Library staff pose in front of the Borys Lavrenyov Regional Library for Youth. Photo courtesy of Rubryka and TOL. Virtually every city, village, and district in Ukraine has a public library, around 15,000 in all for this country of 42 million people. While that means a library is almost always close by, most people hardly notice them, especially as access to a vast range of resources on the internet constantly grows. Yet in the port city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, one award-winning library is bucking the trend. The Borys Lavrenyov Regional Library for Youth has managed to achieve two major goals at once: meeting the specific needs of the local community by becoming a multifunctional public “hub,” while also redefining Kherson, population 290,000, on the cultural map of Ukraine. From humble beginnings, the library has become a fully functioning youth center, while retaining its appeal to older people, and currently employs a core team of 26 librarians. Visitors can take part in creative clubs, meet famous writers, and receive psychological and legal support. The library collaborates with schools, offering leisure and educational activities for their pupils and encouraging them to read, as well as with universities, jointly conducting activities for students. The icing on the cake of these unusual activities for a small-city library are the large-scale, regional cultural events that Lavrenyovka organizes – including an ambitious book festival. Most libraries in Ukraine simply house books, and even some of those haven’t had their collections updated properly in years. They aren’t particularly popular with the wider public. At first glance the Lavrenyov Library – or Lavrenyovka, as staff and local visitors affectionately call it – would seem to fit into that category. Founded in 1980, it is located in a one-story building in a quiet and somewhat distant residential area of ​Kherson among nine-story apartment buildings and tall poplar trees. At the entrance, visitors are greeted by a mural of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The walls are covered with paintings by Kherson artists, and then it is almost like in a classic Slavic fairy tale: go right – find this (books), go left –find that (a master class). The director of the library, Viktoria Lobzova, sits in a neat and cozy office with houseplants and a small sofa for visitors. Photographs of the surrounding neighborhood hang on the walls, and not surprisingly, there are books everywhere. The transformation away from a mere book repository came organically and gradually, she says. Starting in 2006, the staff decided to put an emphasis on work with young people and came up with the idea of integrating a youth center into the usual activities of the library. That has paid off. In 2017 Lavrenyovka won third prize for its activities with youth in the Ukrainian Library Association’s “Library of the Year” contest. And Barabooka, an all-Ukrainian portal promoting reading for younger people, reports that yearly Lavrenyovka serves over 12,000 readers – quite a healthy figure when one takes into account that the national children’s library in Kyiv, the capital, reaches around 20,000 people each year. What does it take for a library to become a youth center? Organizing such a wide range of activities has been a challenge, especially since the program has been expanded without more funding from the state. That includes clubs for the kids in subjects such as arts and crafts. Library deputy director Tatiana Ihnatova says Lavrenyovka stuck to its existing structure, with each department deciding to start new activities based on its own experiences, interests, and desires to work in certain areas. That’s how clubs, local history initiatives, and participation in festivals, among other things, came to pass. Constant communication among Lavrenyovka employees has also been key. “Even during quarantine under the pandemic, we met several times a week on Zoom,” Ihnatova says. A lot depends on the librarians’ enthusiasm and willingness to learn new things and be proactive. Searching for volunteers, innovating, mastering new skills (such as content creation for their website and social media), and doing all that without additional financing, is not an easy job. What keeps them all going is personal interest, Ihnatova says, and positive feedback from visitors. Yet Ihnatova and others make clear that little on the youth center side of things could be done without the work of volunteers. Most are enthusiastic young people. “Especially students, so they get experience and practice,” Ihnatova says. Despite the lack of pay, Olha, who works with kids in the library, remains upbeat: “We like it. And there is so much curiosity and demand.