Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN — The Rotary Club of Youngstown, in partnership with the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County, will install a Little Free Library at the Boys & Girls Club.

The installation event will occur 1:30 p.m. Monday at 2105 Oak Hill Ave.

When the editors at Reader’s Digest made a list of “50 Surprising Reasons Why We Love America,” at No. 11 was Little Free Library.

“The Rotary Club of Youngstown has been mounting wooden boxes on posts and filling them with books since 2014,” noted Elayne Bozick, chair of the Little Free Library project for the Rotary Club of Youngstown.

“It is a made-in-America cottage industry built on the premise of ‘take a book, share a book.’ The Youngstown club took on the project with the goal of creating neighborhood gathering places in order to foster relationships and support literacy.”

The installation coincides with the celebration of The Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA Big Read seeks to broaden the understanding of the world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book.

Locally, the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County will welcome author Luis Alberto Urrea to Youngstown on Tuesday. Urrea will be at the Main Library at 5 p.m., reading excerpts from the book, discussing and answering questions about his novel “Into the Beautiful North”. The evening will culminate with a meet and greet, book signing, and reception.

“It’s wonderful that the Library and the Youngstown Rotary can work together to get more books into the hands of the boys and girls in our community” said Aimee Fifarek, the library system’s executive director.

The Rotary Club meets each Wednesday from noon to 1 p.m. at the downtown YMCA.

The club is one of more than 33,000 worldwide clubs located in 200 countries that comprise Rotary International.