Providing refurbishments and upgrades to the Berkeley Public Library, including the Children’s Floor at the Central Library and the children’s rooms at all four branches.

Enhancing Berkeley Builds Readers, a family literacy project, bringing library resources and programming to childcare centers in underserved areas of our community.

Funding a variety of literacy projects and library innovations which give the Library and librarians the opportunity to afford new technology, materials, and the resources they need to try new ideas, to dream, and to stretch.

Seeding the Generation Fund, a new board-designated legacy fund to ensure the long-term funding needs of a robust public library.

Beginning in 2018, we awarded grants funding laptops & hotspots for public check out, including laptop lending machines at all locations, bins and safety equipment for outdoor pick-up, tablets for library staff to provide service during library building closures, monitors for wayfinding, and an expansion of the Tool Lending Library at the Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch.

In 2019, we funded a library partnership with the Berkeley-created Charlie Cart Project. Berkeley librarians now use this award-winning curriculum and mobile kitchen to teach food and nutritional literacy and advance STEM learning in our community. We also expanded the Tool Lending Library to include a culinary collection.

In 2014, we rolled out the Library on Wheels, a unique service dedicated to serving our community by taking library materials along with a mobile hotspot and all the support needed for check out to every corner of our city. The Library on Wheels has since become a fixture at Berkeley community events.

In 2014 we partnered with the library on Branch Out, an outreach campaign following on the heels of the branch library renovations. This brought many to (re)discover their public library and doubled attendance at library programs.

In 2013 we celebrated the successful completion of our Neighborhood Libraries Campaign. Our donors and volunteers raised over $3 million to bring the four branches of our neighborhood libraries fully into the 21st century.

Our very first campaign, We Love the Library, led the way in support of the restoration and earthquake retrofitting of Berkeley’s landmark Central Library. Between 1998 and 2002, our donors raised $4 million to outfit Central with furniture, technology, and other interior fittings.