“I love working with children. I like bringing families together to celebrate each other, their different cultures and stories.”
This is how Valerie Taylor-Pierce describes her passion for her job as the bilingual children’s librarian at the Longmont Public Library.
Having been born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in a bicultural family, Taylor-Pierce has been fascinated by language and culture from an early age.
She traveled across South and Central America with her parents, Wayne and Thusy Taylor, as a child, visiting and living in Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Guatemala, and gained a special appreciation for education from her father, an English teacher, and bilingualism from her mother, a native Chilean.
“I grew up in a bilingual household and when I started going to college, I really wanted to keep that skill,” Taylor-Pierce said. “It was really my mother who insisted. Even the few years that lived here in the United States, when I was growing up, she insisted that we speak Spanish at home, which I'm eternally grateful to her for.”
After close to 40 years of living in Longmont, she has seen many changes in the community about which she is excited.
“Since I moved here, (Longmont has) really changed and I think for the better,” she said. “We really make an effort to be very inclusive because Longmont has become so much more diverse … It makes it a really interesting place to be.”
As the bilingual librarian, Taylor-Pierce oversees the several program areas the library hosts to reflect Longmont’s diversity, including the bilingual story time as well as Day of the Dead and Children’s Day and Diversity in Action programming.
“We're a community center and as a library we have the opportunity to really bring the community together and have important conversations about what is going on in the world or just even share each other’s culture whether it’s through food, dance or stories,” she said.
Valerie Taylor-Pierce leads a bilingual storytime. . By Screen capture from Longmont Library Facebook pageThroughout the pandemic, the library has found ways to go out and meet community members where they are to continue providing services, she said.
For her, this work has entailed visiting Head Start schools, meeting families at lunch and grocery sites coordinated by Children, Youth and Families services, and hosting book donation events in partnership with the Friends of the Library, a group of volunteers and enthusiasts working to promote literacy across the community, she said.
Going out to the community is something that has become especially necessary throughout the pandemic as the library building has had to close due to COVID-related restrictions, said Nancy Kerr, library director.
“Doing outreach to the Spanish-speaking community meeting people where they are is really important to us. She's always amazing and enjoys meeting with the community and being able to speak with people in Spanish,” Kerr said. “But during COVID, she's been just exceptional.”
Beyond volunteering to hand out free books at multiple events and lunch sites, Taylor-Pierce has stepped up to help with translation and interpretation at local COVID testing sites, Kerr said.
Taylor-Pierce said it’s important for the community to know the library is still available to them, even during the closure.
“So often what I’ve found when I go to these lunch sites is that people don't even know that we're still open … even though it's limited, people can still access what they need,” she said.
During the pandemic, the library has continued to provide a variety of services, including a virtual bilingual storytime as well as a monthly bilingual lotería Mexicana, or Mexican bingo, night during which both English- and Spanish-speaking families can play an interactive game via Webex.
Other bilingual family activities provided by the library include craft challenges streamed every Thursday via Facebook and Twitter.
“We’re really making people aware that we are more diverse. We’re helping people see that the library is for everyone. We serve everyone. We don’t care what your income is or your legal status, none of that matters,” Taylor-Pierce said. “My role is to serve.”
