Bridgton Public Library Director Amy Stone hopes that the library will become an important community gathering spot for local nonprofits. Rory Sweeting / Lakes Region Weekly

The Bridgton Public Library plans to start a “nonprofit learning community,” which would serve as a resource for local nonprofit organizations.

According to Amy Stone, director of the Bridgton Public Library, the idea for the learning community came from several different places, including her previous experience working with community foundations.

The most important of these was the Bridgton Area Nonprofit Collaboration, which regularly met throughout 2023, and which Stone described as a predecessor of sorts to the group that she plans to start. The group included a number of Bridgton-area nonprofits, largely centered around education, culture and the environment, with some health and wellness groups as well, gathering together to talk about ways to support each other’s work. Despite the soft launch in 2023, the participants found themselves too busy to gather together as a group, and the nonprofits have mostly communicated with each other in the form of one-on-one conversations and by asking each other reference questions.

Participants in the original group included Windham’s local 4-H group, Loon Echo Land Trust, Bridgton Hospital, the Rufus Porter Museum, the Bridgton Public Library and the Opportunity Alliance.

Stone hopes to relaunch the group, noting how she thinks the role of nonprofits in providing cultural resources and help with health and human services is going to become even more important in the upcoming years. She noted that there were a lot of nonprofits in the Bridgton area, and she felt that they needed some extra support, particularly involving research and technology. The nonprofit learning community, Stone said, would be of help in many of these areas, helping provide nonprofits with access to grant research resources, peer editing for grant proposals and nonprofit management.

According to Stone, the library is the best-equipped place for a nonprofit learning community for a number of reasons. If there are particular topics or questions that organizers have as they develop their nonprofits, the library could connect them to other resources, such as the Maine Association of Nonprofits or the Maine Center for Philanthropy. Technology that the library has available for checkout, as well as one-on-one technology assistance, will be offered to participants.

Stone said she would like to form a nonprofit support group. However, she said, even if an official learning community does not form, she is still dedicated to supporting nonprofits throughout the Bridgton area.

“If there’s not a group, that’s okay,” she said. “We’re here to support the community as the community needs. We’re here to gather people together, but we’re also here to just support people where they are.”