Our Supporters

We are honoured to receive $25,000 through the New Horizons for Seniors Program for our 2025 initiative, Preserving Voices, Empowering Communities.
This multilingual oral history project will celebrate Milton’s seniors by capturing and preserving their life stories in their native languages. The project includes:

• Interview training sessions, along with technology training on how to conduct interviews

• A digital archive with English captions

• Educational workshops on financial fraud prevention and digital literacy awareness to help avoid online scams

Seniors will take on the role of cultural ambassadors, helping to foster cross-generational learning while preserving community heritage.
This marks our fourth consecutive year receiving this important grant, with past projects including:

• Hand-Me-Down (2022)
• Seniors Translation for Newcomers (2023)
• Engaging Senior Artists (2024)

Learn more about our work on previous New Horizons for Seniors Program grants here.

We extend our sincere thanks to the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation for a $7,000 grant to support hands-on environmental programming at MPL.
This funding will enable the development of:

• 25 Citizen Science Pollinator Kits, which include field tools like binoculars, wildflower guides, and notebooks
• A weekly environmental education series in the Indigenous Medicine Garden at our Beaty Branch

The initiative promotes pollinator awareness and sustainable gardening practices, with a special focus on bees and butterflies.

Through the Government of Canada’s Canada Summer Jobs program, MPL received funding to hire two Library Assistants for summer 2025.

These 8-week positions provide local youth with meaningful employment, while supporting library programming, events, and outreach activities across our branches.

The Government of Canada funding through the Young Canada Works program has made it possible to offer two new positions:

• Outreach Literacy Coordinator – Multilingual
• Diversity Audit Assistant

These 26-week roles begin in late spring/summer 2025 and are designed to enhance multilingual literacy resources and support more inclusive collections and services at MPL.

With the generous support from the Milton Community Resource Centre (MCRC) and in partnership with Halton Healthcare, MPL continued the Baby Bee’s First Reads program into 2025. This initiative, which reached over 113 families in the past year, provides resources tailored for newborns, fostering a love for stories, language, and imagination from the earliest stages of life.

As part of the program, families welcoming a baby at Milton District Hospital will receive a voucher in their discharge package. This voucher can be redeemed at any MPL branch for a kit that includes a baby’s first library card, a reusable Baby Bee’s First Reads tote bag, the popular book Where Is Baby’s Belly Button?, or a selection of multilingual books in Urdu, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and French upon request. Families will also find early literacy resources, a 1000 Books Before Kindergarten tracker and growth chart, and information to guide them to additional community supports, including Halton Healthcare’s online Patient and Family Health Information Centre.

With support from the Canada Post Community Foundation, Milton Public Library is expanding its services for children who are neurodiverse. This grant will help us increase our sensory-friendly story times across all branches and create a dedicated sensory-friendly drop-in space at the Main Library. These initiatives provide welcoming, inclusive environments where children of all abilities can learn, play, and connect.