An Interview with Timo Kuru, Specialist Librarian, Lappeenranta City Library
The term was new. The content wasn’t.
When Timo Kuru sat down for his ESG4GLAM interview, the acronym itself was unfamiliar. But the moment the three dimensions — Environmental, Social, Governance — were explained, his reaction was immediate: “We’re already doing all of this.”
That recognition matters. Because Kuru is not an outlier. He is, in many ways, representative of a large and underacknowledged segment of the GLAM sector: institutions that have been practising sustainability for years — through inclusion programmes, environmental initiatives, ethical programming guidelines — but have never framed any of it within an ESG structure.
Kuru works as a specialist librarian responsible for events and exhibitions at the Lappeenranta Main Library and its service points. The library is part of the City of Lappeenranta’s municipal organisation, which means it does not operate independently on ESG matters — it follows the direction set by Lappeenranta’s Green Reality sustainability programme, the city’s overarching environmental and social framework.
Social first, always
Of the three ESG dimensions, Social is the most developed at Lappeenranta — and the most natural.
“The library provides free, open access to spaces and services, welcoming all residents and enabling community activities,” Kuru explains. “That is the core of what we do.”
Every day the library is open is, in a sense, an act of social sustainability: eliminating barriers to knowledge, inclusion, and participation for the entire city.
The Environmental dimension has also been given serious attention. Around 2022–2023, the library participated in a carbon footprint study — which returned a negative footprint overall, in large part because the renovated main library building is itself highly energy-efficient. The renovation process involved extensive domestic benchmarking visits to other Finnish libraries, making it one of the most ambitious environmental infrastructure investments the institution has undertaken.
Governance, by contrast, is where ESG visibility becomes thinnest — not because it is absent, but because it operates at a level above the library’s day-to-day decisions. “Major decisions pass through municipal administration,” Kuru says, “shaped primarily by legislation and city-level policy rather than library staff.” The library implements governance, but rarely defines it.
The gap that nobody is measuring
The most significant structural gap Kuru identifies is not attitudinal. It is technical: the absence of systematic measurement and reporting.
Beyond the 2022–2023 carbon footprint study, there are no ongoing ESG metrics, no monitoring tools actively involving library staff, no dashboards or reporting cycles connecting daily work to sustainability outcomes. This is not, Kuru is careful to say, experienced as a crisis — “daily work functions well.” But the gap is real, and it has a cost: without measurement, good practices remain invisible, and invisible practices cannot be scaled, replicated, or celebrated.
Contributing factors are structural: the library rents its building from the city’s technical department, which limits its ability to make independent physical interventions. Staff time for ESG work is not formally allocated. And no guiding framework exists at the library level to connect individual activities to a coherent ESG narrative.
What would actually help
Kuru is clear about learning formats: workshops, not lectures. “Workshops require applying knowledge to real situations and yield concrete, transferable examples,” he says. “Introductory lectures are a useful baseline — but insufficient on their own.”
He is also clear about the value of international exchange. Finnish libraries, he notes, tend to share information rapidly and thoroughly with each other — which is a strength, but also a limitation. “Exposure to different approaches from Latvia or Italy could bring perspectives not otherwise available domestically.” The main library renovation, in hindsight, was a missed opportunity in this regard: extensive domestic benchmarking, but no international collaboration.
Any training tool that ESG4GLAM produces, he suggests, should be genuinely actionable — concrete examples of what can be achieved within the real constraints of a publicly funded, municipally governed library. “Not conceptual frameworks alone.”
Practice without framing — and the cost of invisibility
Perhaps the most striking insight in Kuru’s interview comes in the final section, where he reflects on a recurring theme: the gap between what the library does and how it communicates it.
A recent example: the library hosted a creative reuse workshop where students guided visitors in making artworks from discarded library books. The event combined environmental goals (waste reduction, circular economy) with social ones (intergenerational learning, community creativity). But it was not presented to participants through an ESG lens. The values behind it were never made explicit.
“There is potential in making those values more visible,” Kuru says. And this, he suggests, might be one of the most practical contributions ESG4GLAM could make: not teaching libraries to do new things, but helping them name and communicate what they already do — in a language that connects to policy, to funding, and to the wider European conversation about cultural sustainability.
The library also, he notes, already applies ethical criteria to external event organisers under Finnish library guidelines: events can be refused if they are ethically questionable, politically affiliated, illegal, or likely to generate waste or other negative outcomes. This is, by any definition, a governance practice. It just hasn’t been considered one — until now.
This article was produced with the assistance of generative AI tools. The interview transcript was prepared by a third party and may itself have involved AI-assisted processing. All factual content has been verified against the original transcript.