by Zach Miller
Quick Summary
The Cultivating Community Seed Library is a collaboration between the Nobles County Historical Society and the Worthington Garden Club, made possible by a Community & You grant from Prairielands Library Exchange.
Prairielands Library Exchange is based in Marshall, and serves public, school, and academic libraries in southwest Minnesota. The director at Prairielands, Bethany Kauffman, was looking for ways community organizations could collaborate to strengthen their communities, so she created a new opportunity: the Community and You Grant.
When Nobles County Historical Society (NCHS) Executive Director Beth Rickers heard about the opportunity, she reached out to the Worthington Garden Club to plan a seed library, and the two organizations applied for funding. Prairielands accepted their proposal, and Rickers, along with collaborators Cyndi Morrison and Nancy Hofstee, got to work.
Their efforts culminated this Earth Day, April 22, at a kickoff event at the Nobles County Heritage Center in downtown Worthington. The Cultivating Community Seed Library consists of a good old wooden card catalog repurposed as a seed distribution station. Each drawer is filled with seed packets from which patrons fill their own smaller packets, which they can label themselves.
The kickoff featured morning and afternoon gardening programs presented by Hofstee (a Master Gardener), and there was a session just for kids in the afternoon. The organizers also offered attendees free gardening gloves and heirloom zinnia seeds. The event began at 10:30 a.m., and already by noon, each of the 50 pairs of gloves and all 100 seed packets were gone. "We tried to keep track of numbers," Rickers recalled, "but got a bit overwhelmed and lost count."
Kauffman sees the Worthington collaboration as emblematic of what the grant program hoped to achieve. "These are superstar collaborators bringing libraries and museums to their regions in new and creative ways," she says.
"From the perspective of NCHS," says Rickers, "this achieved exactly what we intended, to get people into our facility who might not otherwise darken the door."
The success of the kickoff event has left the collaborators with a new challenge. "Now we have to figure out how to restock the library," Rickers admits - "Several categories of seeds are wiped out!"
