uh can either be individuals, corporate, or foundations.

We try to have a healthy mix, um, but different staff members have different specialties that they lean into.

Um, so we have a pretty good um pretty good spread between the four of us and our portfolios.

And as of 2025, we had 370 donors under portfolio management, which is a lot of donors uh to have and to um steward in a very catered and special way.

They receive a lot of attention from the development team.

Um, this is not all of the donors that we work with, but they definitely get the most attention out of uh all of the donors that we work with.

So we'll go to the next slide.

Couple different campaigns that we launched last year.

Um we have our friends of the library, which is our annual fund campaign.

Um, it is a direct mail piece that goes out quarterly.

Um, we received in 2025 nearly 2,500 gifts, and we raised 221,000.

Um, we also sent out a little over 8,000 letters, direct mail letters that get sent out directly to people that make it to our friends of the library list.

Um, and we also have an e-send for people that are specifically signed up to receive emails from the library foundation.

Um, and last year we uh achieved an average open rate of 52 percent.

Uh, and just to put that into perspective, um, nonprofit industry standards as of last year were somewhere between 25 to 30 percent of an open rate.

So we are very pleased with an open rate of over 50 percent.

That shows that we have um very loyal donors that look to receive communication from us.

They are opening the emails that we send them and they are engaging with the materials that they receive.

Uh annually, we also host a staff campaign in the fall that is hosted by our development officer.

Um, we try to engage, we have a staff campaign committee that provides personal testimonies as to why they give, um, and we try to make it as easy as possible for staff that are interested in providing financial support to give through different uh various different means.

Um, so as of last year, we raised 25,200, which uh huge kudos to all of the staff that participate that.

Um, it's truly a testament to how much they support the library foundation and how committed they are to this mission.

I think it really just demonstrates that commit uh that commitment.

Um, and an interesting uh stat too is we had uh 95 donors that contributed to the staff campaign for 2025, uh, which was significantly up from 68 donors that gave in 2024.

So we are very proud of the results that we got from our staff campaign.

Thank you.

Um couple other campaigns just to share with you our board giving.

Um we are proud to report that 100% of library foundation directors contributed financially in 2025, they contributed or raised 117,000 uh and 500 through November.

That doesn't include December total.

So that means that they either contributed themselves or they helped solicit through different connections and different meetings support for the Library Foundation.

Giving Tuesday, if you're not familiar, is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

It has come into somewhat of a national holiday where a lot of nonprofits like to do some sort of special activation.

And this is something new that we've uh started doing within the last couple of years.

If you're familiar with the book tile process, so you are actually able to buy a commemorative book tile and put it in place at your branch, if that's interested.

Um, if it's a branch that you have special connections to or if you want to uh memorialize uh somebody special in your life.

That is something that you have the option to purchase, and then all of the proceeds go to the library foundation.

Uh we usually will host uh special sales throughout the year, usually in tandem with uh branch reopenings or celebrations.

But something special that we started doing is offering a significant discount on Giving Tuesday as a one-day only sale, uh, again, with all of the proceeds going back to um to the library foundation.

And we build that as a special holiday if you wanted to get something special for you know the family members or the friends in your lives.

Um but we actually had uh a lot more people give to the Giving Tuesday booktowel sale in 2025 compared to the first time that we hosted that in 2024.

Um so we had 26 donors give 5,600 in 2025, up from 16 donors in 2024.

Um, and we did have several people say that they were specifically waiting until Giving Tuesday to purchase their book tile, which is exciting because it means that people are paying attention and that they are looking forward to our Giving Tuesday sale.

So excited to report on that.

And next slide.

Um Circulate Night at the Library is the Library Foundation's annual fundraising event.

It is uh 2026 event, just a quick plug is quickly approaching on April 17th.

Um, but just as a sneak peek into what we did last year, um, we raised a little over $82,000 compared to our $75,000 goal.

We had a total of 18 sponsorships, of which uh were five completely new sponsorships to circulate.

We had 290 total attendees, uh 23 uh four tickets sold.

So some of our tickets did go to our sponsorships, so that's kind of why the difference uh in numbers is there.

Um, and then we had a little over 20,000 raised from our Silo auction.

So overall, very pleased with the results.

It's a great opportunity to celebrate the library, have a fun evening together, um, and raise funds to our mission.

So, kind of going into more uh extra activities that we had in addition to some of these campaigns.

Um, we're going to talk about our newsletters and then um some partnership opportunities with the marketing and communications team.

So we've kind of talked about this already, but um, our friends of the library mailing is one of our direct mail pieces that we send out, but we also have two other mail pieces that we send out annually.

We have our imagined newsletter, which goes out between four to five times a year, and then our legacy uh newsletter, which goes out about two times a year.

Um, and the Imagine newsletter is uh to provide updates about the Library Foundation to our donors.

Legacy is specifically geared toward people that meet the criteria for potential plan giving donors, so uh donors that are interested in putting the library foundation in their estate planning.

So just some again, high-level stats we've got over here.

