BEC, LCRA Award $3,683 Grant to Lakehills Area Library

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LAKEHILLS, Texas – A $3,683 grant from Bandera Electric Cooperative and the Lower Colorado River Authority will purchase new mobile shelves for the Lakehills Area Library, freeing up space for public events in the library’s much-used community room.

The Community Development Partnership Program grant will allow the Lakehills Library and Community Association to buy five mobile, collapsible shelves to showcase used books available for purchase. Book sales provide financial support to the library, but the aging shelves that now display them are unstable, unwieldy and take up too much space in the library’s community room, said Dianna Landes, the library’s director.

"We are very excited about this grant,” Landes said, recalling a discussion with library board members about the challenges posed by the bookshelves now in the community room. “I told them, ‘We could seek a grant to make the room a more usable space for the library and the community.’ I had requested an LCRA grant before and thought this might be a good candidate.”

The approximately 1,500-square-foot community room provides free meeting space to organizations holding non-commercial events, and is the site of meetings or events two to three times a week and nearly every Saturday, Landes said. Equipped with a small kitchen area, an overhead projector and a sound system, the room also can serve as a polling place, a gathering spot for children’s literacy activities or a convenient location for area businesses to train employees.

The community hall also is central to the Lakehills Library Holiday Market, an annual event that allows local artists and other vendors to rent space at the library in November to display and sell their wares. The event typically draws about 30 to 35 vendors, and the new mobile shelves will open up space for more, Landes said.

“What’s really cool about them is we can have them spread out in the community room, but when we need more space, we can squeeze the shelves together and condense them,” Landes said. “Or we can completely remove them and squeeze them into the library’s work room. Being able to get a little more space in the community room works for a variety of reasons, and it’s going to make it look much nicer.”

The community grant is one of 27 grants awarded recently through LCRA’s Community Development Partnership Program, which helps volunteer fire departments, local governments, emergency responders and nonprofit organizations fund capital improvement projects in LCRA’s wholesale electric, water and  ransmission service areas. The program is part of LCRA’s effort to give back to the communities it serves. Bandera Electric Cooperative is one of LCRA’s wholesale electric customers and is a partner in the grant program.

Applications for the next round of grants will be accepted in January. More information is available at lcra.org/cdpp.

Press release courtesy of LCRA. Image courtesy of Lakehills Area Library Facebook page.
 
Posted Thursday, December 3, 2020