Banking on KC – Margaret Perkins-McGuinness of the Kansas City Public Library
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Staying Vital by Reading the Community
Kelly Scanlon:
Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Margaret Perkins-McGuinness, the Deputy Director of Philanthropy at the Kansas City Public Library, which is celebrating 150 years. Welcome, Margaret.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Thank you so much for having me, Kelly. I'm happy to be here.
Kelly Scanlon:
Well, I'm happy that you came to share about the 150th anniversary, a little bit about the library's colorful history in the Kansas City community. What an accomplishment though. 150 years. That's wonderful. Let's go back to 1873. What was going on in Kansas City at the time?
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
One of the most amazing things about the Kansas City Public Library to me is that it's so reflective of Kansas City. It is reflective of a few people with a great idea about increasing opportunity for everybody. So in 1873, the superintendent of the Kansas City Public School system was named James Greenwood. Mr. Greenwood established the Kansas City Public Library actually as a single bookcase. So it was one bookshelf and there was a small group of volunteers who hosted a fundraiser so that we could create a small library. And at that time, it was a membership library as were many in the country. So at that time, we created a lending library that was available through sort of a membership process. And over time, the Kansas City Public Library developed as sort of a department or a program within the public school system.
Kelly Scanlon:
And when you talk about it being a membership library, obviously you have to apply to get a card, a library card, but a membership is different. Did you actually have to pay to become a member?
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
At that time, many libraries in the country as we were forming were membership organizations. So you paid a small fee to be a member and have access to the lending library.
Kelly Scanlon:
Okay.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
So you can think about one library, the Philadelphia Free Library, actually I think it's called the Free Library of Philadelphia. And that was the model that brilliantly and thankfully we all moved to having started and initially funded ourselves in many instances through private fundraising and philanthropy. So that is one of the exciting developments of the library. And in those very first days, we had our first librarian, her name was Carrie Westlake Whitney. So one of the things that we have really celebrated as we look back on the development of the library, that in fact our first library director was a woman. And 150 years later, just this year, we selected and onboarded a new library director. So once again, 150 years later, we do have a new library director, Abby Yellman, who just joined us. So technically she is our second female library director.
Kelly Scanlon:
Where was the library located at this time?
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Within the head office of the school district. And then our first library building was constructed in Downtown Kansas City, the first time that we had our own freestanding library. The building is still there, and I think it may be full of files or something like that. It's privately owned now, but it still has the stone facade and it says across the front of the building, public library.
Kelly Scanlon:
Let's talk about the 150th. What do you have planned?
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
The 150th anniversary of the Kansas City Public Library was technically December 5th, 2023. But because we know that 150 years of greatness and community engagement can't be celebrated in a single day, we went ahead and took a full 365 days. So on December 5th, 2023, we brought a celebrated scholar of public libraries and the role of public libraries in the communities in which they reside. His name is Tommi Laitio, and he was the inaugural Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow. So he had assumed this brand new position and all of his research and all of his teaching and engagement throughout that year was centered around the theme of convivencia. And convivencia is a translation of conviviality, but in the translation of convivencia, it really is talking about coexistence. So the coexistence of enlightenment and extraordinary community need, the coexistence of two ideas that can both be true in the same place, but conflict with one another.
And for us, that was such an incredible thing to think about and to be able to represent as a community that cares so very much for its people, but understands that caring for our people means that we're going to have to be more than one thing to serve our community effectively. And that we're going to embrace the fact that as a community agency, we have to reflect different ideas, different periods of time, different voices, different patrons, different geographies. So bringing Tommi Laitio in was such a celebration, and another extremely special moment of that celebration was the commission of a poem. So a very dear friend, Glenn North is-
Kelly Scanlon:
Oh, we've had Glenn on the show. Yes.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
As it came out of my mouth, I thought, I'll bet that Glenn has been a guest on the show. So Glenn North was commissioned to write a poem to celebrate our 150th anniversary, and Glenn wrote a poem that is of a structure called an abecedarian, and as you might assume, it's related to the alphabet. Perfect for libraries. Every line of the poem begins with the next letter of the alphabet. So it's a 26 line poem, and it was all about what libraries are, what they have been to him and to the community, what we can be. So it was truly a special celebration for us. So at our closing celebration, we will present it in a printed form to our guests. So that day we had so much festivity. So we started out with a quiet consideration of libraries led by Tommi, and then we moved in the evening to a massive public celebration bringing Tommi and Glenn into the Plaza Library with celebration and music and all of our community partners and an absolute packed house that was rocking.
