Library Gets Grant to Help Immigrants
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The Santa Ana Library has received a $5,000 federal grant to educate the city’s Spanish-speaking immigrant population about topics such as citizenship, history and English as a second language.
The grant will be used to help immigrants adapt to American culture by allowing the library to offer more audiotapes and easy-to-read books on those subjects, library director Rob Richard said.
“The intent is to provide materials that enable them to become productive citizens,” Richard said.
The grant will be used to augment the library’s $125,000-a-year program to provide such materials.
Still, “our needs are much greater than that even, but our resources are limited,” he said.
The ability to reach Spanish-speaking immigrants is especially great because 53% of the city’s residents are foreign-born. Of those, most are Spanish speakers, Richard said.
Richard said one benefit of the program is that it attracts immigrants to the library, where many newcomers don’t realize that books can be borrowed for free.
And, he said, libraries offer people one of the best tools to learn about a new culture: novels.
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