Volunteer thanks library for giving her an identity

A WOMAN who started a weekly social morning at a village library stepped down as chair after five years on its committee.

Alison Smith, 57, had reached the maximum term allowed as a member of the Friends of Sonning Common Library committee but will continue to volunteer at the Grove Road venue.

Mrs Smith, who works as a part-time bookkeeper, said she will miss the camaraderie on the committee.

She said: “The way the constitution is we have to step down after five continuous years on the committee.

“It’s quite a healthy thing because you don’t get one person embedded into the role and you get new people coming through with new ideas.

“I will miss the camaraderie of the committee. We had great fun and worked very much as a team.

“I will miss the buzz you get when you’re organising an event and everybody turns up for it.

“But I’m still going to be volunteering, I’m on the fortnightly volunteer rota, so I will be there for a couple of hours in the library every other Friday morning.”

Mrs Smith, who lives in the village with her husband, Jeremy, joined the library during the 2020 covid lockdowns.

She said she wanted to give back to the library, which she said had helped her when she was raising her two children, Maddy and Ben.

Mrs Smith said: “I moved to Sonning Common in 1996 and I have used the library ever since.

“My two children were both avid readers, so it saved me a fortune in books just being able to go to the library.

“During lockdown, when the library started to reopen, it was under restriction and a lot of the volunteers were retired people.

“I did speak to the library manager at the time to see if they needed any more volunteers because some of them weren’t happy to come back due to covid at that time, so I stepped forward and started volunteering then.

“I was just keen to give back to the library in any way as it had saved my sanity when I had young children and it was just somewhere to go where people wanted to talk about something other than young children.

“When you go from working full-time and you’ve got one sense of identity and then you have children, it can be quite hard to keep that sense of identity.

“It was nice to have somewhere to go, because people chat to you in the library, staff or volunteers will always chat if you want and they really, really helped me so I was more than glad to step forward when I was needed.”

During her time on the committee, Mrs Smith was responsible for implementing Friday social mornings, a weekly gathering for adults to catch up over tea.

She was also behind the annual Big Bear Hunt, which runs over the summer and involves her laying a trail of bear images around the village for children to hunt down to be entered into a prize draw.

She said: “Some people come regularly, some come every now and then. You never know who is going to be there, it’s a mix of people and you just sit and chat about anything and everything from weather to books to childhood to what the area was like when they were young.

“There are all sorts of conversations and it’s so interesting to get to know people and it certainly makes you realise you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

“I also introduced the Big Bear Hunt that we have around the village throughout the summer and that gets the whole village involved.

“Part of that was to try and encourage people into the library but also to get people who don’t necessarily use the library aware that there is one and that it’s a community space.

“When I have been putting the bears up, people of all ages say they look forward to it.”

Mrs Smith was presented with flowers and a card signed by volunteers, committee members and regular library users and the committee’s annual meeting.

Kate Eke is the new chair of the committee, with Vera Galyasz being elected vice-chair.