Elena Lara of Lakemoor is one busy Lake Countian. She’s been working at the Round Lake Area Public Library for 10 years, the last five as head of outreach services. She volunteers with community organizations, such as the Round Lake Area B.E.S.T. (Bridging Everyone’s Strengths Together) Coalition, where she acts as president and with the WRLR 98.3 radio station where she is a board member. Elena loves her community and never misses an opportunity to talk about programs and events designed to help others.

What do you do at the library?

I serve the community by creating awareness about the library services. Another important thing I have to do is reach out to the community and build community partnerships so that I can link up to additional services and programs that we can bring in for the patrons.

What are some of those community partnerships you have built?

Well, right now we have a partnership with Mano a Mano Family Resource Center and we partner with them to bring health seminars in Spanish to the library, because that’s one of my focuses —outreach to the Hispanic community. So, we bring health seminars and other informational seminars that are important … about what kind of rights they have. We also host some of their classes, too. I just want to mention also that the citizenship program with Mano a Mano we’ve had for about a year and the volunteers that we’ve been able to recruit are fabulous. They’re telling me that they have a 98 percent success rate with the students who take the class and then pass the test and the interview.