Lin-Manuel Miranda’s family helps Friends of the Lincoln Library

Don’t throw away your shot to help Puerto Rico! The Friends of the Lincoln Library in Lincoln, Massachusetts, will raffle two pairs of the best seats in the house for the musical Hamilton at the Boston Opera House. Proceeds from the raffle will fund the public library in the hurricane-ravaged city of Loíza, Puerto Rico. These are center orchestra seats and the winners get to submit their preferred dates and times to the Producer. Raffle tickets are $50 each and only one thousand tickets will be sold. Each raffle ticket holder gets two chances to win!

Raffle ticket sales begin Thursday, June 28, 2018 until sold out or 5:00 p.m. Friday, September 7, 2018, whichever comes first. The Friends will randomly select the winners on Saturday, September 8, at the Lincoln Library. You do not need to be present at the drawing to win. Tickets may be purchased online at https://rafflecreator.com/pages/22879/lincoln-library-hamilton-raffle

In addition to selling raffle tickets, which are not tax deductible under Massachusetts gaming law, the Friends are accepting tax-deductible donations for the Loíza Library on their regular website https://www.lincolnpl.org/about/friends. Checks should be made payable to the “Friends of the Lincoln Library for Loíza” and sent to 3 Bedford Road, Lincoln, MA 01773.

Nine months after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the island continues to recover. To show their support, the Friends of the Lincoln Library voted to raise money to help a Puerto Rican library that needed help with storm damage. They wrote to the Pulitzer Prize winning Hamilton creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda in the hopes of getting tickets to the Boston run of the show to raffle. Of the numerous ticket requests Miranda receives, the Lincoln Library’s caught his family’s eye. The next thing they knew, board member and Raffle Chair, Julie Brogan, and then President of the Friends board, Ray Shepard, were on the phone with Lin-Manuel’s father, Luis A. Miranda Jr..

The elder Miranda is a political consultant in New York, and founder of the Hispanic Federation (HF), the nation’s premier Latino nonprofit membership organization. When Hurricane Maria devastated his birthplace, the Miranda family put their star-power behind Hispanic Federation’s UNIDOS Disaster Relief and Recovery Program. https://www.hispanicfederationunidos.org/.

Luis was intrigued by the Lincoln Library’s request because he sees rebuilding libraries as essential for Puerto Rico’s long-term recovery efforts. In addition to making Hamilton tickets available to the Friends, Hispanic Federation UNIDOS will match up to $20,000 of what the Friends raise for Loíza.

Luis, who has been on the ground in Puerto Rico every other week since the hurricane, paired Lincoln with a Library in the coastal city of Loíza. The small city of Loíza sits just 22 miles east of San Juan. But it is a world away from the towering resorts of the capital city. Sandwiched between the Rio Grande de Loíza River on one side and the El Yunque rain forest on the other, the city was isolated until 1983 when a bridge was built over the Rio Grande to connect it to the rest of the island. Public transportation didn’t reach Loíza until 2005. Loíza’s seclusion helped the city maintain its rich Afro-Caribbean culture and a coastal landscape unspoiled by development. The Pinones mangrove forest, the largest in Puerto Rico, is located in Loíza. Yet such isolation came with a cost. Loíza is one of the poorest cities on the Island; 49.6% of its residents live below the poverty level.

According to Julio Alves, Director of the Jacobsen Center for Writing at Smith College, “The Loíza library is more than a library. It functions like a community center. It's a bright spot in an otherwise very depressed area now, even more than ever. The people there are wonderful and very devoted to the Library.” Alves befriended the library in Loíza ten years ago, when he was vacationing with his son in Puerto Rico.

“Medicine Chest of the Soul” Sign above a library in the ancient city of Thebes