Green Libraries Grant Fund 2025-26: One Small Thing

Category: #CILIPSGoGreen, Blog

by Eileen Vernon and Amanda Berrisford

Scotland’s Green Libraries Grant Fund project report (2025-26)

Supported by Scotland’s Green Libraries Grant Fund, generously sponsored by Better World Books, the One Small Thing project ran from 2025 – 26 in South Ayrshire Libraries, based in the Sustainability Hub at the Carnegie Library, Ayr. It was delivered as a collaborative project led by South Ayrshire Libraries working with other council departments, local organisations and volunteers based in or active in Ayrshire.

The Sustainability Hub (launched October 2025)

The Sustainability Hub was conceived as a space within the Carnegie Library in Ayr that was dedicated to Climate Action; a place to hold events and workshops and house our dedicated Climate Collection. It was also envisioned as a space where people could come and use community available resources to make, repair and reuse things. We wanted it to be a place where people exchanged resources and the response from the local community was overwhelming; we received donations of a whole range of craft items from textiles, wool and knitting needles to sewing machines and craft paper. We used some of our project budget to purchase basic repair materials such as tool sets and glue guns so people would not have to go out and buy these things to repair small items. The results were reducing consumption and saving money for our Hub users!

The Sustainability Hub has grown throughout our project and now has several shelves of community items for use and magazines on everything from pottery to gardening. It has a Community Free Fabric Library, Community Wool Library and a Jigsaw swap shop. Also available are a range of tools to go with these as well as use of sewing machines and knitting needles.

The Hub is an information resource as well. We have our up-to-date Climate Collection, posters and information about green-themed events in local libraries and beyond, information about the partners we have worked with and also a free “Take Away” bookshelf that allows people to access even more environmental based fiction and nonfiction from library stock that would otherwise have been disposed of.

Monthly Climate Café and Workshop Series

Ayrshire Climate Hub and Home Energy Scotland

In our initial planning stage, we envisaged the Sustainability Hub as a place for hands on practical activities for individuals and groups engaged with reuse, repair and recycle, and also as a space for discussion and information with a dedicated collection and opportunities for talks and discussion with invited speakers. Before the launch of the Hub, we made contact with the Ayrshire Climate Hub to invite speakers on climate issues in Ayrshire and home energy efficiencies to the Prestwick Library Tea and Talk to mark Scotland’s Climate Week in September and followed this up with an invitation for them to participate in a series of monthly “Climate Café” conversations in the Sustainability Hub during October, November and December.

Sustainable Christmas

We paired the Home Energy Scotland events with our “Sustainable Christmas” themed events in November and December in order to strengthen our message that sustainability could help with affordability and to highlight the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 12: “responsible consumption and production”.

We wanted to start the One Small Thing project with something impactful and with relevance to many in our community. Christmas can be one of the most wasteful times of the year and many people struggle with overconsumption and excessive spending. We decided that the events would focus on a) not buying things you don’t need, b) creating decorations and gifts from recycled and reused materials and c) keeping energy use down by focusing on insulation and education.

Our programme included:

• Rag Wreath making workshops: using fabric, including old bed sheets, donated to the Sustainability Hub Community Fabric Library. The adult session was very popular with everyone making fantastic looking wreaths that would not wither and could be hung up year after year. We hoped this would highlight the importance and ease with which people could save material from landfill and make and reuse beautiful decorations.
• Make an upcycled draught excluder: this used material from the Community Fabric Library and shredding from council offices to make an effective draught excluder. This had the bonus of allowing adults and children to practice sewing and glueing skills while making something from recycled materials that would insulate their homes and help reduce their energy output. Again, we hoped to highlight that these small actions could help reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gases in an easy and affordable way.
• Make your own Cards/Wrapping Paper workshops: these focused on reusing old, donated Christmas cards and turning them into something new and authentic. We ran adult only sessions that were very popular and filled up almost immediately and also some family focused ones. Most people who attended made multiple cards.

Our Sustainable Christmas workshop activities were well received, with 47 adults and children attending the programme. However, we struggled to make a similar impact with our Climate Café series of monthly talks. Following participant feedback from our January Climate Café, which featured practical activities led by a speaker from the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere, we decided to focus on offering more hands-on workshops once a month rather than talks and discussions.

UoG Participatory Workshop

In December we were contacted by the Ayrshire Climate Hub asking us if we would be able to work with second-year PhD research student Rhiannon Hawkins of the University of Glasgow. Her research is examining the impacts of climate change on community mental health in Scotland, particularly in areas prone to flooding and drought such as Ayrshire, and she was keen to speak with local people about their experiences, especially farmers, young adults, disabled and elderly people. Rhiannon hoped to tap into community experience of floods and droughts and to provide them with a chance to have informal discussions about what they thought and felt about these and climate change in general.

