An Attempt at a Prologue To This Idea
Long story short, after a long term relationship failed catastrophically, I've lost hope in starting a family anytime soon. Like-minded people, let alone women, are just too rare. That said, I've put a lot of thought into what needs to be settled in my life before starting a family; and would get a lot of fulfillment from helping others have what they need to raise prosperous and healthy families.
So with all of that having been circulating through my mind for a few years, I'm ready to start putting these thoughts into practice. They're still just half-baked ideas about how to have a more stable and beneficial community, but they're not going to get any more refined by my mind alone.
The Idea
Since I can't afford a proper estate, I would like to start by purchasing a small and affordable chunk of land, in an existing community. Could be in an urban area, suburban, or rural. On this land I would put a single room building, which would house a small library. After building a residential sized parking lot, the remaining land would be landscaped into a garden.
Now that's the minimal form of this idea, sized for a typical suburban plot. Of course the larger it would be, the more the possibilities open up.
Expanding On This
For Profit?
Well it really depends if I start this with my own funds or with other donations. To me, keeping this as a private endeavour makes the most sense. In the long term, that probably looks like a Private Member Association (PMA). That said, it's very important to me that whatever wealth is accrued, is put back into the library and distributed back to its purpose.
Eg: the handful of people who enable it to run are compensated, the main funds are either invested on behalf of the trust or put into the grounds, and the services which the library offers are funded well enough that they can be relied on to be accessed by the community.
The Collection
The simplest version of this library would have 1000 books in its collection. Not very much. Now if the patrons were like myself, it would be worth carefully curating the volumes until it was full of rare books that couldn't be read anywhere else for 500 miles. That said, for it to be sustainable, the library must be useful for many locals, as well as visitors from further out.
That's all for now.
I've run out of steam on this particular thought train. More thoughts to come.