Kelly Scanlon:
It sounds like a great time. And you've continued to have events throughout the year. Could you give us some highlights of those events?
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Absolutely. So one of our most treasured series of the anniversary celebration was the signature event series. So we started out with Tommi and he was the kickoff of our quarterly high profile signature event series. And our second guest was Jacqueline Woodson, who has won a National Book Award and a Newbery Honor. She is a MacArthur genius, and she is an author who has written beautiful books and beautiful poems that center Black female characters. So bringing in as our second guest, such an esteemed artist and author who can speak to the world through a voice that isn't as commonly represented.
Our third guest was Ari Shapiro, who is well known in the public radio community, but had also recently released a book that is all about talking to strangers. In this book that Ari had released just a few months before, he talked about a life spent talking to strangers and all of the things that he has gained as a person by entering new countries, new environments, new thoughts of framework, and the way that that has informed the steps that he takes in the world, which is such a beautiful parallel to the many world views, ideas, and points in time that we can provide access to through our beautiful collection of books.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes, it ties back to your first guest.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Yes, of course. So everything tying together such as we do. And then last night we had our final celebrated guest of the quarterly signature event series, Margaret Atwood.
Kelly Scanlon:
Oh yes.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
And that is a very big deal for any library, and it became very evident that it was a big deal for Kansas City when our tickets were released and sold out. They were free, but they sold out in less than 60 seconds.
Kelly Scanlon:
That does not surprise me. I mean, Margaret Atwood, for heaven's sakes.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
It was the real Margaret Atwood here in human form. We immediately moved it to a much larger location and still had 600 people in person and more than 1,000 people who additionally registered to watch the talk live through our live stream.
Kelly Scanlon:
I had several friends on social media last night after they got back from that event that were posting, they actually got pictures with her. So it was incredible.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
It was truly incredible. Yes. And she was so gracious, and it was so fun to be in the presence of such an Herculean character in literature, but also such an enormous advocate for libraries. Each of our guests really did come back to their own upbringing and what libraries have meant to them throughout their careers, through their success, and still all of the time and effort that they put back into celebrating our work.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. And we've got a few months until December the fifth. You said it's a year-long celebration. So what do we have yet to look forward to in terms of celebrations?
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
As we end this spectacular 150th year, we will have a couple of big celebrations, including the Heartland Book Festival, which we launched just last year. And everything that we've done this year has had a little bit of a birthday theme. So the Heartland Book Festival is taking place on October 12th. So excited this year we are bringing the great voting rights advocate, Stacey Abrams, who will have just released a children's book called Stacey Speaks Up. And then our keynote is an Indigenous author by the name of Tommy Orange and Tommy Orange's first book ever positioned him as a finalist for the Pulitzer. So this second book, which is covering really the contemporary lives of Native Americans in the United States, and not only the invisibility that some of those populations experience today. But also the vibrancy and the vitality of the culture and the painful histories that have brought them to where they are today and the way their communities continue to suffer and struggle.
So for us, that really ties together into a fun celebration and a consideration of how the choices that we make as a community and as a society and country carry forward to lift people up, things that we've recovered from grit and resiliency. So we're very excited to be able to celebrate those activities. And then we'll have a little bit of a party.
Kelly Scanlon:
Got to have a party in there. It's 150 years though.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
We do have to have another party. It's been a while since we had one. Our last party was last night with the great Margaret Atwood and this final party will really be a celebration of the many community partners that we were able to incorporate as a part of our 150th anniversary celebration. And we were really thoughtful when we considered who in the community will help us connect to different demographic groups, different age groups, but also really reflect that the library is a cool place to be. So our first always partner, but our first and most fun partner for the 150th anniversary was the Kansas City Streetcar.