In January we organised a participatory workshop in Prestwick Library which ran at the same time as a scheduled Knit and Natter event. Rhiannon was able to capture thoughts and feelings of those attending the Knit and Natter group as well as others who had come along to the library to take part in the workshop. In total, over 130 people and 23 different organisations have engaged with her research project, and we were delighted to connect her with participants in South Ayrshire. Once she has finished analysing her data she will share her findings with these groups as well as the wider communities.

The Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere

Our designated theme for January was United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3: “good health and well-being.” We showcased a collection of health and nature books on our online catalogue and partnered with the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere to deliver a Green Health workshop in the Sustainability Hub, focussing on the benefits that being outside in nature can have for both physical and mental health and wellbeing as well as connecting people to nature and each other. The workshop was a mix of indoor and outdoor activities, with discussions around science and nature and then a walk in local green space.

The Conservation Volunteers

We partnered with The Conservation Volunteers (TCV) to offer a series of family and adult workshops in February and March, to explore our highlighted theme United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15: “life on land.” The family workshops involved indoor and outdoor activities exploring Ayr’s biodiversity, including winter tree identification activities in Auld Kirk Cemetery, bird identification activities along the River Ayr and a bug hunt in the green spaces surrounding the library. The adult workshops introduced participants to the work done by TCV and about the importance of the work done by the public in recording and helping each other identify plants, insects and mammals in their local area, and how sharing that knowledge via apps and websites is one small thing we can all do to help scientists and conservation groups build up a picture of the natural world across the UK.

Crossroads Community Hub

April saw our focus move to food waste awareness, with project co-lead Amanda Berrisford introducing the topic at the end of March with a menu planning workshop in the Sustainability Hub. We used Food Waste Action Week and Zero Food Waste Day at the end of March as a catalyst to focus our efforts on helping our communities change “One Small Thing” about their food waste habits, and did this through community education, in person and digitally. We worked in collaboration with Crossroads Community Hub to bring their Canny Cooking programme to the library, with an emphasis on food waste reduction, budgeting and practical cooking skills. The Sustainability Hub was transformed into a temporary kitchen as participants were led in two sessions “Cooking from scratch on a budget” and “Reducing food waste by using leftovers creatively”, with focus on simple, nutritious, home-cooked food that participants could easily recreate at home.

Other practical sessions offered through the Sustainability Hub were guided bitesize online learning courses from Zero Waste Scotland, with library staff on hand to support people who were not confident with digital learning and a further menu planning workshop by Amanda. These workshops were great to deliver as they did not require specialized knowledge; many people were keen to get started with menu planning and just needed some guidance. Amanda showed them several different templates and used different recipe books to help inspire them. They talked about healthy freezing and storage guidelines and use by and best before dates. All of these activities supported our United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of the month, “zero hunger,” and were complemented with a curated book collection showcased in our library online catalogue.

Regular Events in the Sustainability Hub

One of the principles and main aims of our project was to empower people to make small changes within their lifestyle that would have lasting cumulative effects. We wanted the Sustainability Hub to be a place where people could come to learn new skills and practice existing ones. It was important to establish regular opportunities for people to drop in and be able to meet with people sharing their knowledge and expertise and we did this through the Repair Cafe and our volunteer run “Sew Sustainable” drop-in class.

The Repair Café

The Repair Cafe started with a pop-up session in Prestwick Library at the end of November, run by volunteers from Irvine Share and Repair who are members of the Scottish Share and Repair Network. Members of the public were encouraged to come along to the library with items of clothing, soft toys, soft furnishings, small appliances or ornaments, anything that could fit in a Bag for Life, to see if precious possessions could be repaired. The pop-up session was a great success, with volunteers having the opportunity to talk through how they were mending items, informal chats about the value of saving things from landfill and the One Small Thing project in general. Feedback from the public attending was very positive and arrangements were made to establish a regular monthly Repair Cafe in the Sustainability Hub in the new year.

These regular monthly Repair Cafes ran from January to May, with great success. A myriad of items was brought in for repair: table lamps, wall clocks, cuddly toys, summer tops and jackets, jewellery boxes and slow cookers to name only a few. In some cases, the repair volunteers were able to talk attendees through how best to make a repair and guide them to do it themselves. In other cases, items needed to be left with volunteers as they required more time to work on than was available in the session. We had several members of the public who were repeat visitors and who were able to report to us that they had been inspired to mend other items at home.

