Free Help With Your Phone, Your Family Tree and a Class You Always Wanted

If you have ever sat with a phone you cannot make behave and decided you would just live with it, this article is for you. The help exists, it is free, and it is roughly ten minutes from wherever you are in Weld or Larimer County.

Free one-on-one help with your phone or computer

High Plains Library District covers Greeley, Evans, Eaton, Johnstown, Milliken, Ault, Kersey and most of Weld County. They run a service called Book a Librarian: a free one-on-one appointment, at any branch, with a person whose job for that block of time is you.

What they will help with, per their own published list: smartphones, tablets, cloud storage, email, websites, e-books, audiobooks, movies, job searching, reading recommendations, genealogy research, citizenship, and even selling on eBay or Etsy. What they will not do: legal, tax or medical forms, typing documents for you, financial transactions, or backing up your data. Requests go through a form on their site and they respond within two to five business days, usually by email.

Branch locations in the towns we serve:

• Centennial Park Library, 2227 23rd Avenue, Greeley
• Farr Regional Library, 1939 61st Avenue, Greeley
• LINC Library Innovation Center, 501 8th Avenue, Greeley
• Riverside Library and Cultural Center, 3700 Golden Street, Evans
• Eaton Public Library, 132 Maple Avenue, Eaton
• Glenn A. Jones, M.D. Memorial Library, 400 South Parish Avenue, Johnstown
• Milliken Public Library, 266B South Irene Avenue, Milliken
• Northern Plains Public Library, 216 2nd Street, Ault
• Kersey Library, 332 3rd Street, Kersey

Windsor is not on that list. Windsor is served by a separate district.

Poudre River Public Library District covers Fort Collins, Timnath and Laporte, with Old Town Library at 201 Peterson Street, Harmony Library at 4616 South Shields Street, and Council Tree Library at 2733 Council Tree Avenue. District number 970-221-6740.

Their technology help runs through Digital Navigators of Larimer County, staffed by AmeriCorps service members, covering phones, computers, internet, social media, email and apps. Appointments at 970-962-3154 or online. There is also a drop-in session on first Wednesdays from 5:30 to 6:30 at Old Town Library where volunteers take technology questions with no appointment. Spanish-language one-on-one help is at 970-818-8948.

A small thing worth knowing: Harmony Library shares its address with the Front Range Community College Larimer campus. One trip, two destinations.

Loveland Public Library, 300 North Adams Avenue, 970-962-2665, runs Digital Navigator drop-ins on Saturdays and Mondays at 11, plus a session called Tech-4-Vets aimed at veterans. Loveland also offers free delivery of library materials to people who are homebound, disabled or temporarily unable to get out, which is the sort of service that changes a housebound month and is almost never mentioned.

If you want to trace your family

This is the strongest single thing we found in the region.

Old Town Library in Fort Collins hosts one-on-one genealogy help most Thursdays from 1 to 3, staffed by volunteers from the Larimer County Genealogical Society. Free. You bring what you have and a person who does this for pleasure sits with you.

The databases available free with a library card in Larimer County include Ancestry.com for in-library use, MyHeritage Library Edition, the Fort Collins History Connection archive, Chronicling America covering 1836 to 1922, the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection with more than a million and a half pages across 335 titles from 1859 to 1923, the Fort Collins Coloradoan in full text from 1999, Sanborn fire insurance maps of downtown, and cemetery records for Roselawn and Grandview.

On the Weld County side, High Plains offers American Ancestors, Ancestry Library Edition, Fold3 for military records, HeritageQuest, MyHeritage, and NewspaperARCHIVE including the Greeley Tribune from 1916 to 1977. Book a Librarian is the way in, since High Plains does not publish a standing genealogy session.

Loveland Public Library lists Family History Research Assistance on Thursdays at 1.

Book clubs, honestly reported

High Plains runs book clubs and a year-round adult reading challenge called ARO, Adults Read On. Poudre River runs a long list: Old Town Book Club, Harmony Book Club, a virtual club, Rekindle the Classics, a banned-books club, and one called Book Club for Mortals that takes on end-of-life themes, which is a braver piece of programming than most libraries attempt. Loveland has Buzzwords for nonfiction and Readmore for fiction, plus book club kits and a seed library.

Most of these do not publish a day and time on the web. Call the branch.

One warning if you go browsing on your own. High Plains runs something called the Young At Heart Book Club. It sounds like it is for older adults. It is not. It is young adult literature for high school students, meeting in Evans on first Thursdays. We nearly got that wrong ourselves.

Going back to college for free, more or less

The University of Northern Colorado in Greeley publishes this on its registrar's page, and we are quoting it because the wording matters:

Senior Citizens (65 and above) are eligible to audit courses through the University of Northern Colorado with no tuition charges (course fees may apply).

Read the fine print with us, because this is a real opportunity and it is narrower than the headline. You audit, which means you do not earn credit and you are not required to do assignments or take exams, but you are required to attend, and not attending can get you dropped. Registration happens through the university's system only after the standard pre-registration period closes, and it is subject to space being available. After you register you contact the registrar's office to have the senior audit coding applied. Course fees, as distinct from tuition, can still be charged.

That is a university policy on a university page, not a statewide entitlement, and it can change. Call the registrar at 970-351-4862 before you build a semester around it.

Two related things we checked and could not confirm, so we will say so rather than imply otherwise. Aims Community College in Greeley publishes no age-based tuition discount or audit rate that we could find; their continuing education catalog is non-credit and career-focused, with some personal enrichment offerings in painting, ceramics, blacksmithing and herbalism through an outside catalog. Front Range Community College's continuing education portal would not load for us at all, so we have nothing verified there. And the well-known Osher Lifelong Learning Institute network does not list a Colorado host institution on the foundation's own page, so if somebody tells you there is an OLLI in Northern Colorado, ask them for the phone number before you count on it.

What this has to do with a pharmacy

More than it looks like.

Two of the questions we get asked most often at a Medicare appointment are really technology questions in disguise. Can you look up whether my doctor is in this plan. Can you tell me what my prescription will cost. Both of those live behind a website, and the reason people ask us is that the website defeated them.

We are glad to do it. That is part of the job and we do it in front of you rather than promising it later. But if the underlying problem is that the phone in your pocket is a locked box, an hour with a librarian is worth more than an hour with us, and it is free, and it compounds.

The other reason is plainer. The people we work with who do best over a long stretch of years are the ones with something on the calendar. A book club, a Thursday genealogy session, a class you audit because you always wondered. That is not a health intervention on any chart. It behaves like one.

Why Haven wrote this

Haven Health was started by the pharmacists at Good Day Pharmacy, right here in Northern Colorado. We help people in Greeley, Windsor, Wellington, Eaton, Johnstown and the towns nearby sort out Medicare.

Hours, programs and policies in this article change without notice. Call before you drive.

And if you do want to talk about coverage, ask your Good Day pharmacist about us first. Before you trust a stranger from a mailer, ask the person who has been filling your prescriptions for years.