The following letter was sent to the members of the Legacy Conference Committee. Diane Moench speaks from her heart and from a position of experience. She serves as a Member of the Rochester Public Library Board and the SELCO/SELS Board of Directors. During the current biennium, she has been an active participant on the SELCO Library Legacy Review Committee which is responsible for reviewing and approving SELCO competitive Library Legacy grant awards.
I am writing to share with you my unique perspective on an issue on which you will be acting because I believe that my perspective will be useful to you. I have lived and worked in Rochester, MN for 38 years. For most of those years, I was an Executive Project Manager at IBM. I am now retired and in addition to being an adjunct professor in Business and Workforce Education at RCTC, I serve on several boards. The experience that I believe will be useful to you relates to my work on the Southeastern Minnesota Library Cooperative (SELCO) Legacy committee. This committee consists of volunteer representatives from each county in southeastern Minnesota and within the membership includes members of SEMAC and a Historical Society.
In the past two years, the members of the SELCO staff and the Legacy committee have worked to distribute the library portion of the Library Legacy funds. Distributing money is a very gratifying job but, as you well know, distributing money is work. The committee has spent many hours working together over the last biennium. We worked to improve our grant process. Our goal was to have the information we needed to make an informed decision which best utilized the money while ensuring that the process was not overly onerous for the grant writers. We did not want the process to preclude any library or organization in partnership with a library from requesting funds. Many libraries especially smaller libraries do not have professional grant writers on staff and with community and county funding stressed by the economy many do not have the funds to hire them. Looking at the data from our last quarter grant reviews, 19% of the grants we reviewed were for amounts under $500 and another 24% were for amounts between $500 and $1000. So, we are often able to make a difference with a small amount of funding. We have been able to make the process manageable for even small grant requests. With all grant applicants, we stressed the program results documentation by linking their final payment to the final report. We consolidated the final reports and made the resulting documents available to both houses of the legislature as an accounting of our activities. The positive feedback on the programs has been very rewarding and the committee is proud of what we accomplished in southeastern Minnesota with the Library Legacy funds in this biennium. Because we know libraries and in particular the libraries in southeastern Minnesota, because we have ties and relationships with the libraries and librarians of southeastern Minnesota, and because we have experience and a process that is working, we believe that SELCO and the SELCO Legacy Committee is in a better position than the State Arts Board to distribute the southeastern Minnesota Library Legacy funds in the next biennium. We can hit the ground running while they will have to build an infrastructure and process. (As an aside, a significant amount of pro bono work was done not only by the volunteers on the committee but also by the SELCO staff in support of Library Legacy work. It would be a shame to lose these free resources, their unique knowledge, and their energy in the next biennium.
I have struggled as I have written this letter with how to address the elephant in the room --the Neil Gaiman experience. The minute I heard this story, I knew this would hurt everyone connected with Library legacy funding and it has. It was the wrong but humans make mistakes especially when they are doing something for the first time. The really important thing is to learn from our mistakes. Project Managers spend large amounts of time understanding lessons learned and how to use them to improve future projects and processes. Let us not make another mistake by using this lesson learned as justification to walk away from processes that are basically sound instead of making process improvements to include checks and balances on large grant awards. I truly believe that the audit that I am told is occurring will exonerate the distribution of Library Legacy funds with this one exception.
Please promote the House position on Library Legacy funding.
Respectfully,
Diane Moench