Carolyn McIntyre, 57, is a central Brooklyn resident on a mission.  Three years ago, McIntyre and her husband Michael White, went to her local library – the Brooklyn Heights branch­ ­– for a meeting, where she heard an announcement.

“Vice President [of the Brooklyn Public Library] Josh Nachowitz and Deborah Hallen, Secretary of the Friends of the Brooklyn Heights Branch Library, said that they were going to sell the library to a private developer.  They were going to tear it down and build a luxury high rise with a much smaller library on the ground floor and the basement – [downsizing it] from 65,000 square feet to 15,000 square feet,” she said.

It hit her hard.

“It hit me in a very deep place.  I just knew intuitively that this was very, very bad,” she said.

McIntyre went into action.  She had prior experience with political activism; she had gone to call parties and helped re-elect President Obama.

First, she did some Googling and found out that the Brooklyn Heights branch wasn’t the only library being sold off.  There was already an advocacy group, Committee to Save NYPL working, since 2009, to prevent the sale of the Mid-Manhattan and SIBIL branches.

“They had a petition.  We reached out to them and [decided to create] our own petition to expand it to all libraries.  They were only focused on libraries in Manhattan,” she said.

Thus, Citizens Defending Libraries, co-founded by McIntyre and her husband Michael White, was born.

Citizens Defending Libraries is a community activist group, not even large enough to be a registered non-profit.  The small donations it receives mainly go towards printing flyers.

McIntyre spends 10 hours a week working on Citizens Defending Libraries.  This involves: co-leading the weekly meeting with her husband, reading lots of emails, attending subcommittee meetings, going to public events to get the word out, writing letters to politicians, sending out emails to the members, and attending public events put out by the Trustees of the libraries.

McIntyre estimates that Citizens Defending Libraries’s members consist of 10,000 who receive emails, a small group of 150-200 who try to stay more informed, and a core group of 15-30 people who regularly attend the weekly meetings.

It’s been very successful.

“We helped stop the sale of the Mid-Manhattan library, the Pacific library near Barclays [Center], and slowed down the sale of the Brooklyn Heights library.  We’re still fighting,” she said.