Here’s how the reinvention took shape for the Cornelius Public Library:

For years, the town’s library was crammed into a 3,000-square-foot space tucked into City Hall. It needed more room to breathe. At the same time, the rural community in metro Washington County also needed more affordable housing.

Today in Cornelius, library Director Karen Hill reports, the town’s library takes up the first floor of what’s called Cornelius Place — and the second and third floors feature affordable housing. Grants from Oregon Community Foundation helped with the project.

And here’s how the reinvention played out for the Jefferson County Library District in Central Oregon:

Using grants from Oregon Community Foundation, the library greatly expanded its efforts to reach out beyond the library, buying vehicles and materials for outreach and launching a program to focus on preschool literacy.

“We couldn’t have done any of this without Oregon Community Foundation funds,” said Jane Ellen Innes, the director of the Jefferson County Library District. “We’ve really been able to change our focus and improve our service countywide.”

Public libraries throughout Oregon are no longer just places where people can go to check out books and other materials. For decades now, they’ve been reinventing themselves. They’re community centers. They’re helping to boost literary skills for people of all ages in programs that often take library workers way beyond the walls of their buildings. They teach patrons computer skills and other tools essential to get ahead in this technological age.

And they are becoming, Hill said, places in the community where people can just arrange to meet each other face-to-face — an increasingly important service during an era when technology, for all its benefits, can be isolating.

Said Hill: “I think having a place where you can go that’s free, that’s safe, that’s welcoming, there’s no expectations, you can just sit on a comfy chair and look out the window if you want, that’s going to be really important.”

In other words, public libraries have become crucial parts of a community’s safety net.

Betsy Priddy, a longtime donor to and supporter of Oregon Community Foundation, has another way to put it:

“Libraries are an essential commodity.”

In addition to its numerous grants to libraries across Oregon — in its 2021-22 budget cycle, it awarded more than 200 grants totaling more than $2.8 million to libraries in the state — Oregon Community Foundation projects have helped to reimagine and reinvent the future of libraries.

It was just a little more than two decades ago when the rise of the internet started driving questions about the future of libraries: What role could they play in a world where information could be routed directly to personal computers? And how could public libraries deepen their connections to their communities?

Those were some of the core questions addressed in a 2015 report, “Oregon Public Library Needs Assessment,” prepared by Oregon Community Foundation with funding from the Foundation’s Betsy Priddy Fund and the Lora L. & Martin N. Kelley Family Foundation.

For Priddy, with her belief that libraries are essential, it was an easy decision to help fund the study.

It was an easy call as well for Craig Kelley, the managing trustee of the Kelley Family Foundation. Kelley noted that early childhood education has long been an interest of the foundation — and has shared an interest in that topic with Oregon Community Foundation for more than two decades. That shared interest led naturally to the topic of public libraries as an essential piece of early education, Kelley said.

But the conversation expanded beyond that.

“The other piece of it was seeing libraries as more than a place to hold books and how they can be more of a community resource,” Kelley said.

The final report, issued in the summer of 2015, listed key priorities for the state’s public libraries: Encouraging reading. Enhancing early childhood learning. Supporting lifelong learning. Digital inclusion for everyone. Presenting arts and culture. Boosting civic and community engagement.

In the wake of the report, Oregon Community Foundation launched a Library Innovation Fund; the Betsy Priddy Fund and the Kelley Family Foundation were the founding funders.

In its first two years, the Library Innovation Fund awarded 10 grants totaling nearly $197,000 to libraries across the state.

Karen Hill’s Cornelius Public Library got one of those grants, for $30,000.

Eventually, Hill and her staff raised $5 million for Cornelius Place, and she said the project has allowed the library to not just reconnect with the community in a new way but also has paved the way to create partnerships with schools, medical providers and other nonprofit organizations.

“We’ve just grown a lot over the last few years, sort of finding ourselves,” she said. “I think that the library means a lot to people and it’s played a big role in how things have improved in the town over the last five years or so.”

And, Hill added, Oregon Community Foundation remains a valued partner to the library.

It’s the same story in Jefferson County, where Oregon Community Foundation grants have helped fuel the library’s work throughout a sprawling county that includes the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. Innes said foundation funding has helped pay for vehicles which allow the library’s Outreach Storyteller to offer bilingual storytelling at day care centers, schools and preschools around the county. Oregon Community Foundation grants also have helped the library strengthen its summer reading program and provide programs for Warm Springs K-8 students.

“I believe the OCF funds have allowed us to expand our programming in ways that we would not have been to do without their support,” she said.

And Innes said the library is just getting started: “We’re getting ready to embark on an expansion project,” she said.

From his post at the Kelley Family Foundation, Craig Kelley sees all this activity at libraries throughout Oregon and likes what he sees.

“It’s a reflection of the libraries being really engaged with their communities and really wanting to be receptive to community needs and seeing that they have resources,” he said. “How can they try to utilize all those resources to meet those community needs, which are evolving as well?”

Betsy Priddy has another take on it: “I felt so honored” to be part of Oregon Community Foundation’s work with libraries, she said, and added: “OCF has been absolutely phenomenal.”

“I really feel like the OCF funds have allowed us to expand our programming in ways that we would not have been to do without their support.”

— Jane Ellen Innis, director of the Jefferson County Library District