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Yakima Valley Libraries (YVL) is located in beautiful, agricultural Yakima County in south-central Washington state. Yakima County, which is also home to the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, occupies 4,296 square miles, making it the second-largest county by land area in the state. The agriculture industry has been the bedrock of the region's economy since its founding more than 150 years ago.
The Yakima Valley's rural county library district was formed in 1945; today, the district comprises a central library, 16 community libraries, and an express library, serving more than 250,000 Yakima County residents. With the exception of the city of Grandview, which has its own library, every city and town in Yakima County has either annexed to, or contracted with, YVL for library services.
In 2019, the library district was open a total of 36,011 hours and welcomed 618,751 visitors. We circulated more than 1,005,350 items and hosted 108,383 computer appointments via the 154 internet-connected computers available to the public. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic challenged all of those metrics. We had to become more distanced and our services more virtual, but that potentially left key segments of our community out. Let me tell you how we responded.
The Yakima Valley is an agricultural region.
From Diversity to Divide
Under normal circumstances, providing library services in our area can be challenging, but once the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, we started looking for data to help guide our decision-making process in response. Because these decisions needed to be made as soon as possible, we based many of them on existing internal and external data, mostly from census tools and regional data reports.
For example, census data (Quick Facts, accessed 3/1/21) shows that 50.2% of the Yakima County population is Hispanic or Latino, and 42.3 % of residents consider themselves white and not Hispanic or Latino. Native Americans make up 6.7% of the population, while African American and Asian residents comprise 1.6% of the population, respectively. In terms of education, 26.3% of Yakima County residents older than 25 lack a high school diploma or other secondary education equivalents. Sixteen percent of residents younger than 65 don't have health insurance, and almost 17% of the population lives in poverty. Another critical element of diversity...