St. Louis County Library Wins 2024–25 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize

admin Tue, 02/04/2025 - 16:36
What’s Needed: St. Louis County Library Wins 2024–25 Jerry Kline Community
Impact Prize
by Lisa Peet
Feb 03, 2025 | Filed in News

A strong library looks to its community for direction. Sometimes, those answers can catalyze and shift the trajectory of the library’s core work—if its administration, board, staff, and local partners listen closely to what is being asked.
 
Covering 467 square miles, St. Louis County, in eastern Missouri, is the state’s most populous county, with more than 860,000 residents. It also contains some of the most economically disparate areas in Missouri, with a long history of residential segregation. According to 2020 U.S. Census data, the percentage of St. Louis County’s population that falls below the poverty line varies from 0.3 percent to 25 percent, and the lowest-income neighborhoods often lack resources such as healthy foods, safe places to walk and play, and nearby medical centers. The consequences for marginalized residents affect everything from information access to basic needs, economic opportunities, educational outcomes, health outcomes, school dropout rates, and incarceration rates.
 

Read Full Article