Commons, foundation and Friends outline fundraising, donor-wall plans and a 'Magnolia to Rose' event strategy

Anne Morrison, president of the Commons Foundation, told the board the foundation previously handed over $5,000,000 and pledged an additional $1,000,000 in 2024 to fund landscaping and a stage/overhang; she said the group is pursuing the remaining roughly $1,000,000 needed and aims to hand the city $2,000,000 for landscaping by year'end. "So we handed over 5,000,000... we pledged 1000000 dollars, and that was in 2024," Morrison said.

Morrison presented donor-wall designs and material samples (resin plaques and lighting) and explained plaque sizes will correspond to donation amounts; she and others noted donors have been responsive to the design and staff will coordinate plaque installation with city staff.

Lori Auctrade, representing the Larkspur Library Foundation, described the foundation's usual fundraising cycle: a December letter campaign that raises roughly $16,000 annually. She said typical annual expenses are about $7,000, with roughly $10,000 in annual contributions to the library. "We raise about $16,000 through that campaign every year... we contribute about $10,000 a year to the library," Auctrade said.

Diana Saint James, president of the Friends of the Library, said the new library design will hold 20,000 books while the current collection is roughly 40,000 titles; the Friends estimated about 4,500 books have been weeded so far and said approximately 3,000 are currently in storage. She proposed a November used-book sale (potentially at the Legion Hall) to clear storage and raise an estimated $5,000. "So we're storing in our storage space about 3,000 of those books at the moment... Our goal is to raise $5,000 from that sale," Saint James said.

Community members and staff used the second half of the meeting to brainstorm joint events under a unifying "Magnolia to Rose" theme as the city prepares to close the current library and open the Rose Lane facility. Ideas included a coordinated retirement event for the Magnolia site, a grand opening sequence of private soft-opens for donors followed by public events, docent tours and family'oriented programming, limited-edition library cards, and a community 'book brigade' (residents passing selected books by hand to symbolically move them) proposed by resident Chris Linehart.

Linehart described the book-brigade concept and showed a short video example: "A book brigade is what they called it... They moved 9,000 books in a couple hours," he said, urging a community-oriented PR event. Participants discussed scheduling constraints and the need for city permission and coordination with donors, the heritage preservation community and partner organizations.

Groups agreed to continue planning jointly and to keep the topic on future agendas; staff invited the groups to the board's next monthly discussion about the Magnolia-to-Rose transition at the board's October meeting and to follow-up community workshops.

The meeting closed with scheduling and a reminder that the city posts construction webcams and will share slide PDFs and time-lapse files for interested residents.