Um, imagine we sent a little over 26,000 uh print essence and 15,000 eSends.

Um, legacy, we sent a little over 8,000 print sends and then uh close to 6,000 for eSENS.

And again, I just want to highlight the uh open rates that we've got for both of those eSends compared to the nonprofit industry average of 25 to 30 percent.

We're very pleased with these open rates of uh an average of 54% and 51% respectively.

Um again, it just shows a lot of engagement in that we have a very loyal group of donors that are looking for communications from the library foundation.

Can we go next slide, please?

Um, and uh last step for me, um, just kind of some opportunities.

Um, I think we might have skipped ahead.

There we go.

I don't know what happened.

We're good now.

Um, shout out to Mary Barr and her team.

Um, we've had a lot of good uh uh conversations that have come out just uh in figuring out how to increase visibility uh for the library foundation in general, but also for our donors.

Um, one of the things we've been in conversation with is uh increasing our corporate sponsor benefits through uh different library channels.

Um, so we have uh had several uh planning meetings to uh talk about that, but we are pretty close to being able to start offering those through some different uh newsletter and different uh communications channels that we've got.

Um, shout out as well, the library funding at a glance page.

If you haven't uh checked it out recently, it is a great tool to kind of look at the library's financials.

It includes the library foundation as well.

Um we actually received uh uh uh input from our donor survey that we completed back in September that people are very interested in kind of the financial difference between the library and what the library foundation supports.

So this is very much in line with what our donors want to see.

It's a great uh conversation tool that we can use to educate them.

Uh we also have uh added the donate button to the ndpl.org website.

So if you haven't checked it out recently, there is a donate button in the top right corner.

Um that was uh a project that we were very excited to see come to fruition.

So again, huge thanks to Mary and her team working on that and just uh providing more visibility for the library foundation as well.

Um other conversations that we're working on, so more to come in 2026, but we're very excited about the direction that we're we're going and um just appreciate our partnership with marketing comms and um being able to work through some of those ideas.

So this is we wrap up here.

I mean, it's hard to really think about what we were able to accomplish and be anything but grateful for the donors for the partnership with the library, the partnership with all of you, and then my god, my staff and the board that we have at the foundation, they're amazing.

So I just want to go on the record and just say how proud and grateful I am to work with all of you and do want to spend a little time talking about specifically our relationship with the library board and how we help to nurture that this year.

And again, some of these things are really intended for people from home or or if we have new board members.

So, first of all, we're just really grateful to have Lisa Riolo serving on the library foundation's board.

She's so engaged, she serves on our governance committee.

She um always um is just she's just there at everything.

If we if we one day we had a tour of you know, any any type of extra activity to get involved, she's there.

She's so committed and so all in, and I've just it's amazing.

So thank you.

Um we we do the monthly reports year meetings, and then per your suggestion, we're going to start out with quarterly or so more longer form updates about the foundation.

Um, and we also so we had that training session in September.

I I'd love to repeat that again, as that was really good.

And then also many of you contributed or are about to contribute to fundraising campaigns to benefit branch libraries that have fewer receipts than the rest of the other ones.

So um, I'm just proud to tell you that this year um we were able to bump up because of your generosity and some other other folks who are giving, we're able to bump up our minimum to $300 to $700.

And so we are really um appreciative about that.

And so we're gonna be notifying the branches soon that are going to be getting makeup contributions from us.

And again, we are welcoming gifts for that all year round.

Um, we get those over to the library quarterly, but you guys really made a difference and helped us to bump that up.

And then as far as oops, I didn't I missed I missed my slide.

I'm sorry, that was what I just said.

And then this is what we have coming up.

So again, we want to continue with our reporting cadence that we've talked about.

Um, we are happy to host you all for another training session on the foundation if that's something you all want.

And I'm just kind of looking around and I'm seeing I'm seeing some nods.

So we'll we'll look at that.

I think that that August September timeline will work well.

Um, we'd love to have you see uh see you all circulate.

And again, we have some information on how to buy tickets.

And if you know of somebody that might be interested in a sponsorship, we can also do those.

I think our deadline for those is March 13th.

So that's coming up, but we're definitely excited to get people involved with circulate.

And so next time um when we get together, I see this is all.

Oh, I'm going backwards.

I'm sorry, I should not be driving.

Um, we want to talk about we'll just go more depth about our support of the library.

We can also talk a bit more about branch designated gifts, and we just wanted to invite you.

Is there anything else that you would like us to share when we come to you next time with a bigger report?

Anything more?

This was very comprehensive.

Thank you.

Okay, you're welcome.

Okay.

That's it.

That's it.

That's it.

Unless you have anything else.

Any general questions.

All right.

All right, thank you.

We're excited to be here.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, that was great.

Uh, let's move on to the report of the CEO.

Um, Mr.

Gregory Hill.

All right.

Thank you, President Biederman.

Thank you.

Board of Trustees.

Thank you to our guests.

Today this evening's board report will cover the month of January and the previous 30 days.

