AtoZ Blogging Challenge – Budget

During the month of April, I’ll be participating in the 2017 Blogging from A to Z Challenge.  For this year’s theme, I chose to look at leadership qualities as I’ve just recently (within the past 6 months) become the director of my public library. We have about 50 staff members, most of whom are part-time employees serving a 30,000 resident community by providing high-quality programs and resources. Each day, I’ll look at one trait and how it’s helped me to become a better director.

I know, I know budget isn’t really a leadership trait, but it is something that I have to think about A LOT! Within my first month of becoming library director, I had to work on our budget for the next fiscal year, which would be daunting enough except that I really had no idea about any of the logistics about our budget. Thankfully, I have a great staff and an assistant was really great in teaching me not only the ropes, but explaining our really difficult software too!

Now that I have a better grasp on our budget – where are money comes from, how much we need to balance at the end of the year, I’m looking for new and exciting ways to promote the library to become a mainstay in our community as well as opportunities for fundraisers to off-set some of our budget costs. We’re making some changes as to where we’re focusing money as well – reference resources are getting used less often while fiction titles circulate much better. We also have a few museum and attraction passes for the surrounding area and I’m hoping we can continue to expand these offerings as well to allow people to experience educational and recreational locations in our area.

I’ll admit, creating the budget completely on my own for the next year is already scaring me, but I’m much better prepared this year and hope that our forward-thinking and changes help me to fight for the funding we need and to find new and innovative ways to raise money as necessary!