Library partnership lets you get landscaping book on one floor, lawnmower on another
Tori Brewster was looking for a lawnmower. The one she had was broken.
She also wanted to build some flower beds but had never done such a thing before.
Asked last week about her first encounters with the Tacoma Tool Library, the 39-year-old bookkeeper said the allure was as simple as that.
She was a relatively new homeowner in need of equipment and basic guidance, and the Tacoma Tool Library had what she was looking for.
The rest, according to Brewster — who now chairs the nonprofit’s steering committee — is history.
“I’m pretty much the prototypical tool library member. I’m about to turn 40, and I took shop class in 1992,” Brewster told The News Tribune last week with a chuckle. “Most of our members and the people we see coming in are definitely either first-time home buyers or renters. They’ve moved into new housing, and they want to fix stuff up and do really simple stuff, but they don’t even really know where to start.”
It’s likely a familiar predicament for many South Sound residents, and precisely the reason the Tacoma Tool Library was created in the first place.
Operating just like a traditional library, the Tacoma Tool Library deals in hammers, wheelbarrows, saws and highly sought-after pressure washers instead of books, endeavoring to improve self sufficiency and reduce waste in the process.
Since opening, the tool library has served hundreds of people throughout the region and completed over 19,000 rentals from its ever-growing collection of more than 2,100 donated tools, according to Brewster. During the pandemic, the nonprofit has deftly shifted to booking short-term tool rentals online and scheduling at-home deliveries, she added.
Now, the Tool Library’s next chapter will expand upon the possibilities, Brewster believes.
According to an Oct. 30 announcement on the Tool Library’s website, the nonprofit will officially join forces with the iconic downtown library, moving from a small Lincoln District storefront to a new space on the second floor of the main library branch at 1102 Tacoma Ave. S. in early 2021.
For the Tool Library — which is almost entirely volunteer run and operates on an annual budget of roughly $40,000 — the move will make an immense difference, Brewster said.
The new space — which will be roughly three times larger than its current tiny storefront — will allow the nonprofit to raise its profile, expand its collection and offer far more educational offerings, Brewster said.
Brewster also hopes securing a prominent space in the main library building will help shield the nonprofit from the harsh economic realities or rising commercial rents for years to come.
For a nonprofit, the financial stability is particularly important during a pandemic, Brewster said.
“I think it’s a really good thing for us,” she said.
Tacoma Public Library director Kate Larsen is just as optimistic about the arrangement.
Larsen said last week that even before the coronavirus forced her to reconsider what services a library delivers and how it delivers them, she was already warming to the idea of finding different partners to utilize the downtown main library’s abundant space.
While a deal with the Tacoma Tool Library is the first to be announced, Larsen hopes it won’t be the last.
Eventually, she envisions a second floor of the main library that’s home to several local nonprofits that are aligned with the Tacoma Public Library’s philosophy, while the library focuses its services on the first floor and in the locally renowned Northwest Room.
Larsen believes such partnerships have the potential to serve the common good while improving what the main branch has to offer.
“The pandemic has brought a lot of bad things, but it’s also brought some good things,” Larsen said. “The more that I talked to people about it — like the library board of trustees and others around me — it just started taking on a life of its own, and I realized that it’s a really good idea.
“We’ve got a ton of space, so we’ve got a resource we can share, but we also need new energy and new life. That’s what I think partners like the Tacoma Tool Library can bring us.”
Larsen noted that the library believes it has more than enough space to offer traditional services on its first floor and won’t be hampered by allowing outside organizations to occupy the second. Though the library is currently closed for in-person services, Larsen hopes the main branch — and other branches — will be able to reopen at some point next year.
Candidly, Larsen acknowledged that the idea of finding partners to occupy the main branch’s second floor was “born out of creativity” while navigating a COVID-19 related “budget crisis.”
Ultimately, she said, the library system concluded that the positive benefit of partnerships like the one with Tacoma Tool Library were more important than earning a profit or making a minuscule dent in the potential $2.2 million budget shortfall.
Though the specifics of the deal with the Tacoma Tool Library have yet to be finalized, Larsen said the nonprofit will only be charged for the cost of expenses like water and utilities.
At a time when small nonprofits are scrapping to survive the COVID-19 pandemic and libraries are re-imagining the services they offer, it’s the type of outside-the-box thinking that should be applauded and encouraged.
“I’m thinking of it more like an incubator that’s really just meant to help uplift these organizations as well as being a benefit for the library and the people who come to the library,” Larsen said.
“We think it’s totally in line with our mission.”
