The Healthy Families Partnership has determined that one of the most effective ways to reach out to a city's population is through its public libraries. The city of Hampton, for instance, operates one main and three branch libraries. These facilities are easily accessible, offer established procedures, have a professional and helpful staff and are visited by about 70 percent of the city's residents during any given year.

A collaboration between the city's libraries and the Healthy Families Partnership resulted in the formation of Young Family Centers in each of the city's four libraries and its Bookmobile van. Each center functions as a family resource and lending library, providing parents and other caregivers with educational material on child growth and development parenting and family management, life skills and home economics, children's crafts and activities and a variety of other topics. The centers also offer audiovisual aids, a play area with toys that stimulate development and information on other parenting resources available in the community.

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Hampton's public library resource centers were designed to offer a convenient and inviting new way to provide parents and other community members with child development information

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But the ultimate objective of the Young Family Centers is to support the city of Hampton and the Healthy Families Partnership in their efforts to ensure that every child in the city is born healthy and enters school ready to learn.

Program Accomplishments

Since 1992, a focused effort has been made in Hampton to develop public library parent resource centers that not only are easily accessible to all city residents, but also contain the information parents and caregivers need and want.


The result has been an innovative approach to providing parenting and child development information to the community by:

Creating a welcoming library environment with comfortable seating and
   developmental toys in each of the centers;

Establishing identical browsing collections in the children's section of each
   branch library;

Obtaining resources that promote the role of parents as their children's first
   teachers;

Including information on community resources and opportunities for assistance
    with parenting; and

Offering programs that promote reading and the love of books.

Community response has been encouraging. During the program's first four years, collections within the centers grew from 1,000 to 3,692 items. Even more importantly, the number of checkouts of these materials has doubled from 7,312 in the first year to more than 44,000 checkouts during the program's most recent year. In fact the program experienced its most significant growth in its third year, when checkouts more than doubled to 19,000 items.

Conclusions

All four of Hampton's public libraries and its Bookmobile van have successfully established Young Family Centers that meet predetermined criteria and that continue to enjoy growing circulation figures. Data compiled on the centers show they contain information that is both needed and desired and that the centers, as a whole, are easy to use. In fact 84 percent of those questioned said they found the information they were seeking in the parent resource centers without any assistance from library personnel.

Continued growth of the centers - from more than 7,000 to 21,000 checkouts from the first through the fourth year of the program - supports the premise that the Young Family Centers have excellent potential as sources of information about parenting issues as well as infant and child development and that they bolster the ongoing goals of both the city of Hampton and the Healthy Families Partnership.

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