Our Purpose

We live in what's called a knowledge economy. That means most people can no longer earn a living wage by making things, as they did in the factory. Now the best jobs require great digital skills, high literacy, and the ability to keep learning new things.

Our citizens must become lifelong learners if they want to succeed in the knowledge economy. That's why our mission is to be Flint's go-to place to learn for life.

This mission helps to guide our service priorities, or the areas in which we focus. Some things are a given. For example, we'll always have books! We'll always be the place for local genealogy and history. But we invest most of our resources in the following three priorities.

- Early Childhood Literacy: helping parents and caregivers prepare children to read, and exposing kids to STEM programming.

- Digital Learning: filling the technology education gap by exposing students to aspects of computer science, and making technology accessible to the public.

- Community Hub: we want to provide abundant and welcoming space where people can gather for learning, dialogue or entertainment.

About the Library!

We invite you to explore our web site to find out more. Discover our collections that include more than 150,000 books and media to check out or to download and stream. Read about the Black Life and Literature collection. See our Local History and Genealogy Room with the second largest collection of openly accessible genealogy materials in Michigan. Bring your own technology or borrow ours to log on to our Gigabit Internet service. Reserve a room from study room size up to a large community room for your organization’s next big program. Welcome to Your New Gloria Coles Flint Public Library.