By day, senior accountant Jen Bruhl, manages customer and vendor invoices and payments and general ledger entries. When she checks out of Firespring, she checks into the library, or into a good book.
Firespring’s Power of 3 program encourages all team members to volunteer at least 3 percent of their time to causes they care about. That’s around eight hours a month dedicated to serving others.
For over 4 years, Jen has volunteered her time to a local library here in Lincoln. When she’s offering her time there, she can be found helping with shelf organization, looking for lost items and preparing books that are on hold to be picked up by their next reader. During the summer, she’s been able to lend a hand in the assembly of craft supply packets for the reading program. When the summer reading program has finished, she assists with inventory. This is a process where she and library staff members scan and account for every book to ensure that it’s in its home. That’s a lot of books to go through.
A perk to spending so much time at the library, Jen says, is “Sometimes I find books I probably wouldn’t have seen if I were just browsing for something to read, so it helps expand my reading list. I also enjoy being able to help other patrons find things from time to time.”
Jen says that she enjoys reading and the library atmosphere in general. She actually had plans to work there during high school! Though that didn’t work out, she appreciates the ability to be involved now.
Between her time at Firespring and the library, it’s safe to say that Jen finds herself analyzing details quite often. A lot of the skills she uses in this specific volunteer work were developed at the Nebraska Book Company, where she worked several years ago. This includes being able to promptly scan shelves to find the one book that she’s looking for or even coming up with new solutions when looking for a book that can’t be found. This also speaks to Firespring’s value of finding a better way when old ways don’t get the job done.
Though the library is generally pretty quiet, it’s important to Jen that she and others are involved in their community to give back and have the possibility of experiencing something that they wouldn’t otherwise.