Mérida English Library 2023 Annual Report
Our last year at MEL was a good one, with a full calendar of activities of all sorts, plus continued expansion of our collection of circulating materials. We added 457 new memberships in 2023, bringing our total number of members (family, individual and student/teacher) to 1,856. MEL has never been stronger!
We continue to set aside funds from new and used book sales and late fees which are designated for book purchases. We added an additional 234 new books to our collection in 2023 with these funds. We still appreciate and NEED book donations, but these dedicated funds allow us to add specific book titles that our members would like available to them at the library. Overall, we added 1,726 new items to our catalog in 2023, and so our current collection of books, audiobooks and puzzles now numbers just under 19,000.
We are also proud of and grateful for our team of volunteers and staff. Volunteer efforts continue to be the lifeblood of the Mérida English Library, with almost 300 people donating their time in 2023 to make MEL the dynamic and vibrant place it is. These efforts come to us in a variety of ways: our volunteer Board of Directors, the committee that manages our library collections, the front desk staff, tour organizers and helpers, leaders of Children’s Storytime, subject-matter experts who share their knowledge through workshops, classes and lectures, English-speaking hosts in our language exchange and mentorship programs, homeowners who allow the House & Garden Tour and Wine Tastings to visit their houses, and people who help out for special events.
In addition to this army of volunteers, we also have five paid staff members: Karime, our administrator, Alfonso, the outreach coordinator, Manuel who does our graphic design and manages our social media accounts and website, and the housekeeping/maintenance team of Hermy and Hector. Each of these is a part-time position requiring 26 hours of work each week.
We are also proud of the services we were able to provide to the community in 2023. We continue our Monday night Conversaciones con Amigos, Wednesday evening MEL Talks, Saturday Children’s Storytime, and Monthly MEL social nights. We hosted the Mérida Writers Group, Alcoholics Anonymous, and poetry & fiction writing workshops. We’ve organized a community posada and held a holiday donation drive for Refettorio and Evolución. We’ve also started a new book club, Fiction & Friends, and now host a Prose & Poetry Open Mic Night. Each of these meet monthly. We continue to provide a home base for The Gorro Group, a team of knitters and crocheters who meet twice a month to produce caps for children suffering from cancer, and the International Women’s Club. Finally, we’ve hosted members of the city’s mosquito-abatement team for a presentation on mosquito control and an ongoing program of larvicide distribution, and representatives from the US consulate who distributed important information on a variety of topics to US Citizens. All of these activities are free to our community members.
The Mérida English Library feels a special kinship to our community of writers, for where would a library be without writers? We’ve already mentioned that we host the Merida Writers Group for their every-other-week meetings, which allow writers of all abilities and levels of accomplishment to gather and exchange ideas and inspiration. We also continued a very successful Fiction Writing Workshop in 2023 and held two separate workshops in poetry writing. In addition, we continue to support local authors through sale of their books on our Local Author shelves, and we highlight their accomplishments in a monthly Author Spotlight feature on the website and in our newsletter. But, most dramatically, 2023 saw the arrival of the MEL Local Author Book Fair, a day-long event of readings and other activities that gave community members the opportunity to meet, talk with and listen to new and interesting writers. Twenty-two writers participated in this inaugural event which was organized by the now-closed and badly-missed Between The Lines bookstore. We plan to continue this under MEL’s guidance and hope it will become an annual feature.
Our calendar of regular programs and events that fund Library operations, such as the MEL Wine Tastings, the Artist Studio Tour, the Original MEL House & Garden Tour, and the Santa Ana Gallery Tour all had banner years in 2023. While these are our major activities for fundraising, we also hosted several smaller events that provide income: Pilates, yoga and tai-chi sessions, art history workshops, language courses in English & Spanish, a two-week summer camp for children and six bazaars that support local artists and craftspeople. We also had concerts put on by Steve Katz, a member of Blood, Sweat & Tears and founding member of The Blues Project, and classical pianist Richard Steinbach. Thank you to everyone who helped to organize the events and who participated in them - your hard work and ticket purchases help keep our Library running!
All this activity allowed the Merida English Library to have a good year financially in 2023. We normally lose money during the slow summer season, but due to the fantastic work of our staff and volunteers, we did not have to dig into savings to pay bills during that period. This allowed us to use the savings that we were holding to improve MEL’s facilities. Thanks to a donation from long-time MEL member Larry Nielsen, we upgraded our solar capacity in an effort to conserve valuable natural resources and reduce our cost for electricity. We purchased a new laser printer which greatly improved our printing capability and quality. We upgraded the library management software to allow more consistent collection of fees for overdue and lost books, and to better manage our circulation control for books and other items. We added shades to the classroom to make it much more usable during the sunny daytime hours and added an additional bodega for storage. We purchased new chairs for our events, and a high-quality, battery-operated speaker to use at off-site events like Wine Tastings and House & Garden Tours, making the experience there much better for our visitors. And we spent almost $50,000 on new books for the Library collection.
Click here to review the Annual Financial Report.
Our growth both in the number and size of activities and in the number of items in our collection present a shared problem - we are outgrowing the space we have available. A main focus of 2024 will be to begin the discussion of expansion possibilities which will allow us to continue to provide the services you want while allowing more space for our ever-growing catalog of books and other materials. Discussions have already started and are VERY preliminary, but we could see changes to almost every corner of the library: the Judd Dolle room, the children’s area, the staff office, the patio, the classroom, the upstairs terrace and the back garden.
We will also continue to expand our range of activities and events, so that more people in our community may benefit from the work we do. Mérida English Library continues to thrive thanks to the hard work of many people and will continue to do so with your support!
Please send us an email at info@meridaenglishlibrary.com if you have any questions.
