June 2019

By Laura Hagar Rush, Sonoma West Times & News, June 12, 2019. This summer the Sebastopol library will offer a series of free mental health classes for teenagers, thanks to an innovative partnership between the Sonoma County Library system and Social Advocates for Youth (SAY), a nonprofit offering mental health and housing services for youth. The first group will be held on Tuesday, June 18, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at Sebastopol Regional Library, 7140 Bodega Ave., Sebastopol. Sebastopol is...

With graduation season upon us, I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite graduation speeches. It’s the speech that Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy, gave in 2014 at Dartmouth College. She references the typical expected advice from a graduation speech: “Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big..." And then she says, “I think that’s crap.”

Combining laundry time and storytime is not a new concept, but the Laundry and Literacy Coalition — a recent partnership between the LaundryCares Foundation, Libraries Without Borders and the Clinton Foundation’s Too Small to Fail initiative — is taking it a step further, piloting a project to install literacy spaces for kids under 6 years of age in 600 laundromats by 2020. It’s a joint effort to make early literacy programs available to underserved communities via laundromats nationwide.