We would like to thank the many donors who have already contributed to our campaign! We are so grateful for your support.
Roundabout Books has been working to renovate our new space at 85 Pierce Street with the goal of having a lasting home for our bookstore. What we need most now is an elevator, so that people of all ages and abilities can access all levels of the store. With your support we can purchase an elevator, so that our building is accessible for all.
www.patronicity.com/roundabout
Old buildings come with challenges. Our building must also be usable, from the first day, by the whole community, including people of every age and physical ability. Access for everyone is a value and a commitment for us and our city. This would allow us to serve people with disabilities, including people who use wheelchairs. It would be a benefit to many of our senior citizen customers. And, it would be a benefit to able-bodied people helping young children. It would allow us to continue to serve everyone with the welcome we all expect at Roundabout Books.
To make our whole building accessible is a substantial financial commitment. We can open the main level of our building with a handicapped-accessible ramp and modifications to our entrances and bathrooms, which we have already contracted with an architect to design. With your help, we realized we could go further, though. Our most beautiful room for books--a 2400 sqft upper floor book room--can only be made accessible with the installation of a small elevator.
Our elevator project has been accepted as a project by the State of Massachusetts's Biz-M-Power grant program, one of just four from Franklin County to have earned this grant. If we meet our goal, the Biz-M-Power grant will provide equal, 1:1 matching funds for our project for every dollar that we raise for our lift project, up to $20,000. If we can raise $20,000, the state will provide the remaining $20,000, which would fund the entire $40,000 cost of the elevator. Our upstairs book room would be an outstanding community space--a open, beautiful place to be, to be immersed in books, as well as to host community events. I believe our restored factory building put to effective working use for the whole community would be a defining cultural place in our community that people would consider as a destination as well as an integral part of our civic life.