
How Libraries Are Creating Community Through Food
August 27, 2025 | Source: Civil Eats | by Liz Susman Karp
For the last five years, Michelle Coleman has attended cooking and culinary education classes in a light-filled teaching kitchen at her local library in Boston. The kitchen, designed for hands-on cooking and demonstrations with four gas cooktops and a 17-foot-long counter, was included in the building’s redesign in 2020 in response to community feedback.
Here Coleman learned how to compost and repurpose leftovers, thereby reducing her food waste, a bonus to learning about new foods and flavor profiles.
“Cooking in public spaces is really fun,” says Coleman, a retired academic medicine administrator who owns over 300 cookbooks. She enjoys combining her love of cooking with being social. “The library has become this much broader social space for people to feel supported and in community.”
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