The report will cover a typical day, January programs, staff recognition, and I wanted to highlight the leadership enrichment and development program, the heart of every neighborhood, upcoming events.

And I'll uh go through this and just make sure I give uh Miss Mary Ann McKenzie time to do her strategic plan and statistical report update, which we still have those both of us.

And Mr.

Hill did you want to confirm the confirmatory resolution?

I'm sorry.

Yep.

I do that sometimes.

I apologize.

That's all right.

So before you use confirmatory resolution 9-2026, which is in its typical format regarding to personnel finance and travel for the month of January.

It's in its typical format, and I would ask for your approval.

All right, is there a motion to approve resolution 9-2026 regarding finances, personnel and travel?

So moved.

Serious second.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded.

Any discussion?

Hearing 911 call the rule.

Dr.

Montata.

Approved.

Dr.

Pasio.

Approved.

Dr.

I mean Miss Wooder.

Approved.

And Mr.

Badaman.

Approved.

And we get everybody.

Approved.

Dr.

Miller.

Dr.

Planproof.

All right.

There we go.

We did it.

All right, continuing on.

Before I continue on with the agenda, first off, I'd like to thank the staff of NDPL.

Again, thank you, Miss Megan Shepherd, and thank you, Miss Wendy Johnson, for your presentations.

Just goes to show the work that goes on throughout the library each and every day.

So again, a hearty thank you to the staff.

You guys are amazing, and I appreciate all the work that you do.

I also want to say thank you to the executive leadership team.

You guys continue to do amazing work.

Thank you for one voice and thank you for one storyteller.

We're all capable of telling the library story.

So thank you for your dedication and your hard work, which makes uh the library run.

Uh physical circulation.

And just again, it's just physical circulation.

This does not include uh e-resources.

And this is your typical day in the month of January.

We had 13,862 items that were circulated.

This is just over two checkouts per person.

Uh our visitors, we had 6,585 visitors.

Um share visitors who attended uh program was one and 14.

So one in 14 visitors attended a program.

And then just going back to the circulation, the highest circulating branches for the month of January was Glendale, Nora, and Lawrence in that order.

And again, uh shout out to Nora.

They were closed for a long time and they then worked their way up to uh the second highest circulating branch for the month of January.

And again, share visitors who attended the program was about 7.2% or one in 14 visitors.

The most visited branches were uh Glendale, Fort Bend, and College Avenue.

And then uh we had 26 programs on any given day.

PC usage was 1,087.

On a typical day, about one in six visitors use a public PC or 16.5% of visitors use a public PC.

Here's just a snapshot of some of our January programs.

Uh Hallville, preschool visits, shout out to uh children's librarian Alice Sam.

She uh made a couple visits, seven visits actually, to uh Christamore House and Hawthorne Center, where she did story time.

She had 107 guests.

Uh we'll jump down to East 38th Street, the tax appointments.

They had over 400 appointments for the month of January, and then chair aerobics, which is uh our traditional physical strength exercises at various locations.

I think there were 30 programs total.

We had 631 patrons who took advantage of that, and then also the better together event that we had at Central.

Uh, I did get a chance to attend that event.

Uh I did talk to John Helling.

I thought it was a really great civic event, if see if that's something that we could do next year as well.

And then we had uh bilingual story times as well at various branches.

Paige Excellence is Kara Harkness, community involvement, Damika Newell, other duties assigned, Casper Elliott and Volunteer Partnership was Alpha Calpa Alpha.

So round of applause.

The next thing I want to talk about here is our leadership enrichment and development work group program.

We just kicked that off on February the 12th.

Thank you to the executive leadership team for your work with that, and a special thank you to Ms.

Mary Ann McKenzie and Ms.

Tisha Gillarce for your help with getting this kicked off.

So, real quickly, the leadership or lead program as it referred to is for building capacity confidence and collaboration.

The lead work group is a cross-departmental team composed of managers from departments represented represented on the executive leadership team.

So all departments are represented as part of this work group.

And the purpose of the role the work group is it simulates ELT collaboration to support leadership development, foster readiness for senior rates, and strengthen retention.

And then our development platform is managers gain experience and strategic decision making and cross-functional collaboration.

So basically, this work group simulates the ELT.

They do have projects that they will be assigned, and they also have experiences as well that they are responsible for uh attaining those.

And I believe there's a list of experiences, and they have to get at least it's based off of a point system, and they have to at least get five uh points between now and the 12 months that this program runs.

So really excited about this program again, gives them a chance to uh do the work that we do as ELT, see how it is to be able to work uh as part of a bigger group and uh to reach out to staff and then uh to make some connections in that.

So uh again, that kicked off February the 12th.

The next item was the heart of every neighborhood.

That was February 9th at the Glendale branch.

Um very good turnout.

Again, it exceeded my expectations.

Um free access for everyone, uh, literacy, exceptional experiences, and the importance of signing up for using renewing your library card.

Uh, I think we had anywhere from 45 to 50 people who came through.

Uh we had a contribution wall where staff or patrons could write down what the library meant to them, what the library meant to them.

