Rachael Grime is the director of the Little Dixie Regional libraries, which cover Randolph and Monroe County. She said they work to support their community in lots of ways – beyond just books.
They offer a “Library of Things,” which focuses on health and wellness, where patrons can check out basic health equipment: ankle weights, a thermometer, blood pressure cuffs, and more.
“Some of those things are very, very expensive, and if you only need it once or twice, or if you only need it for a week or two, that's a huge expense, and then it just goes and it sets, Grime said. “So, I was able to write a grant to ask to purchase some of the healthcare items that we have, and I wanted to make sure that these items were available for everybody in our community.”
More recently, the libraries began to offer a “Healing Library,” a collection of pre-prepared interactive kits that help families tackle hard topics together.
Missouri Health is spending March 2025 exploring the intersection of public health and public libraries. If you have a story you'd like to share, contact us at smithbecky@missouri.edu.
Rachel Grime: My grandmother passed away in 2019 and, you know, I was really, really close to my grandmother, and death is hard – death is hard to understand as an adult, let alone as a child. Just death is hard to understand.
And so, when I was trying to find items for myself to help with grief and the stages of grieving and things to help with my family, I found the healing library.
And the idea behind the healing library is that it was a project that a library student in California created, and I was able to contact them, and I told them that I was really interested in their idea and to see if I could kind of borrow it – and they sent me all the programming information, all the kit information and the logos and told me to have a good time.
So, what the healing library is – is it's a kit. It's a bag, and inside of that bag are local resources and children's items, children's books to better understand a certain theme
We have several themes: Death of a loved one, death of a pet, cancer and serious illness, my loved one lives in prison, my loved one has Alzheimer's or dementia, we have COVID – we have a COVID kit. I might be missing a couple.
So, within each of those kits, we have books and local materials. I have went through all of the materials and have created them locally for our items.
So, when it talks about “these are the places you can go for health information,” I have our local hospitals and our local health departments listed. When it talks about “These are people that you might, you could talk to for more help,” I have local therapists and psychologists.
The books are kind of created to where you can have a discussion with them. So, there's five to six books in each kit.
And so, for example, the “Death of a Loved One,” all of the books talk about death in different ways, and so, not each book maybe perfect for your family, but hopefully at least one or two of those items would be perfect to read through.
And as you read through those books, there's questions that you can ask your child, so or there's questions that they can ask you.
There's activities with it, such as the death of a loved one, there's memory kits and dream catchers, and there's lots of little, small crafts that you can do with your child or do with a loved one that, you know, don't cost a lot and it would benefit their memory or benefit the grieving process.
They helped me. I'm not gonna lie. I'm an adult. I was an adult when my grandmother passed away, and I have taken each one of those kits home, and the kit for death of a loved one helped me immensely.
And, you know, I think she would be really proud of it. Some money was donated in her memory. All of the healing kits were purchased with money from the community, it was all donations from our community, so no taxpayer money went to that.
So, I just encourage people to come and use it.
