LIBRARY FRIENDS:

CYNDI BLOOM

Friends Board President

Cyndi Bloom has been the president of the Friends of the Boca Raton Public Library for the past two years. Under her leadership, the Friends have grown steadily in membership, have increased event attendance through enhanced media communications, have launched successful library advocacy and funding campaigns, and have engaged more volunteers than ever before.

 

Cyndi joined the Friends in 2008 after attending the opening of the Spanish River Library, and became an active volunteer in the Friends bookstore. She organized the Friends' 2011 book fair, which raised almost $10,000 in books sales over one weekend. Her regular reports to the Friends Board as to the status of book fair preparations over a few months' time resulted in a Board seat and eventual leadership of the Friends.

 

From the beginning of her tenure as president of the Friends, Cyndi has been committed to membership and outreach. She streamlined the Friends' newsletter marketing campaign with Constant Contact, an email small business marketing tool, and transitioned most membership services online. For outreach, she attends Chamber of Commerce meetings, City Council meetings, and local business group meetings to promote the Friends, their cultural programs, their mission to enhance the library, and to raise funds. She has collaborated with local community organizations in the staging of community events, such as the Junior League of Boca Raton's recent successful "Trick or Treat so others can eat," Halloween event at the Boca Raton Community Garden. She has sought and encouraged talented individuals to join the Friends, serve on the Board, act as liaisons, and partner with other local cultural groups to further enhance and promote the Friends organization.

 

Cyndi is a retired business executive. For twenty years prior to moving permanently to Boca Raton in 2006 with her husband, Gil Dube, she held senior management positions in Human Resource Management and Organization Development in the Massachusetts high tech industry. She held an adjunct teaching position at Cambridge College Graduate School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the later years of her professional career, Cyndi ran her own management consulting business in organizational and strategic planning where she had contracts with non-profit organizations such as Accion International, the Boston Management Consortium, Tufts Medical HMO Program, and the Brazilian Immigration Center.

 

Cyndi has held numerous Board memberships for other non-profit organizations, and served on the Massachusetts Governor's Commission on the Status of Women. She also worked for many years for the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts District Court, organizing employee training and development seminars and conferences for court staff and judges.

 

Cyndi has an undergraduate degree in Journalism from Penn State University and a graduate degree in public administration from Sawyer College of Management at Suffolk University in Boston.

 

During her four-year undergraduate work at Penn State, Cyndi worked at the University's Patee Library where she gained her love of libraries and first-hand knowledge of library operations. She is committed to the mission of the library to serve the educational, cultural and literary needs of the community. Her own passion for reading stems from her early childhood memories of getting lost in novels that transported her to other places and times. As president of the Friends, Cyndi hopes to increase the visibility of the organization, and focus on its goals, direction, marketing and branding strategy, to promote the love of libraries.