Uh we got quite a few of those.

We had a uh branch history table where people could uh take a look at the history of the Glendale branch, and then most of all, we were able to get 10 positive testimonials uh from staff that was video recorded.

And one of the testimonials we got was from um State Senator Fadi Quador.

He gave a really good uh testimony about uh the impact of the library, so we appreciated that.

The next schedule event is April the 13th at East 38th Street branch, and that will be from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

And I think Angie uh for the board members uh we'll make sure that that is on your calendar so you could attend that as well.

Uh some upcoming events.

We have intro to foundation directory, finding grant funders.

That's on Wednesday, February 25th.

Uh, there's also Fearless asking how to build an individual giving program.

Uh Saturday, February the 28th, and then the lunar new year, which is the year of the horse, Saturday, March the 7th from 12 to 4 p.m.

And that will conclude this portion of my presentation.

And if you don't have any further questions, I'm going to turn it over to Miss Mary Ann McKenzie so she could do the uh strategic plan update and the quarterly statistical report.

Any questions from the board?

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good evening, everyone.

Good evening.

You have two presentations for me tonight, so I'm very excited.

They are a bit data heavy.

I've tried to be mindful of throwing in a little bit of narrative flair to keep you um on your toes.

But it is gonna be two episodes of Fast Talking and Lots of Numbers.

Um, of course, as normal, I'm going to give you an abbreviated version of what's in your print packet, but I'm happy to answer questions on anything represent live or anything in your printed packet tonight.

To kick us off, we're gonna do a quarterly report on operations.

Um I abbreviated this one more than usual.

This was the carryover from last month.

This, of course, is in your bylaws, though, so it is very important, but I believe you've had plenty of time to reflect on its contents.

So I look forward to your questions.

First of all, we're going to take a look at card holders.

This is, of course, a key metric.

You're going to see this when we talk about the strategic plan metrics as well.

A couple things that I really want to draw your attention to are that our active card holders, which is the patrons who have a library card that is not expired and have engaged in borrowing or engaging with digital content behavior in the past 12 months.

So these are the people who are most actively engaged in the library from a collection borrowing and materials perspective.

That's not to say that there aren't cardholders who maybe don't borrow or log into our stuff online.

They might visit the branch or use other services.

But we use active cardholders as a very crucial and key metric to how we serve the community.

And we did a fantastic job over the past year of increasing that percentage.

We did that through both engaging new cardholders.

We saw slightly more new cardholders enrolled than the prior year, but also just through doing the hard work of continuing to have conversations with people in the community and in our branches to make sure that they were aware of all the variety of services and materials that they could use their library card to access.

Now, that is a very large percentage, and I just want you to mark that 17.4% increase.

In my next presentation, that's going to become relevant.

Another way we look at our success in the community, of course, is just circulation.

Now, when it comes to circulation, there are two pieces.

There's electronic circulation, so ebooks and e-audio books, and physical circulations, the more traditional mediums that you think of a physical book, a DVD.

Our physical circulation has also expanded in the past year.

We've been piloting library of things.

So we had some small amount of circulation and quarter four for that.

But on the whole, the thing that I want you to mark here is that circulation in total, all those categories, it's only grown by 1.5% over 2024.

So it's growing, but it's growing at a small rate.

In your packet, you have a breakdown that gives you more details on the physical versus eCirc.

And as we've been talking about in prior presentations, electronic circulation continues to grow and grow and grow.

Physical circulations just sliding a little bit.

Now we know that in 2025 we faced some unexpected or unusual circumstances around physical circulation.

At the beginning of the year, we had two key branches closed, and then we also had a vendor disruption that impacted how quickly and how often we could get new materials to branches, and new materials are a strong driver of physical borrowing.

So we're not panicking, we're not stressed about these things, but we are monitoring that because if this trend continues, we do know that electronic circulation presents some unique barriers for us in terms of affordability and getting access and having things available in the timeline that patrons express expect, getting it to them in a timely fashion.

So we're going to continue to monitor that, but we are always happy to support how people borrow in whatever format.

We are not worried about more people borrowing electronically.

We're happy to see people checking out in any way they can.

But for all of you in your context, we just want to be mindful that there are some economic and financial impacts of those trends.

Now, when it comes to the other way people can use their library card to become an active borrower, we have database online learning platforms and other digital platforms.

This is an area that we're seeing really strong growth.

So we ended the year with a 10% increase over 2024, and we ended 2024 with an increase over the prior year.

This is just a space that we are continuing to see growth.

This is one that we're really excited about.

Usually the way most of these models work is that we pay for a subscription and we're not paying for additional access, it's not like a pay-by-login.

So these can be great ways to really encourage people to engage with our materials that doesn't have quite the same financial cost that like borrowing an e-book potentially could.

One thing that I want to note here, we added a new platform that's aligned with the strategic plan here, and that was called Brain Fuse.

It had two pieces: Help Now, a homework help option that was live.

It's live homework help available in both English and Spanish during peak hours.

