Patrons warm up with soup at the library

Program first of a series of Friday events in January
By: 
Luke Reimer
Reporter

Visitors to the Shawano County Library had the opportunity to warm up as temperatures dipped below 20 degrees on Jan. 7.
Library officials offered every patron a cup of Italian wedding soup as they entered the library.
“This is our January thaw,” said library assistant Helen Rowinski. “We have soups available every Friday at 11:30 a.m. in January.”
Librarian Paige Crawford said that this is something that the library likes to do for the community.
“Its just a nice thing for the community,” said Crawford. “People can come in and kind of warm up with a cup of soup.”
Crawford said that they have been hosting this for the last few years.
“This has been pretty well received in the past, so we want to keep it going,” said Crawford.
This event is sponsored by Friends of the Library.
“The Friends of the Library is a voluntary membership group,” said library director Kristie Hauer. “In that group, they just want to help make the library better.”
She said that the group works on donations and grants from around the community for projects within the library.
“One of the big things that they fund are the programs in this library and the other five branches,” said Hauer. “The January thaw is one example of the programs that the staff come up with and put together.”
All together, the staff of the library made close to 30 cups of soup in preparation to serve about 30 people.
“We usually have about 30 people per time that we host this,” said Rowinski. “With us doing it every Friday in January, we are making a lot of soup.”
As the staff has put this on for the last couple of years, it has become a part of some community members routines.
“When we were shut down during the pandemic, we had a lot of people asking us what we are going to be doing with the soup,” said Rowinski.
Rowinski said that people come in just for the soup, but even that is a step to getting more people into the library.
“They come in just for soup, but they have to walk by our bulletin boards and they can see what is going on,” said Rowinski. “It may not be someone that comes in on a weekly basis, but just coming in for soup will get them to attend something else.”
Hauer added that something like this also gives staff the opportunity to share other events that are happening.
“This is a good conversation piece for us,” said Hauer. “We can talk about the soup with patrons and then mention our other programs as well.”
The library will be serving Olive Garden’s chicken gnocchi soup, tomato soup with grilled cheese croutons and vegetable wild rice soup in the coming weeks.
“This is great for us,” said Rowinski. “We have a grand old time when we can do this.”


lreimer@newmedia-wi.com