Essex County Library Employees Give Back

How far can $1,500 in charitable money be stretched to directly benefit the less fortunate in Essex County?

You’d be hard-pressed to top the creativity and thriftiness of Kandice Cramer and Julie Feher.

The two big-hearted Resource Assistants at the Amherstburg branch of the Essex County Library – with key direction from the County’s Employee Engagement Committee, and Community Services Manager Jeanie Diamond-Francis – purchased hundreds of personal-care items for the 220 residents living in the Residential Services Homes program’s nine homes situated across Essex County.

The money was raised this spring thanks to an internal Essex County Library fundraiser.

To be precise, Kandice and Julie bought 702 personal-care items with just over $1,500, namely:

• 226 tubes of toothpaste
• 250 toothbrushes
• 131 bottles of shampoo
• 10 bottles of conditioner
• 79 bottles of bodywash
• 6 large packages of feminine hygiene products.

The items will be distributed this week (July 14-18) to residents at the nine RSH homes.

“We cleaned out Dollaramas in Leamington, Kingsville, Amherstburg and Essex,” Kandice says of the toothpaste haul alone.

The sequence of caring acts by Library and County employees is yet another reminder of the good so many so often do in our community, and not just within work parameters – but over and above, too.

“This started essentially with internal fundraising,” says Adam Craig, Chief Librarian of ECL. “We had a staff day and, as we sometimes do, we sold off some surplus stuff to our staff. We do book sales a couple times a year too. We decided – based off Kandice and Julie’s input – to direct the money to the Employee Engagement Committee."

That was in March, about the time when Jeanie, the County’s Community Services Manager, had informed a committee member about the pressing need in the Residential Services Homes program she’d just been told about.

“In a nutshell, the County has funding agreements with nine Residential Services Homes in the county,” Jeanie says. “Some are retirement homes, and some are like congregate-living lodging type homes. We subsidize a total of 220 residents that live among all these homes.

“It’s important to know that these residents each get only $149 a month in spending money. It doesn’t go very far. The price of everything has gone up.”

With that important, even urgent, need established, the Employee Engagement Committee “took it and ran with it.” Jeanie says. “It was amazing.”

That’s when Kandice and Julie began stretching all those dollars.

“They really led the charge on this. It’s just great what they did,” says Adam, ECL’s Chief Librarian. “Our involvement in the Employee Engagement Committee is relatively new … Honestly, it’s an extension of what we do anyways. I look at libraries as a community service. We’re providing free access to the internet, to computer printers. We’re providing free access to literature, and everything else. This is just another way for us to give back to the community. This is taking it to the next level.

“Library work, and public library work in particular, attracts a certain type of person. And one of the things I love about our staff is they get deeply embedded in our communities … This is another reason I’m so proud of our staff.”