And then a section called Job Now, which can provide career readiness and career job search support.

Those were very new at the end of 2025, but it's something that we're going to be monitoring closely over the next year because that is a new-ish idea for us.

It's something we've tried in the past and we're revisiting that to see if it can meet some requests from community members for those sorts of resources.

Over the course of the year, you also will have noticed that we had some access wobbles regarding Inspire.

Over the course of the year, you also will have noticed that we had some access wobbles regarding Inspire, which is a program through the state library that provides databases to all libraries.

I'm happy to share that we are seeing some positive progress to access through that program for our patrons.

The impact on us is that those databases, when a patron uses them, the usage count goes towards our library.

So they become an active cardholder with us.

We get one count towards our total usage.

So we were concerned that by narrowing the variety of things that were available to a patron, we might see impact in this category.

We did not see that.

But we are always happy to see the return of those resources, and we're starting to get some of those back at the beginning of January of this year.

So on the whole, happy to see growth.

We've had some concerns and some new things to try, but we ended in a very positive place by the end of the year.

When it comes to visits to the library, so we often call this people count.

That's the service that we use to monitor this.

We saw some positive growth in total.

If you want to see the breakdown for the entire system, it's in your packet, we saw 3% growth.

Our goal was to grow people visit count by 10% by 2027.

So we're about a third of the way there.

So we're ending right where we want to be.

So we're very excited about that.

Where people visited did change a little bit over the course of the year.

We had two branches that were closed for the first quarter, so we had some shifts and where people visited.

And so I included this slide here so that you could see how that shift ended this year because when we talked about this back in the beginning of the year last year, we had two branches closed.

So that there was some unusual behavior at that point.

The other thing that I wanted to acknowledge is throughout the year I would pull numbers on branches, and one of those branches is outreach, right?

Our bookmobile.

And there was a sinking issue that we have now resolved where every couple of months they just wouldn't get counted for a month.

I didn't notice it in the quarterly summaries, but I was reporting to you that they were seeing a little slight decrease throughout the year, and that was wrong.

They have shown a fit a growth of 15% over the course of 2025.

So first of all, I want to apologize to all of you for the error.

It's been fixed, but I just want to acknowledge the hard work that team does and investing in that growth.

Taking a bookmobile to a new location and setting up shop and letting people borrow takes a lot of work and effort.

So we are very excited to see their growth.

And we're excited to see the impact that the two new bookmobiles that we're receiving next year will have on their statistics next year.

So we hope to see more growth then.

Now you heard from our West Indianapolis branch manager about how public PC utilization is very popular at West Indianapolis.

We have a handful of branches where those public PCs are truly a lifeline for the community.

But in general, what we're seeing is that public PC utilization by branch is steady but not increasing.

Back in 2024, we had an upgrade to a new system, so we were comparing two slightly different metrics.

Now we've had about an entire year of monitoring this, and we can say that we're seeing consistent usage but not growth.

Now, when it comes to Wi-Fi usage, which is like if you bring your you know smartphone or your laptop into the library, the sort of related experience, that is growing, but that is also a metric that is in flux because of upgrades.

We had an outage this year.

So we're seeing large growth there, and we do think that we're seeing an increase of usage of Wi-Fi, but it's really hard to definitively say how much given some of the chaos in the data this year.

But one of the reasons that we're looking really closely at public PC utilization of Wi-Fi, first of all, we have to report them to the state library, but also because we know that some of the programs that were receiving federal funding or local funding that focused on digital literacy or access or subsidizing home internet access, they lost support over the past 18 months.

And we are been closely monitoring to see if we were seeing a shift in behavior because of that.

In a positive note, it doesn't seem that we're seeing a huge shift of that, but what that does mean is that the people who are using us before are just as dependent on us, so we don't want to change our behavior or our support in that area.

Lastly, on a very positive note, and this isn't in the next report that I give you.

I wanted to talk a little bit about study room usage.

Um, this is something that is a decision that was driven by our leadership and by all of you.

We have added more study rooms as we've remodeled and built branches, and as we've added them, the community has responded by using them.

So we ended with a 19% increase over 2025.

When I went to look at what was driving that, it's because we added those additional spaces.

So usage is consistent, and when we add new spaces, the public is quick to embrace them.

Now you might say to yourself, well, maybe we should just convert, you know, a bunch of things into study rooms.

I will always want to, you know, note that we want to support all of our services in an equitable and equal way.

And one of the things that's interesting about study room usage is we have an online booking system.

You can book up to two weeks in advance, but our patrons really like the experience of calling a staff person or showing up and having it book them for them.

So I did take a little peek at how people get access to our study rooms, and we're seeing that 80% of them, and if you see we had 56,000 over 56,000 study room bookings, those are being handled by staff members.

So it's a great opportunity for us to engage with the community, talk about all the other resources they can have at the library.

So we love people who choose to book online.

It saves us a little bit of work, but we also love the customer service engagement we get from offering that service.

So those are my quick facts from that particular presentation.

