Two Enumclaw volunteers honored for work at library

Two members of the Enumclaw Friends of the Library were honored during the recent Friends’ Day, an annual celebration of King County Library System volunteers.

November 22, 2017 10:45 am
From left, Enumclaw’s Charlotte Johnson and Barbara Braun join Shirley Bishop, KCLS operations supervisor, and Beth Castleberry, executive director of the KCLS Foundation. Submitted photo.
From left, Enumclaw’s Charlotte Johnson and Barbara Braun join Shirley Bishop, KCLS operations supervisor, and Beth Castleberry, executive director of the KCLS Foundation. Submitted photo.

Two members of the Enumclaw Friends of the Library were honored during the recent Friends’ Day, an annual celebration of King County Library System volunteers.

There were 15 honorees during the Oct. 28 ceremony, including Enumclaw’s Barbara Braun and Charlotte Johnson. Each was recognized as a 2017 Friends of the Library Hall of Fame Honoree.

Hosted by the KCLS Foundation, Friends’ Day honors KCLS volunteers who contribute their time, talents and expertise to serve as goodwill ambassadors and raise money to supplement their local library’s budget to help the library better assist a greater number of patrons.

The event at KCLS’s Service Center in Issaquah drew more than 125 friends, volunteers and employees to recognize the volunteers and honor awardees. Volunteers are nominated each year by librarians and branch staff. The criteria for selection includes leadership, accomplishments, initiative, creativity, advocacy and length of service.

Nominations for the Enumclaw volunteers included:

• “Charlotte has chaired membership outreach for Friends of the Enumclaw Library. She does an incredible job staffing our book sales. She is also half of the two-person ongoing monthly book sale team. Charlotte always has King County Library membership cards with her. She represents friends everywhere she goes.”

• “Barbara initiated and runs the program that supplies used books to the local jail. She volunteers with Charlotte Johnson as the two-person team that handles the in-house ongoing successful book sale,”

Collectively, KCLS volunteers spend thousands of hours serving libraries each year and raise approximately $300,000 annually for local library programming to augment KCLS public funding.

The King County Library System Foundation is a separate entity from the King County Library System and exists entirely to benefit the patrons of the KCLS.

Founded in 1942, the King County Library System is one of the largest and busiest library systems in the country. KCLS currently has 49 library branches spread throughout King County with more than 700,000 cardholders.