Kelly Scanlon:
Oh, fun.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Our very good friend, Donna Mandelbaum AKA Streetcar Donna partnered with us. So if you have been in the downtown area, you will have seen the Streetcar Bookworm, which we celebrated and inaugurated just a couple of weeks before our 150th birthday. And that has continued. The Streetcar Bookworm will be in place a little bit past our 150th year. We also had partnerships with Charlie Hustle to create their Book a Trip Kansas City Public Library t-shirt, Betty Rays created a Kansas City Public Library ice cream. One of our most fun partnerships was partnering with Vine Street Brewing Company, which is Missouri's first Black owned brewing company.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes, they've been on too.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Oh, perfect. I know you have all the coolest people on this podcast.
Kelly Scanlon:
We do. There's just cool people in Kansas City.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
It is so true. There's so much to celebrate in our community and it has been such a fun year to do so. Vine Street Brewing was also one of our earliest partners to sign on, and they created a special brew for the library that is called One for the Books.
Kelly Scanlon:
Oh, I love it. I love it.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
A couple of the other partnerships include Made in KC Cafe, even J. Rieger created a special signature drink for us. So we have had so much fun connecting with the community and these high-profile partnerships that really reflect back to our community that we are here, we're present today, we're fun, and we're pretty darn hip.
Kelly Scanlon:
Obviously, the library has had to change with the times and people's interests and so forth. And here in the digital age where we find ourselves, why are libraries still important?
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
I think that this is one of the most important questions that you can ask, and it is one of the most important questions that we can think about as a city because there are so many of us who can meet every one of our needs by picking up our smartphone, but that is not everybody. And our work can't be finished until everybody has access to the same levels of information and opportunity that any one of us with either one of those tools and that connection to the outside world has at our fingertips. One of the things that we love to share with our community is the importance of our physical branch locations. Every year we welcome as many as 1.3 million in-person visitors into our Central Library Plaza and our 8 physical branch locations. And some of those branches have higher in-person visitorship than others. And oftentimes that connects to whether or not they are as connected digitally.
So as one example, our Blueford library, which is at 31st and Prospect, welcomes somewhere between 600 and 1,000 visitors on any given day. And when we have that many in-person visitors, they're there for the books, they're there for the community resources that we have available. We have an incredible youth and family engagement team. Every one of our branches has youth librarians to welcome and connect with the families that we serve. And then we have robust digital resources available in every branch. One of our biggest priorities since the dawn of technology has been to think about how we can harness this incredible tool which is truly centered around providing access to information in ways that all of the community can access.
And the pandemic gave us a great opportunity and a great challenge. All of a sudden we had families who not only needed access to the internet to watch movies or check their emails. Children needed access to the internet in order to participate in class. And during those lockdowns, the Kansas City Public Library immediately took measures to boost the wifi signal out of our buildings into our parking lots. So on any given weekday, during the very early days of the pandemic, our parking lots were full of cars. And if you wondered why it was because there are families who needed that access in order for their kids to participate in school. It was a wonderful public service, and it was a time that we tested our ability to pivot and respond. And I think that that is one of the things that's incredible about an institution that can survive and thrive after 150 years of serving the community. We have had to be dynamic, responsive, and if nothing else, that pandemic had tested our capacity to turn on a dime when the community's needs turned on a dime.
So I would say that it's such an important question, and it's an important question that we can ask ourselves is who is excluded from the digital age now and what kind of magical, vibrant, and diverse community can we celebrate when those voices are brought in and when the opportunity and the richness and the information that you and I can access through podcasts, yes, digital ebooks, internet, and all of those tremendous resources can be made available to people who are currently excluded?
Kelly Scanlon:
That's such an important point that you've made there. I think too, that even those of us who have access to many of the tools that you just described, there is still something, it's almost come full circle where people still, and kids too, they still, in spite of all of the digital access, they find themselves holding a book and that tactile experience of holding the book and becoming, without sounding weird, one with the book, so to speak, as they read and get absorbed into the story. There's something to that that just doesn't happen when you're reading it with this blue light from the phone bothering your eyes and so forth. And I think the growth and the popularity of venues like the Rabbit Hole, Pete and his wife Debbie, and they've been on the show too, but just the popularity of those says that libraries aren't going away. In addition to all the other things you just said, people still like that immersive experience.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
I love having the opportunity to talk about how important books remain and always will if we can have anything to do with it. Because that tactile experience, even if temporary, the sense of connection and ownership of a story that one can feel with the accomplishment of flipping the last page on a book or going back to a familiar passage or a familiar illustration, that can never go away. That must be part of our culture because it is part of what's brought us to where we are today.
