image credit: Pevensey Community Library
PEVENSEY BAY JOURNAL EDITION 26
Another great day in the library. Those of us who have been campaigning to save it for years still can’t quite believe it! It was great to see new faces again today, members of our community giving their time to get this project off the ground.
The training we’ve been given by ESCC, Old Town Community Library and Ringmer Library is proving invaluable and the collaborations forming with other local libraries will lead to exciting possibilities for the future.This is shaping up to be just what we hoped, a collaborative project run for our community, managed by our community.
We will be working in the library all week 9am to 1pm so do pop in and say hi!
—Pevensey community library, 28 April 2019
News that Pevensey Community library is preparing to open has come on their social media feed (24 April).
Talking about the preparations, one of their team posted “Exciting news! We get the keys to the library on Friday morning!”
The bid to manage the library was won by the group in the autumn of 2018.
At the time a rival group, the Friends of Pevensey Bay Library lost their bid, after having lobbied East Sussex County Council and campaigned to save the library for three years.
The rival bid was supported by both Bay Life online and the Pevensey Bay Journal. The support was based on a trusteeship and charitable incorporation model, together with a public subscription element that has roots in the history of libraries as a public service in this country
In Langney, another community library has been established under the remit of a charitable incorporated organisation and as a trust. The community library opened with the full support of local people.
The document that has founded Langney library, lodged with the charity commission, talks about financial hardship’ and ‘social and economic circumstances’ as being objectives in ‘improving the conditions of life for said residents’.
The project ticks all the right boxes in relation to the continuing legacy of our near three hundred year history with the public library movement in this country that can be traced back to the Penny Universities of an Oxford Coffee shop in 1652.
Seeing what is happening in Langney with this library opening in the shopping centre is a fit with the new library mutuality movement that is emerging in this post-austerity age.
This new movement began with the countywide initiative in Devon in 2015 with Libraries Unlimited.
Mutuality as a movement emerged in the nineteenth century with the chartists, the building societies, the co-operative movement, trades unions and also the public library movement.
Charitable status is the bookmark that demonstrates that the people behind Langney community library have an understanding of the principles behind the library movement. The reason that accountability is so important is because a local public library belongs to the people that the library serves.
Here in Pevensey Bay the library has been formed under the umbrella of a community interest company, an entity that is quite distinct from to the notion of a Trust and a Charitable Incorporated Organisation.
The people concerned deserve credit because they have put themselves, and in some cases their own money, on the line to see that a library service continues here.
What matters though is the sustainability of our precious rural library. The principles and the context of a public service, the kind of values enshrined in the spirit of the library service in this country should inform this venture.
These things are all the more important in the present day. So many local public services have been cut, and will never return.
The possible establishment of a trust status to run Pevensey Community Library will continue to inform the progress of this venture. No doubt Pevensey Parish Council, and to a certain extent Wealden Council, and East Sussex County Council, will watch to see what happens next, together with stakeholder organisations in the locality.
The country is in a state of critical paralysis. Rural communities and parish councils are in a state of critical paralysis.
What should not be forgotten is that Pevensey Parish Council is to provide £5,000 to this venture.
The source of that money means that the community library at the outset has a statutory responsibility.
The nature of the organisation taking on the management of our precious public library is of critical importance.
What should not be forgotten with the rights that have come with the East Sussex County Council decision to award the future of the library to this group, is that there are also responsibilities.
With the collection of the keys to the local kingdom of education and imagination there are also responsibilities.
The library is too important to run the risk that the venture is unsustainable.
In the excitement in receiving the keys to the kingdom, separating out fact from fiction is a subject that should give pause for thought to this group as they put a stamp on the venture with their own stickers.
Foundations need to be set and there is a need for strong sustainable foundations.
Our library belongs to us, all of us. This should not be a project about self-serving whimsy. Already there are signs that this group is stacking up a self-reverential profile.
The library is held in trust to us all.
Langney Community Library has shown the way forward as a charity based on a trustee model. The organisation is accountable. They have received the support of the whole community.