Of course, there's more in your packet.

Are there any questions that I can answer for any of you on this content?

Not a question, but please.

People like using the even the study pods, not just the um traditional room.

Yep.

And I think in your full presentation, I put how much of the new growth was coming from them, and they were really well loved by their community.

Yeah, people liked them a lot.

I just wanted to commend the facilities for making sure that those pods are used and that they will put in because it wasn't a lot of space to add to the to the branch.

So it's good news.

They came in handy.

Yeah.

I know that some of the driving for the calling to make a reservation for the study rooms is because it's the same organization has somebody who's in charge of doing it, and it's like it's on their calendar to do it every year.

So I think it's kind of a lot of that is just their routines.

But I was wondering if we can get some of that interaction on the online as almost a pop-up or you know, bullets of these are some events or something we've added to the collection, or some way to kind of drive some information when they're booking online without being a pain in the neck.

Yeah, uh, we can take a look at that.

The system that manages that is called Communico.

It does have some customization.

For example, this year we added an option to have people verify that they're willing to show their ID to access a study room.

Um, but yeah, we can take a look at that and see if there's a way to engage that more.

Questions on this one?

No.

All right.

Ready for the next one.

All right, the next one is more exciting, and thus slightly longer.

So first of all, we're gonna talk about the strategic plan.

And I heard a question earlier about um garden programs, and I just made me recall that we have a strategic plan objective that's specifically about garden programs, and we have a goal of offering two garden programs per branch per year, which we are currently building up and meeting.

Um, and those focus on the science of gardening and related environmental topics.

So it's tied directly to our seed library.

So very um pleased to be able to say that we are planning for that.

Um, on to uh not just numbers but also symbols.

So, of course, in this presentation, we're gonna be looking at first our strategic priorities.

Those are the key pillars of our strategic plan.

They're learning, belonging, well-being, and workplace of choice.

Um I keep saying those out of orders, belong belonging, learning, well-being, but um, I got the right words.

When you look at the analysis of these, what we're gonna be seeing is if we see a big upward facing arrow, that's because we've seen an increase of over 5% relative change.

If you see a flat line, we're somewhere in the above or below 5%, so it's a 10% area.

Just means we're steady, and then a negative or not desired change is gonna have an orange downward facing arrow.

We do see a couple of those.

I have to remind you, those are not we're they're not red blaring sirens, they are just let's take a look and discuss what's causing this and make sure that we have a plan to change the direction.

Uh this time around, I included the write-up for each key priority, and I wanted to remind everyone that when it comes to our strategic plan, we are filtering everything through our strategic filter of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

It's specifically called out in our belonging category, but it is a filter that we use throughout implementation of the strategic plan as we plan objectives as we write community action plans, and there are four key questions, but we have a longer version of this that we use in our program planning that is um maintained by our Access Belonging and Culture Officer.

So when it comes to belonging, our key areas of measurement, some of these we've already talked about, people count.

We're doing a great job, things are pretty steady.

Web traffic, we're seeing a surprising amount of growth.

So web traffic, I want to call your attention to because we saw 16% change.

That's great.

There's definitely some increased visits to our website, but the caveat there is there are also some changes in requirements for web accessibility, and we think some of the attempts to upgrade and address that artificially caused hits to hit our website.

We also know that our vendor for Biblio Commons, which maintains how you log in and place a hold and look at our catalog, it saw an increase in usage.

The same thing happened to us about two years ago.

They haven't really been able to explain to us why.

So we're not a hundred percent in that all that growth is new people using the website.

But the ones that we can see that are measured by us, we are seeing positive growth in this area.

So on the whole, excited to see this growth.

Percent of active card holders again seeing really positive growth.

Um, and then we are setting a baseline for our belonging programs where we asked two key questions, and we ended the year with those two questions having an average of 93% saying they agree or strongly agree.

93% is a very strong measurement, but we lost left ourselves some room for growth over the next two years.

So we're hopeful to see those flat blue lines or an upward-facing blue arrow as we move into 2026.

When it comes to learning, um, so earlier, so let's do a call back here.

I mentioned that it was important to pay attention to that active cardholder growth being very, very large.

Um, in learning, one of our key performance indication indicators is uh the circulation per active cardholder.

So that's a ratio, a fraction.

Um, I love to get into the math of things.

But what I want you to remember is that circulation growth was small and active cardholders was large.

I think I talked about this last time I presented this metric to you as well.

So we understand that active cardholders is growing at a fast rate, and that's causing this particular key performance indicator to show a negative relative change.

We are optimistic that that growth of active cardholders is gonna result in more circulation long term, and that some of the other things that were impacting circulation will have resolved, and we'll hopefully see this turn into a steady line in the coming year or two.

And if not, we're gonna take a real careful look at what's causing this shift because we fundamentally believe that if you have a library card, we probably have something in our collection that is valuable for you to borrow or that is you know otherwise going to improve your life, and we want to make sure that you're aware and connected to it so that you're getting the full value out of your library card.

