Reading is thinking

The Community Library Project believes all people should have access to books. We are a low-cost, people's initiative. We are committed to the work of building the movement for a publicly owned, free library system that is accessible to all.

सभी का स्वागत है

What We Do

One of the central goals of the Community Library Project is to act as a lab for teaching and learning, a place where we discover, refine, and share ideas about how to successfully run community libraries in the diverse areas we work in.

Though we always say we are ‘free and open to all,’ we understand that we reach only a few thousand of the millions of people in Delhi--to say nothing of India as a whole--who do not have access to excellent community libraries. By ourselves, we won’t solve that problem. But by proving community libraries can work and work well, it is our hope that when the leaders of our city and our country finally do take up the task of funding and building libraries in serious way, no one will say, ‘It can’t be done here.’

Of course, it can be done; we’re already doing it.

There are many ideas that animate our project, but from a curriculum standpoint, our aim is simple: we want to develop strategies and practices that allow and encourage library members to engage meaningfully and thoughtfully with books and the ideas they hold. Yes, this kind of reading will make for better students and more effective workers. Yes, it will strengthen our communities and our democracy. But in the end, we are doing this because we think access to books and the ideas in them--is a basic human right.

We do not pretend to have all the answers about how to run a community library, but we’ve learned a great deal over the past few years about what works, and what doesn’t. Though many of the ideas and resources we present here are works-in-progress, they are all educationally sound and, unless otherwise noted, have been field-tested in our program.