Agreement has been reached with our Repair Cafe volunteers to continue with their regular monthly session in the Sustainability Hub, as well as hosting pop-up sessions in four other South Ayrshire Libraries over the coming months. We are also hoping to work with them to enable recruitment and training of more Repair Cafe volunteers so that we can offer even more opportunities for sessions in South Ayrshire.

Sew Sustainable with Moira

At the same time that the Repair Cafe opened, we recruited a volunteer sewing tutor to lead monthly bookable sewing classes in the Sustainability Hub. We decided to keep these sessions limited to only 2 or 3 participants to give the tutor the necessary time to work one-to-one with an attendee or to cover a range of suggested topics in the session. There were 5 monthly sessions and attendees learned how to sew seams, put in zips, use a sewing machine and overlocker and got feedback from the tutor on sewing that they were doing at home. Feedback from those attending was mostly positive, and we have discussed with the sewing tutor about in future offering shorter sewing courses of 6 weeks, with defined objectives for each of the lessons that build on skills from the previous week.

Gardening Club and Community Garden

As part of our efforts to highlight the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15 “life on land,” we wanted to promote the benefits of green spaces and gardens in our communities, both for cultivating flowers and vegetables and also for health and wellbeing. As part of a “Green Audit”, we had assessed the green and garden potential of all South Ayrshire libraries, and a space at the back of the Carnegie building was designated large enough for a community garden. We hoped that starting one in this visible space would allow community members with no gardens or just balconies to be able to enjoy the benefits that come from looking after a garden, have access to fresh, locally grown vegetables with ZERO food miles and be encouraged to grow things inside or around their own homes.

We bought some simple gardening equipment and organised a new community garden club run from the Sustainability Hub. We reached out to the South Ayrshire Rangers service for advice on local plants, and were very lucky to find out that they were starting a project to produce pollinator pathways throughout South Ayrshire. They were working in built up areas specifically, planting local plants and getting rid of invaders. They were very keen to collaborate with the One Small Thing project and helped build our garden and advised us in setting up the Gardening club. Very soon we had a garden filled with native wildflower species such as foxglove, English bluebell and snowdrop and raised beds producing a wide variety of vegetables.

The Gardening Club started slowly at first, with only a few volunteers attending our weekly sessions, but as more plants were planted out and the weather got warmer membership increased and we now support a thriving ecology of vegetables, herbs and flowers.

Green Libraries Audit

As part of being certified for the Carbon Literacy in Libraries training, project co-lead Eileen Vernon had pledged to undertake a “green audit” of South Ayrshire Libraries with her colleagues. The audit was designed based on the seven pledges from CILIP’s Green Libraries Manifesto and distributed to library colleagues for completion.

We were in the fortunate position of being able to use data from this audit to inform some of our One Small Thing planning. We got feedback about library spaces and practices, groups that libraries engaged with in their areas and potential to support recycling initiatives in library branches. Staff also gave feedback about their adult and junior collections relating to climate change or environmental issues which we used to help us select fiction and nonfiction stock for our dedicated One Small Thing mobile Climate Collection.

Climate Literacy Activities

Mobile Climate Collection

We based our stock selection around the broad themes of reuse, recycle and repair that we were hoping to encourage through our project, as well as currency and broad appeal to a wide readership. We knew from our “green audit” that some investment was needed in up-to-date junior nonfiction and picture books which could then be shared around all South Ayrshire library branches as part of a mobile collection.

As our new collection started to arrive, we were able to highlight it through our online library catalogue as part of themed showcases and through prominent displays in the Carnegie Library which hosts the Sustainability Hub. It was labelled as part of the One Small Thing collection and is intended to support our aim of providing up to date, accurate information which helps to combat misinformation and disinformation that is often found around climate change and environmental conversations.

Author workshop and storytimes

We invited author Amanda Edmiston to the Sustainability Hub to talk about her book “The Time Travelers Herbal”, a blend of non-fiction and fiction discussing herbs and their past uses through a story told from the perspective of a time traveler, with attendees leaving with a new found appreciation of the herbs growing all around them and their history.

We organised green storytimes and craft sessions around two picture books. “The Planet in a Pickle Jar” about conservation and “Ruby plants a Radish” about growing things a food. These were organised with associated activities – making our own jar of wonderful things we want to save and planting our own radish seed that we could take away and row on a windowsill at home. Originally, we had planned to work with a local school and organize class visits to explore sustainability themes, but after the success of our Sustainable Christmas family activities we felt that we could have productive climate conversations and interactions with families through joint adult/children craft and story sessions.

Learn more about Scotland’s Green Libraries Grant Fund