Category Archives: CMLE

CMLE, General

Let’s Roller Derby!

Check out your local S.C.A.R. Dolls team!!

One of our goals is to help build a community of library people, across CMLE and across the state. So we like to host a variety of member events to encourage all kinds of library people to come together, have fun, and meet each other in person!

We have a few different programs going on, so be sure you are subscribed to our newsletter (every Friday!) or our social media to keep up with it all.

Check it all out below, and RSVP now! Comment below, email to us at admin @ cmle.org, and let us know you are coming with us!

We will buy tickets for all CMLE members. (There is no reserved seating, and it is definitely a family-friendly event – so also feel free to buy your own tickets to bring kids, friends, neighbors, or anyone else who might want to have some fun watching some cool skaters with some awesome library people!)

WHAT are we doing? Attending the SCAR Dolls roller derby home event, against FORX Roller Derby team.

WHEN are we doing this this? May 18th 2019 “Most home games have a start time of 6pm with doors opening at 5pm, but please visit our facebook page to find more detailed information as it can vary per game.”

WHERE is this excitement? The River’s Edge Convention Center in St. Cloud Minnesota. 

Wait, What? Who are these people?? “The S.C.A.R. Dolls are the one, the only, the original women’s flat track roller derby league in Central Minnesota. We formed in 2011 to create an opportunity for the women in the Saint Cloud area to participate in the challenging, exciting, and empowering revival of modern roller derby.

Roller derby is currently one of the fastest growing sports in the world, with over 1450 amateur leagues currently in existence and new leagues are forming all the time. This is not the exhibitionist, pro-wrestling style derby of the 1970’s, but a fast-paced, hard-hitting sport that the women of the S.C.A.R. Dolls are proud to be introducing to this wonderful community. We are working hard to make our league competitive in order to represent Saint Cloud both home and away.

Besides being talented and tenacious athletes, the S.C.A.R. Dolls are dedicated to giving back to the community through charity partnerships and fundraisers.”

Here’s a quick video of the team talking about their skating work:

We’ll talk about libraries at some point during the evening, I promise! We wouldn’t want you to feel left out of any library-related fun. We can enjoy hotdogs, chips, cheering for the home team, watching kids run around and lose their minds with the excitement – it’s just some noisy fun for all!


CMLE, Services

CMLE Services: Reports from Mini Grants and Scholarships now all in one place!

Are you thinking about applying for one of our scholarships or mini grants? We encourage you to take advantage of these services, since we know many of our members have budgets that do not allow for trying new programs or participating in professional development opportunities!

We’ve compiled past reports from our members who have received our mini grants and/or scholarships into two pages, one for mini grants and one for scholarships, so you can browse through them for inspiration!

For our mini grants, we can help you purchase materials, help fund a program for your community, add features to your makerspace, and more! Read more about our mini grant service or find the application here.

Our scholarships are to help fund professional development for our members, and have helped members attend conferences or participate in webinars. Read more about our scholarship service or find the application here.

If you have questions about any of our services, please email us at admin@cmle.org!

Advocacy, CMLE, Programs

RSVP for CMLE Tea!

Hi CMLE members! We hope you are thinking about joining us for our upcoming member event!

We’ll be having tea, library conversation, and filling out library advocacy postcards to mail to library stakeholders. We had the best time at our last tea event and you can read all about it here.

Join us on Sunday, May 5th at 10:30 at the Mad Hatter Tea House in Anoka.
Member events support our mission to connect people from all types of libraries with each other to offer encouragement, brainstorming, and community.


Please RSVP below, as we need to make reservations! And since we do not want cost to prohibit any of our members from joining us, CMLE will cover the cost of tea service for members that RSVP and attend.

CMLE

Help Amazon Smile on CMLE’s Members!

Amazon logo plain

We like our members! We like the work we do! And we really like providing all the support we do for those members!!