One of the things that is interesting when we think about community work is thinking about how we can measure our impact. So one of the things that is cool about being a library is that we are data powerhouses. So one of the numbers that I like to remember is that we still check out close to a million physical items, books, magazines, and encyclopedias every single year. Close to a million items are taken into the hands of readers because we clearly still find and need that. And thinking back to some of the library's community impact, we know, and the data shows that the number of books in a child's home, if you account for every other opportunity, risk, deficit, resource across the board, the number of books in a child's home will always have this incredible magnifying factor on that child's likelihood of being successful in school, being successful in their career, and being able to navigate tomorrow's future.
So I think that that is also one of the ways that we can always look back to that role. We will always be an institution that provides free and equal access to information. And where it's not equal, we will go out of our way to try to make it more equal. And one of the great things for all of the book readers among us is that the data shows that those books make a difference. And that means that we can all keep pursuing that love, keep those pieces of paper around our house. We can all have bookcases full of other people's magnificent and inspiring ideas and know that each time that those magnificent and inspiring ideas in the form of a paper book enter another person's home or environment, we position them better to have success and opportunity. So that is a really important question and it's a really important part of our work.
Kelly Scanlon:
So well said, Margaret. There's one part of the community outreach that you do that you haven't talked about yet. And I know it's already happened, but I think it's very important to talk about. And that's the summer reading programs. Can you give us some highlights of that please?
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Absolutely. So one of the things that was very important to us as we entered our 150th anniversary year was to ensure that every Kansas Citian was invited to our birthday party. So the way that we made that possible is that we decided that every year we have a party, it is the summer reading program. This year, the theme of the summer reading program was Welcome to the Reading Party, and in every one of our branches, which means 10 different neighborhood facilities, each of which has their own district that they serve in the way that best meets the needs of that community, got to have a whole entire birthday party of their own and everybody was invited.
So this year, one of the things that was really special about the Welcome to the Reading Party was that we got to build on some success. So over the last several years, we have seen increasing record-breaking participation in the summer reading program. And this year was no exception. We had more than 13,000 formal registrants to our summer reading program this year. And one of the ways that we've expanded recently was to formally create a summer reading program for adults. So we also hosted a big summer reading birthday party again at Vine Street Brewing Company, our good partners on our 150th anniversary to kick off the adult summer reading program.
Kelly Scanlon:
Margaret, the library has been so central to so many people's lives here in Kansas City and still is. And the community outreach that you do is wonderful. Congratulations on the 150th, and we're so happy that you took a few moments to come and talk with us and share with us about that.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Thank you so much. It is such an honor to get to reflect the work of the library. So many hands, hearts, minds, go into the work that I am getting to share with you that I want to thank my team and the team of which I'm so privileged to be a part for caring so much and thinking so innovatively about the ways that we can truly meet the needs of Kansas City. And it's so exciting to be a part of the Country Club Bank's podcast and to get to meet with you, especially since I've seen what an all-star cast you've had in the past. It's really wonderful just to get to be a part of such a rich and powerful community that cares so much for its own.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes. And again, thank you very much. And if people want more information about the library, they can go out to your website.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Absolutely. Our website is kclibrary.org.
Kelly Scanlon:
Margaret, again, thank you so much.
Margaret Perkins-McGuinness:
Thank you for having us.
Joe Close:
This is Joe Close, President of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Margaret Perkins-McGuinness for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Kansas City Public Library. As Margaret delved into the library's storied past and its ability to adapt over a century and a half, it's clear that the library not only preserves our history, but continuously evolves to meet the contemporary needs of its patrons. The library is more than just a repository of books. It's a vibrant community hub that adapts to technological changes and societal needs. Through partnerships with local organizations, the library remains at the forefront of community engagement and enriches our community's cultural and educational landscape. The library's commitment to providing invaluable resources and promoting literacy aligns with Country Club Bank's mission to invest in the prosperity and growth of the Kansas City region. Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on you Kansas City. Country Club Bank member FDIC.