The same year Twitter was born, and the first Mac Pro was released — a small library in rural Arizona learned it had a significant role in its community’s future in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
The lightbulb moment came in 2006 when the Safford City-Graham County Library was approached by a major employer in their community, the Safford copper mine. The company was concerned about the local talent pool.
“They very seldom had people from here that had the skills and the training that they could hire, and they were having to hire from outside of the community,” said Lesley Talley, library supervisor. “They wanted to find a way to encourage kids to get involved in any kind of STEM career.”
The mine funded programming for the library to start an initiative called ScienceCity, where STEM…
