This article was first published online in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, September 19, 2024. Reprinted with permission.
Carnegie Corporation of New York will devote $4 million to three of the city’s public libraries in a set of grants that mark the philanthropy’s return to its roots.
Carnegie will give $1 million to the Brooklyn Public Library, $1.2 million to the Queens Public Library, and $1.8 million to the New York Public Library in Manhattan to provide English language and work-force training classes for adults as well as civics and college- and career-prep courses for teenagers.
Established in 1911, Carnegie Corporation followed up on the philanthropy of its founder, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who started building libraries in the United States in the 1880s. By the Great Depression, Carnegie and his foundation had helped fund more than 2,500 libraries in the United States and abroad. Although the philanthropy has long made library-related grants, in recent decades they primarily went to digitize book collections or to groups such as the American Library Association for professional development.
The current three library grants are a prelude to a larger investment in public libraries, said Dame Louise Richardson, Carnegie’s president. The renewed attention, she said, comes because in a highly polarized nation, libraries remain one of the most trusted institutions that can serve as common ground for people despite their differences. Libraries, she said, can act as civic hubs where residents have the same access to books, seminars, videos, and other resources no matter how much money they make or where they were born.
“Having a place that is completely nonpartisan, completely unassociated with any political perspective is critically important,” she said.
Like Carnegie, who saw libraries as a way to integrate a wave of immigrants into American life, Richardson said the language and civics programs the grantmaker will support in New York can help people new to the country attain better jobs, succeed in school, and contribute to the city.
She also said that libraries are a useful repository of evidence-based information and reliable facts that voters can use during a political campaign hallmarked by the spread of misinformation, such as claims by the Trump campaign that Haitian immigrants are abducting people’s dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.
“Anybody who spent time in a library would not make a fallacious claim about eating pets,” she said, in response to a question. “If one were wondering whether people are eating cats and dogs, one could go to the library and find out.”
Quintessential Philanthropy
In planting libraries across the country, Andrew Carnegie was fueled by the zest for learning he experienced as a poor, young laborer in Pittsburgh, where he had access to a book each week from a city resident who ran a local library.
His library program is “the quintessential, initiative of 20th-century philanthropy,” said philanthropy historian Benjamin Soskis, because it stems from a donor’s personal experience, was vast in scale, and provided people opportunities to advance as a result of their intellect and hard work rather than attempting to change broader social systems.
Carnegie’s library project “wasn’t invented to challenge the underlying system of capitalism but, in Carnegie’s phrase, to provide ‘“ladders on which the aspiring can rise,’” said Soskis, senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy.
While libraries across the country report cutbacks in municipal support, overall library budgets have rebounded from COVID declines, according to a 2023 Library Journal survey. The 6.1 percent budget increase in 2021 was the highest libraries had reported in nearly a decade.
Much of the philanthropy directed to libraries in recent years has focused on technology. The Gates Foundation, for instance, spent more than $1 billion during the early 2000s providing libraries worldwide with internet access and declared success in 2006 in its original goal of providing all U.S.-based libraries with computers. The Knight foundation has spent $45 million since 2008 on projects that support libraries.
The Mellon Foundation also has long supported libraries by maintaining specific collections at academic research centers. Starting in 2020, the foundation began making grants to local libraries. Since then, Mellon has made $32 million in library-related grants, about two-thirds of which has gone directly to public libraries.
One of the main projects Mellon supports is Memory Hubs at more than a dozen public libraries nationwide. Mellon grants go toward digitizing and presenting oral histories and images from community members to create more substantive local archives.
“Primary sources that are being kept and stewarded by community members help tell a broader American narrative” that can deepen communities’ bonds with one another, said Patricia Hswe, who directs Mellon’s public knowledge program.
Hswe said Mellon is looking to respond to calls for censorship and book bans by making grants that provide “research, data, marketing, and training that would empower public libraries to sharpen and revitalize the storytelling about what they do and how they serve and strengthen their communities.”
Cure to Polarization?
Andrew Carnegie’s original library gifts were notable because they relied on the buy-in of local communities, which usually had to provide land for the building and books to fill the shelves, said Maribel Morey, a philanthropy historian and author of White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s an American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order.
When people think of libraries in the United States, they often focus on Carnegie’s big gifts and lose sight of the power of widespread local support from residents across the country, said Morey, who is executive director of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences.
Morey said supporting libraries is a laudable effort because they provide a common place where there is access to knowledge “without paywalls.”
Said Morey: “We can’t just let them turn into Starbucks.”
But will better funded libraries cure polarization?
“That’s a tough call,” Morey said. “I don’t know if that’s a solution for bringing us together. We have to go deeper into what is dividing us.”
Before joining the Chronicle of Philanthropy in 2013, Alex Daniels covered Congress and national politics for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He covered the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and reported extensively about Walmart Stores for the Little Rock paper.
- Special Projects
