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At Illinois College’s Schewe Library, we strive to be a welcoming, inclusive space where students feel at home, finding both academic support and community. With the generous support of the RAILS 2025 My Library Is... Grant, we launched a project to enhance our library’s role as a space for mindfulness, creativity, and relaxation by incorporating crafting, stress relief, and interactive programming.
Why Now?
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 23.4% of US adults experienced mental illness in 2024 (61.5 million people), representing more than 1 in 5 adults. Students, faculty, and staff in the US regularly report moderate to severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and loneliness (2024-2025 Health Minds Study). As a small college library, we think it is vitally important to not only support our students’ academic learning but also to provide opportunities to learn life skills so they can grow into successful, happy leaders.
We designed this project around three key goals:
- Increase student engagement with the library for non-academic, wellness activities centered around stress reduction
- Heighten student awareness of and utilization of mental health and wellness resources both on campus and locally
- Foster a strong sense of community and connection among students through shared creative activities and relaxing experiences
Engaging Our Community
This project reinforced the importance of supporting student mental health and creativity alongside their academic growth. The grant funding allowed us to offer both passive and active library programming, including:
- A Welcome Week Celebration featuring a shark-themed library event (our mascot is Sherman the Schewe Shark), including a scavenger hunt and an outdoor party with picnic blankets, large interactive games, such as giant JENGA and giant Sorry!
- A dedicated puzzle area on the main floor.
- A craft cart supplied with art supplies, fidgets, and sensory toys, such as a weighted plushie and kinetic sand. This craft cart has a permanent place on the library's main floor, allowing students to use it when they need it most without the anxiety-inducing interactions that come with asking for permission.
- Drawing stations on several floors of the library, rotating between crafts such as coloring books, large coloring posters where students can work together to decorate a larger piece of artwork, origami stars and animals, and encouraging students to help decorate the library with seasonal drawings
- Rock painting event.
- Zine-making events.
- Yoga in the library for stress relief.
- Redecorating our relaxation room with mental health posters, fidgets, and an aromatherapy kit.
Our campus community responded favorably to our mental health efforts, and students actively expressed how much they enjoyed the new creative programming. One challenge, albeit not entirely unexpected, was getting students to engage in events where they would not receive credit or free food for attending. This is an unfortunate consequence of students being overbooked and not knowing how to make time for their mental health, and of being so stressed about classes or sports. To counter this, we partnered with other campus elements, coordinating interdepartmental events to have a greater impact. This means the library would host passive events on the main floor and have tables at all-campus events such as Earth Day or Welcome Week. These partnerships were also necessary to maintain momentum as the semester progressed, and our small number of librarians (only 5 librarians total) became busy with other duties.
What Other Libraries Should Know
- Start with relationships: You don’t have to do it alone! In fact, we noticed higher engagement across all campus elements when we partnered with various departments and student clubs.
- Think about user needs: Sometimes passive activities, such as having a craft cart or a puzzle available, can have a significant impact by allowing students to choose when they want to engage. Having these materials constantly available and visible also reminds students that caring for their mental health is important.
- Stay flexible and keep trying: Participation can be affected by a range of factors, from political contexts to midterms to unintentional double-booking of events across campus. If you host an event with no attendance, try again. Even if attendance is low, those who show up will benefit from the program. Momentum takes time, and every small step forward is an achievement.
Looking Ahead
This grant helped us raise campus awareness of the importance of mental health and provide students with an outlet for creativity. Most importantly, this project reinforced the value of a library as a community resource for a college campus, providing educational materials and opportunities to develop positive mental health strategies. Schewe Library looks forward to continuing to be vocal allies for mental health across the college campus. We are grateful to RAILS for supporting our mental health programming efforts to ensure that everyone finds community and support at Schewe Library.
Today's blog post was written by McKenna Jacquemet (she/her), Research Services and Information Literacy Librarian, Illinois College’s Schewe Library.
This project was made possible by the My Library Is... Grant.