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Carnegie Toy Library
Annual General Meeting - 14th March 2023
It was so great to be able to return to a sense of normality in 2022, where our committee and volunteers focused on revitalising both the toy library and toy collection to enable children to learn through the experience of play. The strong bond amongst our long-standing committee and wider community continued and we were able to provide our wonderful service to local families.
Here’s what we achieved...
Our toy collection.
We added 205 new toys to our collection throughout the year, and also replaced 95 toys which were broken or had missing pieces. We are continually reviewing, repairing and refreshing our toys, which involves hours of weekly volunteering behind the scenes.
One of our key focus areas was toys to help nurture pandemic babies and toddlers. Key categories included:
Baby play: Toys specially designed for the first year of a child’s life that are safe, stimulating and developmentally appropriate.
Sensory: Toys which engage a range of senses and skills including gross and fine motor skills.
Train sets, boats and ships: transport toys are great for encouraging narrative skills, imagination and language development.
We continued to grow the new Story Sacks category which contains a story book with accompanying toys to support the story. One of our most popular Story Sacks are the Bluey collections; The creek, The pool and At home with the heelers. Story Sacks are a great opportunity for children to consider the characters and locations of the story, taking the lead of a main character in a story and expressing themselves as the character throughout the story, helping them to develop and improve their social, communication and language skills.
Our committee diligently conducted two stocktake sessions throughout the year, where all toys in the collection were counted and reviewed to ensure all the toys in the collection were high quality and accurately recorded in our database.
Party Packs.
We had our most successful year to date for party packs with a record high number of members and non members hiring the party packs, resulting in our highest ever revenue stream. Our new baby party pack with soft foam play pieces was so popular that we created a secondary pack and renamed the packs to Explorer and Adventure party packs. We also added a new The Floor is Lava party pack which consisted of a ninja soft foam course and 2 roller coasters. The success of the new party packs has enabled us to continue to purchase new toys for our collection.
Our members
Our memberships have remained steady year on year. At the end of 2022 we had 270 members, which sits on par with the previous year. Sentiment continues to remain positive amongst our members, who continue to provide feedback about our toy collection and offering.
Marketing and promotions
We spread the word of our Toy Library at New Parent Group talks throughout the year and continued to promote the Toy Library through our social media channels by posting engaging imagery of new toy arrivals and behind the scenes on Facebook and Instagram.
Our social channels continue to grow with our Instagram channel reaching the big milestone of 1000 followers and our Facebook channel, 696 followers. Our Instagram and Facebook channels continued to message the importance of play in early childhood and featured many new toy arrivals and inspirational ways to play.
We had our biggest ever Nappy collection with over 1000 nappies were donated by our members and collected at the toy library for the Nappy Collective, an organisation which collects unused disposable nappies across Australia and diverts them to families in crisis.
Our google ads continued to drive traffic to our website and helped drive party pack awareness and bookings for non members.
Grants & Fundraising.
We were successful with the following grants:
These were:
Katie Allen - Stronger Communities - Sports Equipment
Glen Eira Community Services Grant - Nurturing Pandemic babies
Forest Hill Grant - Nurturing Pandemic toddlers
Grill’d Carnegie - New toy purchases
Co-ordinator.
We bid farewell to Eleanor, our co-ordinator of 4 years and welcomed Rhinnai. Rhinnai comes to us with a wealth of library knowledge and experience, with a Diploma of Library and information services and working as a volunteer at Collingwood Toy Library. We also thank Eleanor, our co-ordinator of 4 years for all of her incredible dedication and commitment to the toy library and our community. We wish her the best of luck finalising her studies and pursuing her exciting new career.
Acknowledgements.
A huge thank you must go out to our members & volunteers for their continued support. The toy library relies on our wonderful committee members who continue to work through multiple projects and initiatives behind the scenes.
We celebrated Bob’s 20 year anniversary of volunteering at the toy library, helping repair our toys. We are so fortunate to have Bob continuing to help out behind the scenes, and have lost count of all the toys he has saved over the 20 years! He was awarded with a recognition award at our 2022 Annual General Meeting, and also recently at the Toy Libraries Australia 2022 awards, where he was recognised as one of the longest serving committee members within Australia. He was also featured in the local Glen Eira newspaper.
Bob was also recognised by @cityofgleneira for his 20 years of helping repair toys at our toy library!
Elena (pink), our Vice President, and also our Toy catalogue Co-ordinator, who works weekly on Wednesday nights on our toy collection, cataloging new toys, replacing old toys and evolving our story sacks category. Elena has completely transformed our toy database, which she works on remotely at home. She also receives all of our toy deliveries, and brings them to the toy library, which is a massive job, and also helps out at our open sessions.
Pia (yellow), our Communications officer who has been on the committee for 7 years now. Pia is across manyl different aspects of our toy library and often helps out last minute at our open sessions. She also helps the broader toy community by running the media camhelping out across all components, particularly our new walkway area.
Claire (green), our Secretary who is our AGM guest speaker tonight. Claire helped with our biggest ever year of party pack bookings, managing all enquiries and bookings. She’s also done a brilliant job of managing all of our admin and member enquiries behind the scenes. This year Claire is stepping down as secretary, into a general committee role. I just wanted to say a big thank you to Claire for everything she's done for us in her time as secretary.
Gemma (pink), our Grants Officer, continues to spend hours writing grant applications to ensure that we can receive ongoing funds to provide new toys for the toy library. She was successful with 2 grant applications in 2022, which ensured we could provide new toys to our collection.
Katie (pink), worked as our digital marketing co-ordinator and helped optimise our google ads, which contributed to our biggest year to date for party pack hire. The ads helped to drive awareness to non members, who in return visited our website and hired our party packs.
Rosie (yellow), our General committee member has been great at helping out where she can with all of the adhoc tasks that arise ongoing.
Steph (purple), our Duty roster co-ordinator who helped ensure our duty roster was full for the open sessions.
Amay (green), our Volunteers co-ordinator helped to manage our volunteers to ensure that our duty roster is full and our open sessions can run.
Bonnie, our Treasurer who managed all of our financials for the year.
Michelle, who continues to spread the word at our New Parent Groups and has also helped out with numerous open sessions.
So what's in store for 2023?
We will continue to support the families of Glen Eira to engage and learn with their children through the wonder of play.
Our focus will be
Maintaining membership numbers
Growing our committee
Training and sourcing non member volunteers
Continuing to market the toy library through PR
Grant applications and fundraising
I’m grateful that we have new committee members and volunteers joining us in 2023 and I encourage and warmly welcome more community members to share their existing skills or learn a new set of skills to enable the continuation of the toy library service; whether it be embracing a role on the committee or undertaking individual tasks to experience how rewarding and enjoyable a committee role can be.
Leonie Cavagna President
Carnegie Toy Library
We acknowledge the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Owners of the land on which we gather and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. We acknowledge the vitality of our planet and the responsibility for all to care for it and all its inhabitants.
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