And one of the reasons that we're not panicking about that orange downward facing arrow is of course the e-resource usage.

Again, growing steady.

We can tell that patrons who have a library card are visiting us that they're using our e-resources.

Circulation just seems to be this little carve out where we're seeing some shifts, and we're having to think about what that means for us.

Similarly to belonging, we are laying a baseline in 2025, but we did have some measurements to compare to from 2024 for learning, and what we're finding is that we did see growth in our key questions for these programs.

And uh we again left ourselves a little bit of area for growth in the coming year to continue to improve, but we're probably looking for a steady blue arrow over the next year in that category.

Well-being is a short slide because we are still building to measuring one of our key metrics, which is our partner survey.

I've spoken to you about this at least two presentations.

We are working to launch the partner survey.

We wanted to have a really strong foundation of all of our partners in the process of building to that, we realized that we had some more work to do than we anticipated in measuring who we're partnering with.

So we have built custom-built a new partnership database where staff can track when they're engaging with a partner, and we're gonna use that as a foundation to be able to send out a partner survey that should be launching definitely before the end of this year, hopefully in the next three months.

We also have well-being programs, they're laying a foundation.

We had a strong positive responses to those survey questions, but again, a small amount of growth available to us in the coming year.

All right, I'm gonna take a deep breath because every strategic plan presentation, we give you the highlights of everything, but there's one area that we're particularly focusing on, and this quarter's focus is on workplace of choice.

So I want to show you these key performance indicators.

You'll see that we're seeing blue arrows either upward facing or steady.

So those are in the first year what we would expect.

Um, our staff engagement survey, we measured psychological safety towards the end of the year, and we did see positive growth.

Uh, we also measure for our staff engagement survey in the first half of the year job satisfaction, and we saw a little bit of a loss there.

Um, it's not a huge loss, but it is enough that you know we paused, we looked at the written feedback we gathered from staff, and we've taken some steps to hopefully address areas of concern, and we're getting ready to measure that again next month.

So we're hoping to be able to show some growth this year because of some strategies we enacted based on that staff feedback.

For staff retention, you'll see that we had a little bit of a decrease this time around.

Um this was measuring the last half of the year, and the reality of staffing is in the last half of the year, people tend to retire and move on for other reasons.

Our talent and development keep a careful watch on why people are departing and doing exit interviews, and there's nothing that we've seen here that seems to indicate that this is anything more than standard turnover retirement and so on.

Okay, the other area of focus is our values of access.

I'm not gonna run through all of these.

I'm gonna try and just give you some highlights about the key performance indicators for these.

Um, so of course, our strategic plan has pillars of priorities, and then we have these subpillars, which are our goals, and then we have all the actions that we take to support those goals, and those are called our objectives.

So we did have a handful of objectives related to our values, but on the whole, our values are just the foundation for the entire plan and all of our work.

The things that we chose to measure related to them for access, we had total cardholders, so that's not just the active ones, that's all of them, and we did see growth in that category as we saw.

We look at collection diversity.

This is an area that we measured in our last strategic plan as well.

I do want to mark that the way that we measure this, we're using the same tool.

We have a tool that looks at our collection, our physical collection of books and reading materials, and it evaluates diversity from a variety of lenses.

And the lenses that they use align very closely with our strategic plan and our statement and visualization around intersectionality.

Um, but what happened in the last strategic plan is we were really focusing on growing the collection through purchasing, and our staff kept having conversations with us saying, Hey, when we think about a collection as a librarian, we think about this as a life cycle.

How does the material exist and continue to exist or to either be what we call weeded or removed from your collection to retain because it's seeing usage or it's retained because it's so important.

And so we have done a big shift in our thinking and are really thinking about collection diversity from that whole life cycle perspective.

And as you'll see, as a result of that, we ended 2025 with a collection diversity percentage of 30.5% for again our reading material, our physical reading materials here.

Now, physical reading materials are only a small portion of our collection, and so I'm gonna ask that you can trust that we are continuing to use these same methods across our entire set of collections.

We don't have a handy tool to measure all of them.

So this is just really an indicator of our commitment to that.

Communication and exceptional experiences, we have a TALAS survey.

We've talked with you all about it a few times this year.

Our TELUS survey asks every time you visit, you can give us five stars, you can sit answer a couple yes or no questions.

We are seeing strong positive results across that platform for both communication and accessional experiences, which includes customer service.

Because we really love that tool.

We introduced some awards related to that that Gregory has spoken to about over the past few months.

And we are also kind of trying to leverage that TELUS survey a little bit to do some unique measurement for our new autism certified branches.

So we'll have some additional feedback from that survey coming in the coming year.

Smart intellectual freedom, I'm going to skip over it because I'm going to talk with you in more detail about that here in just a moment.

And then I want to talk a little bit about sustainable choices.

We chose energy usage intense intensity, which is basically a measurement of our building's energy usage sustainability.

When you pick that metric, one thing that you have to remember is every time you say open two new branches, you're setting a new baseline.

And if you have weird weather events or other things that happen, sometimes those can have an impact.

