Volunteers create a haven for learning

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Mighty Twig director Marcia Mahoney answers questions as volunteers gathered at the Eddie Lee Sutton Library, housed in the Family Focus Building, at 2020 Dewey Ave. More than 60 volunteers cleaned and labeled some 2,500 books for the library in a day of

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Updated: February 20, 2012 9:03AM

Evanston Public Library Board president Sharon Arceneaux was among the volunteers who spent part of their Martin Luther King Jr. Day on a project spearheaded by The Mighty Twig.

They were helping to refurbish the Eddie Lee Sutton Library, located inside the Family Focus building at 2010 Dewey Ave., and create a more-functional family library.

Arceneaux recalled the last functioning library in the neighborhood, the West Branch Library, which was closed for budget reasons in the 1980s and which was used by her family.

“I’d have to be a hypocrite,” not to help out on this project, she said, “so here I am.”

Here were also her two young daughters, Jami and Jenna, working on the other side of the room, trying to steady a bookshelf.

“I work for the Circuit Court so I’m around paper all day,” said Jami. All the same, “I didn’t think I’d end up doing this,” she said.

A lot of volunteers might have expressed similar comments.

During the course of the day, more than 60 community members participated in the project, cleaning, labeling and categorizing some 2,500 books to be used in the library housed in a classroom off the main hallway of the one-time 5th Ward school.

“Organized chaos,” said Marcia Mahoney, director of The Mighty Twig, the citizen-run library at 900 Chicago Ave. The Mighty Twig was started by the Evanston Public Library Friends after the South Branch library was closed last year.

”But it’s been phenomenal,” she added.

Family Focus-Our Place director Dorothy Williams asked Mahoney for help after she dropped off a box of books for the agency to use in the small library.

The Eddie Lee Sutton Library is the group’s third project. Group volunteers previously set up small libraries for the Ridgeville Park District, and at the Rice Education Center, where they transformed a storage room into a nifty library for the school, which serves youngsters with special needs.

The Sutton Library is expected to receive plenty of traffic. The Family Focus building houses after-school, GED Teen Parenting and Adult Education programs, and is well traveled by both parents and children.

For the past few weeks, members of the The Mighty Twig’s construction crew have been painting, patching, taking down old bulletin boards, even replacing a radiator cover, Mahoney said.

Volunteers also brought in roughly a thousand books, with either African-American themes or written by African-American authors for the library, which is located in a predominantly black neighborhood.

One book, a coffee table book showing a photograph of a then-young jazz musician Quincy Jones, was eyed by a number of volunteers, said Mahoney.

“Everyone wants to take it out,” Mahoney said. “I said it has to stay until the library officially opens.”

That date isn’t far off. Longtime community member Val Summers stopped in to peek at the progress.

“This is good,” she said. “With the amount of kids they (Family Focus-Our Place) serve, it’s really good.”