Announcing: Libraries & Lemonade!
A refreshing summer project from For The People
When life hands us lemons (and book bans), library defenders make lemonade!
This summer, For The People invites you to join us in defending public libraries by talking with your neighbors. Hand out free lemonade to your community, and spread the word about what makes public libraries so great.
Participating in Libraries & Lemonade is easy: pick a day, time, and location for a lemonade stand, download and print out copies of the toolkit, and have conversations with your neighbors about public libraries over a cool refreshing cup of lemonade.
Setting up a lemonade stand is a great opportunity to get the word out to your neighbors about why taking action for our public libraries is essential.
Whether that’s joining a Friends group, attending a library board meeting, thinking about running for office, or even just getting a library card, we need more folks involved in libraries.
Let’s talk with our neighbors about strengthening and defending our public libraries. There are so many reasons to value and protect local libraries—they provide free public space, resources, and information, and in many communities, they’re one of our most important remaining shared common goods!
Learn more and get your stand started →
TELL US ABOUT YOUR LEMONADE STAND
Once you’ve picked a day and a time, tell us about your stand! If you are comfortable with us sharing the location, we’ll add you to our For The People lemonade stand map.
A privacy note: you can absolutely opt out of having the location shared, if you prefer; we still hope you’ll tell us about your stand so that we can keep track internally of how many folks participate.
NEED SOME EXTRA SUPPORT TO GET GOING?
For The People is offering up to $50 to cover costs of lemons, sugar, cups, and photocopies to the first 30 people who register their lemonade stand and request funding. You’ll need to have access to Paypal in order to receive funds.
FURTHER READING FOR YOUR STAND
Want to offer more resources and reading material to your neighbors? Consider downloading and printing this incredible zine, THE PEOPLE AND THE LIBRARY, including beautiful papercut art by Erik Ruin. The zine covers an oral-history of the Philly-based Coalition to Save the Libraries, a successful organizing effort that helped prevent the closure of 11 public libraries in 2008-2009. It also includes a reflection on community-worker alliances, a short piece from Emily Drabinski on collective-power and public good, and a roundtable discussion titled "What is a library for?"
You can also download and print a version of Ariel Aberg-Riger’s visual story, THE FIGHT FOR THE AMERICAN PUBLIC LIBRARY (originally published April 2023 in Bloomberg).
You can always find even more stickers, postcards, social media assets, etc on our Resource Library page. A big thank you to artists Flynn Nicholls, for the wonderful lemonade stand illustration, and to @Lizartistry, for the library coloring page!
FROM OUR COMMUNITY
This information and request for your help comes from a group of workers at the Free Library of Philadelphia:
Moms for Liberty will be having their National Summit at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown at 1200 Filbert Street. We are looking for lots of support during the conference since Moms for Liberty has threatened to disrupt library programming, particularly around Pride programming (more info here). We have some more specific asks for Philly folks regarding when/where support is needed, but are only sharing this with trusted partners, so it's not completely public.
How you can help:
For folks in the greater Philadelphia area, please read this Request for Community Solidarity and see if/how you can plug in on any of the asks.
For everyone, please see this request for Social Media Solidarity and share the messaging and images on your social channels.
Wishing a happy Pride month to everyone and sending solidarity and love to our siblings in Philadelphia and to all our LGBTQIA+ siblings across the country facing similar challenges, big and small, in their own communities.
In case you missed it:
It’s always a good time for a game of Board Watcher Bingo.
Every week is/should be Library Week - refresh yourself with this list of actions and pick one!
Are you signed up to help with FTP’s data collection project? The volunteer scoreboard refreshes every month, and it’s the best way to do good and win prizes.
This is amazing! Thank you so much for giving folks the tools tools to support Philly Libraries next week. We are grateful and hope that lots of people show up offer love and support to Pride programming and our LGBTQIA+ family and friends!