THUNDER BAY — The city’s library system is looking for someone to help bring in a lot of money for a slate of major projects.
The Thunder Bay Public Library currently has a job opening for what it’s calling a campaign assistant. The full-time, year-long contract job will “help steward donor relationships, support events and communications and keep everything on track as we raise funds to transform our libraries,” according to the posting on its website.
“We're imminently going to be launching a major capital campaign for the library, which is a big fundraising drive,” library CEO Richard Togman told Newswatch in an interview.
“We know that we've got major improvements to our infrastructure at Waverley, at Brodie, (and) at County Park.”
Depending on the success of the campaign, Togman said the contract could be extended.
The main entrance ramp at Waverley has been earmarked for replacement due to its deteriorating condition and that it no longer meets modern-day accessibility standards. The library also announced the summer-long closure of the Brodie Street branch for a whole bunch of work which will also impact the Waverley site. The library has also recently renewed its lease for the County Park branch — after a renewed push for a space at Intercity Shopping Centre was voted down by city council — with an eye on expanding its floor space there, and refurnishing and freshening up the place.
Overall, improvements will also include “new furniture, all the design work, flooring, lighting — we need overhauls pretty much at all of the branches, and that can get pretty expensive,” Togman said.
He said there’s no firm number yet on how much they’re looking to raise.
“We know, obviously three different buildings, different scales of renovations in each building, and not everything has to happen all at once,” he said. “So, we're still trying to cost out what all the different pieces are that we want to accomplish, the timelines for that, and the final price tag.”
Togman said library officials have also started to contact “some of the bigger donors in the community” to start gauging their interest in potentially contributing to the library’s plans.
“We're really at a generational inflection point for the library system right now,” he said. “We know the last time the library really had an overhaul of this scale was many, many decades ago.”
“Right now, we've got major work underway at three out of the four branches. So, the last time something of this scale probably happened was maybe in the 70s when the Waverley addition was put on, which was obviously a huge expansion of the library system at that time.”
Togman said the capital upgrades are about increasing the size and quality of the library’s spaces, and its capacity to help the community “and really change how the community interacts with the library, with a whole new approach to doing business.”
The job posting will be “open until filled.” It’s slated to pay $27.71 per hour.
“It's a really interesting, dynamic job where you have to be a little bit of a jack of all trades,” Togman said. “But specifically focusing on the … capital campaign aspect, (it involves) everything related to raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the library.”
