Little Free Libraries are quietly reshaping Calgary's reading landscape, one neighbourhood at a time

In 2023, Hanna Stroud designed a blueprint for a Little Free Library and their partner built it — a sturdy red structure on a post outside their Valley Ridge home, filled with children's books reflecting diverse voices and experiences. Inside are illustrative books on insects, space, cooking, historical figures, and stories from marginalized communities.

"I want easy access to those books," Stroud said. "So that kids see themselves and others in their community on the pages of those books."

Fourteen years after Calgary's first Little Free Library opened, the city is now home to more than 1,000 officially registered Little Free Libraries, with countless others operating unofficially across neighbourhoods. These simple boxes of shared books have become a quiet force for community-building and literacy at a time when access to stories is increasingly uneven.

Stroud, a literacy consultant and former literacy assistant for the Calgary Board of Education, understands the lifelong impact of reading. They own and operate My Literacy Space, where they tutor kids in key language and reading skills, and they're a popular picture-book reviewer on Instagram with 89,400 followers. Publishers send them books for review, which Stroud often places in their Little Free Library alongside stories that speak to Calgary's diverse communities.

Their library has held books written in Arabic, English, French, and German. There are books about Indigenous and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities in Canada, and others about the experiences of East Asian and Black people. For Stroud, representation matters. "That's exactly why I do what I want to do," they said.

The global Little Free Library movement began in 2009 when Todd Bol built a miniature schoolhouse in Hudson, Wisconsin, to honour his late mother, a teacher and passionate reader. The movement spread around the world.

Three years later, as part of then-mayor Naheed Nenshi's "Three Things for Calgary" initiative, Cheri Macaulay installed Calgary's first Little Free Library in her front yard. Macaulay, a long-time advocate for community projects and neighbours looking out for one another, saw the library as a way to bring people together through books. She expected it would take time for people to understand the concept. Instead, the shelves were empty within hours of stocking them. Macaulay died in 2019, but her legacy continues to grow.

Steven Campbell, an engineer by trade, built his own Little Free Library on his lawn in the summer of 2020. Since then, he has built them for other Calgarians. "I started seeing all of my neighbours that I never saw during the day, because I was always away," he said. "So I thought, what a great little way to meet my neighbours and bring them together."

Across the city, these small libraries have become gathering points — places where neighbours connect, where kids discover stories that reflect their lives, and where the simple act of taking and leaving a book becomes an act of community care. In neighbourhoods where public library branches have closed or are distant, Little Free Libraries fill a critical gap, offering free access to stories in a landscape that doesn't always make reading easy for everyone.