Cool things we are doing include:

  • paying out over $5000 in scholarships/mini-grants this year
  • paying for members to attend events, so we can all connect in person
  • paying for supplies for our continuing education classes
  • paying monthly fees for website hosting, podcast hosting (two of them!), security software, and other online services
  • paying for postcards and postage to connect important messages with our members, legislators, and other stakeholders

We love doing these things! They are part of what makes our jobs wonderful, and the feedback we get from our members warms our hearts every day.

And we start thinking: What could we do with just a liiiitle more money? For sure: jack up that scholarship/mini-grant fund! For sure: hire someone else to help us be out on the field with members more often! For sure: offer more continuing education events!

We want these things!

Our members want these things! And let’s face it: our members totally deserve these things, and they aren’t going to get the help we can provide from any other source.

But yeah: the “more money” isn’t going to happen.

We haven’t had a budget increase in eleven years – and there isn’t one coming our way any time soon.

Things happen, priorities are set, and…ultimately that’s pretty out of our hands. Sometimes, you just have to let things go.

So we are starting to look around for other funding sources. Our members need good work from us, and they need more than we can offer. It’s our responsibility to figure out how to get them what they need from us!

One of those strategies involves you. (Yes! I did mean you, specifically! *waves at you* Hi!!)

Are you an Amazon shopper? If so: Amazon has a structure to help donate money to us, without any pain (or even thought!) to you.

It’s their Amazon Smile program, and it lets you choose a charity to support with the profits Amazon is making from your purchase. You do nothing. Amazon figures it out, and will send us the money. We will use that money to do that stuff we talked about above: scholarships, grants, CE, and more.

Then every time you shop at Amazon, just go to Smile.Amazon.com (instead of Amazon.com), and buy stuff. Any stuff. Anything you would already buy there. Diapers, books, furniture, pillows, lawn mowers, laundry detergent – whatever you are already buying. Then, Amazon sends us a check.

Everyone is happy!

How do you participate? People: it could not be easier. (Okay, I guess it could be easier; but not much easier than doing nothing at all!)

From Amazon’s website:
“On your first visit to AmazonSmile (smile.amazon.com), you are prompted to select a charitable organization from our list of eligible organizations. You can change your selection at any time.

To change your charitable organization:

  1. Sign in to smile.amazon.com on your desktop or mobile phone browser.
  2. From your desktop, go to Your Account from the navigation at the top of any page,
  3. Then select the option to Change your Charity. (NOTE: you can’t just search for us – we don’t turn up in the first page you see. You have to hit the Change Your Charity button, and search for use there.)
  4. Select a new charitable organization to support.
  5. Type Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. (There will be a couple of other very nice organizations that also start with “Central Minnesota” – applaud them, and then pick CMLE to fund.)
  6. Bask in knowing that YOU are helping to support the wonderful libraries of CMLE!! (Maybe buy yourself something nice? We have hundreds of book suggestions on our podcasts! They even helpfully link to Amazon, for easy information access.)

For more information about the AmazonSmile program, go to http://smile.amazon.com/about.

As we get checks from Amazon, we will report back to tell you how we are spending this money on our members and their needs.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP!!!

Canada's fireworks at the 2013 Celebration of Light in Vancouver, BC
CMLE, Programs

Join CMLE for tea in May!

Spring means melting snow, chirping birds, chocolate eggs…and is a great time to get together for tea!
Since CMLE is a multitype library system with more than 300 members spread around the Central MN area we like to hold member events in different locations in order to make sure more members can attend!

So join us on Sunday, May 5th at 10:30 at the Mad Hatter Tea House in Anoka for a joint member event/postcard party!
We’ll have tea, library and book conversation, and write postcards to mail to library stakeholders encouraging them to support libraries.

Please RSVP below, as we need to make reservations! And since we do not want cost to prohibit any of our members from joining us, CMLE will cover the cost of tea service for members that RSVP and attend.

Since our members work in school media centers, history centers, archives, public, and academic libraries, we really appreciate hearing about the variety of tasks and challenges you handle every day. Plus, we love when our members get to meet each other and form connections across different types of libraries! 

Read all about the fun we had at our last tea event in our article here.