So we are seeing change that is not in the direction that we'd hope to see this year, but I really think that for us our baseline is being set right now where all of our branches are open.

Going into next year, as we make some additional remodel changes, as we you know optimize our branches, we hope to start movement in the opposite direction.

Um, yeah, so we're very excited to be able to find new ways of improving that metric.

I'm going to transition over to objectives.

Remember, those are the actions that we take.

There's a bunch of them summarized in your written report.

I'm just going to give you a couple highlights.

First of all, for we support intellectual freedom, we had set a goal of impacting a hundred thousand people, and we exceeded that by three times.

So we impacted over 300,000.

This is collaborative work from public service from our executive team going out in the community and talking about how we love the freedom to read.

And then also from our communication and marketing department doing a wonderful job pushing this message out into the digital space.

So we have been able to mark that objective as completed, but of course, it is still a key performance indicator.

So we'll still continue to push that message out into the community.

For workplace of choice, one key objective was looking to improve our benefits to support a healthier workforce.

But our um account and development team and then our finance team and Tisha and Lolita in particular did a wonderful job going to that for our staff and then working to negotiate a robust um benefits package.

And they did a wonderful job of thinking about this from the staff feedback perspective.

So that we did a survey back in 2024, and they have continued to rely on that feedback to think about what can we negotiate for for our staff.

Now, of course, it is negotiation.

The options on the table in front of us are somewhat controlled by the vendors we're using.

But we had some great outcomes this year, and we are positive that our staff are seeing a positive outcome because we did ask them some questions about that in one of our staff engagement surveys this year.

In the full report, I gave you a good summary of some of the positive changes that we've seen, but we are also planning to do another survey this year to check in and say what can we do to continue to improve over the next two years.

Workplace of choice.

We um have an objective that we completed.

We've talked about this previously, but I just want to mark that it is completed, checked off the list.

We are a good wage initiative employer, and our staff have responded positively to that change.

Um at this point, it's a good time to note that when we talk about an objective being completed, that just means the specific action that we identified has been undertaken, but that doesn't mean the work stops.

We will continue to try and look for areas of growth in these areas.

We just uh monitor them a little bit less closely.

There's a few um a little bit less reporting due for them at that point.

On that note, we also had our access belonging and culture page on the staff intranet that launched this year.

We'd wanted to find a way to support belonging in our staff in the same way you support belonging in our community, and because we have 25 branches staff spread it all over, we can do things like training and um you know resource groups, but we really needed a centralized hub where everyone could come and find standardized information about training available to them, about ways to celebrate cultural identity for themselves or their peers, and the access and belonging page was found to be the best place for that.

We had set a goal of by 2026 having a resource hub that impacted 50% of staff.

We found that staff love this resource page and have really embraced and used it.

And by the end of the year, we had already exceeded that.

We on average have a little over 600 staff, and as you can see, we had 589 unique views since the launch of this page.

So staff are really finding a benefit from that, and that is of course um Kim Ewers or Access Belonging and Culture Officer, and then Nate Weber, who has been helping support her internet page over the past year.

Last big slide.

Um, because our talent and development workforce uh have such a large um part to play in workforce um of choice.

I couldn't um not mention this again.

I mentioned it to you in a prior update before, but I wanted to highlight their end of year progress.

They try to make sure that our staff are representative of our community, and we think about that in all the ways that you can have a diverse workforce, and that is both through supporting the advancement of our already um diverse workforce internally, that is through going out into the community and saying, hey, we are a workplace of choice, you should come work for us.

And that is also thinking about how to target the dollars that we have to spend on recruitment in a way that is going to have the most impact and ensuring that we have not only the best candidates, but that those candidates are coming from a diverse pipeline.

And they've done a wonderful job of that.

All the objectives that they laid out for themselves this year, they have exceeded.

And I just want to acknowledge that they're continuing to do great work.

That um option number B there, they invest 30% of the annual recruitment budget.

That is a carryover from the last strategic plan.

We found it to be very um effective.

And I just want to mark that this year they did spend 55% of their budget, they far exceeded that goal, and we know that that is an effective strategy because we saw the outcomes of that under our last strategic plan.

All right, that's all my fast talking.

Um, what questions can I answer for all of you?

Questions do we have?

I did such an excellent job.

There are zero questions from the line.

All right, I'll take it.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Uh no unfinished business.

Oh, sorry.

Okay, if there's no further question, that concludes the CEO report.

Excellent.

No unfinished business, no new business.

Future agenda item.

This time is made available for discussion of items not on the agenda, which are of interest to library board members.

Opportunity is given to suggest items be included on future library board meeting agendas.

Do any board members have something to suggest for the March 2026 meeting?

Dr.

Classia.

Yeah, amazing.

Amazing work.

Yeah.

Any any items for next month?

All right, none.

Uh next meeting is going to be Monday, March 23rd at the Library Services Center 2450 North Meridian Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46208 at 6 30 p.m.

The meeting is now adjourned.

Thank you.