we collect your questions, your comments.

Perhaps you have favorite resources that you are using in this area.

We have collected a number of the resources that will be referenced today and added those to the event page already.

And I'll put that link into  chat.

And you can click on links in chat.

You can't click on them in the slide.

You can click on those in chat or on the PDF version that's posted on the event page.

So if you click on that link in chat you'll see we've elected a number of resources, and we will definitely add any of the other resources that you bring to the conversation to that page after the webinar.

A couple other important things about the chat.

We ask that you be sure you're posting to everyone.

That should be the default setting as you entered the room but if it slips away from that just be sure to select  "everyone" and not all  attendees, it's unfortunately further up on the list but that is not visible to the panel.

So we want to make sure all of our presenters are seeing your questions and comments as well.

If you are on Twitter feel free to add the hashtag to your  posts, that's another way for you to stay connected.

We also can provide you with telephone access if your computer's audio is not working for you today in this environment.

I will be pushing this information out at the top of the hour, so it should be in chat for you to access.

But again, please don't hesitate to check in with web junction support.

And I think our captioner is here, so I will just orient you to the caption window.

That bottom right corner, the multimedia viewer panel, once you open it you'll still need to click this blue "continue" button first for the third party tool to work within the environment.

Once you have the caption window show up click the show/hide header.

You should be able to see those captions now.

Thanks, Heather.

Welcome to those of you just joining us.

We are spending this time until the top of the hours orienting folks to this Webex environment.

We open these up nice and early so folks can come and get settled and make sure your audio is working for you, and that you're seeing the slides.

So I'm just going to walk through that welcome for those of you just joining us.

Welcome, welcome.

So excited to have more folks joining us!

And you should be able to hear our voices coming through your computers, speakers, or headphones.

And I like to point out the buttons that you should see across the bottom of your view here.

There is a button for the audio broadcast for participants, for chat, and the multimedia viewer is where our closed captioner is providing live captions for today's event.

And your audio should be streaming through your  computers, speakers, or headphones, and we've done our best to test and make sure that our audio is level as -- as level as possible, but know that you may need to adjust the volume as we move through the session.

So deciding on the best way to do that whether that's your computer's audio settings, that also maps to Webex or if you have a separate knob on your headset or your speakers, you can use that as well.

I like to share the troubleshooting tip on the bottom of the slide here.

If you do have audio issues, perhaps it's cutting in and out or you lose your sound altogether you can first click on that "stop audio broadcast" button and wait a couple  seconds, take a nice, deep breath, click "play audio broadcast" and that will trigger reconnecting.

We want to hear from you.

If you have any issues with the environment here please do not hesitate.

You can chat privately with web junction support, the recipient line and click on the arrow, click web junction support, Kathleen, thank you, is here with any of those related questions you have.

That keeps our chat open and focused on the conversation for the topic of the day so when you're done, just be sure that you select "everyone" as your option for chat.

So that we can all see your posts.

And you can customize your view in Webex.

You can click any of the  icons -- or any of those boxes, actually even the icons at the bottom of your screen, will open and close them.

You can go to the X's on the rights of the panels or the little arrows to the left, and those will minimize those windows on the right.

We will be using video with our presenters shortly, and that  layout button if you hover over your slide there's a layout button in the top right corner that allows you to customize your view here as well.

All right.

We are big fans of the chat panel at web junction.

We use it to collect your questions and comments.

We encourage you to share your answers for each other's questions.

If you have resources that you find helpful in this work, definitely we want to hear from you as well through chat.

And I always like to mention that we see chat as a way for you to pass notes to each other during the session to share and have that back channel conversation.

I like to think if we were all gathered together at a conference, in a conference room, passing notes is generally frowned upon but here in this virtual environment we can  multitask and share those ideas and resources as well.

I encourage you to post your questions as they come to mind.

We're going to be collecting those and bringing them to the presenters at the end of the session.

And also encourage you, like I said, if you have questions for each other, for the group, to go ahead and pose those into chat.

And a couple of things to note about chat.

There is an option to post to all attendees, and that is not visible to the panel.

So just be sure you're posting to everyone.

And that way we'll all get to see your contributions to chat.

Also, if you are on Twitter you can add the WJwebinar hashtag to your posts.

This will be recorded today, and I will be updating that web  page, I've just linked that to the chat.

Once it's posted later today I'll send you an email.

So know that if chat is overwhelming you don't need to follow along, certainly you don't need to take notes from chat.

We will provide chat as a resource after the webinar, and so you can sit back and enjoy the session knowing that both chat and the captions are options to access after.

Excellent.

We've got just about four, five more minutes, I guess, before the top of the hour, and I'm just spending this time welcoming folks and getting settled here in this Webex environment.

We're so glad you're here.

I want to do a little orientation.

You should see a row of menu options across the bottom of the slide.

You can note that these are -- I'll explain a little more about each of these in a moment.

There is an audio broadcast button, a participant button, chat and the multimedia viewer panel is where our captioner is providing live captions for today's event.

And you can click on those icons at the bottom to toggle those windows open or closed or I'll explain two other ways for you to customize your view.

And we hope that you're hearing our voices, you should be able to hear those coming through your computers, speakers, or headphones, and you can adjust that volume locally on your computer's audio settings.

It does map -- the Webex maps to your audio because if you have a separate knob on your headset or speakers you can use that to adjust as we move through.

If you lose your audio altogether or perhaps it's cutting in and out you can go to the bottom of your slide view and click the stop audio broadcast button, wait a few seconds, and then click play audio broadcast, and this will trigger a refresh of your audio connection.

Please don't hesitate to let us know if you have technical questions.

We have web junction support provide you with responses to those technical questions.

Ideally we ask you to go to the chat window, under the recipient spot, find that little arrow.

Once you've selected web junction support you can go ahead and privately chat with Kathleen who's here today providing that support.

And get your question answered.
I'm going to start the recording and welcome you to Let's Talk Race the racial literacy toolkits from the Salt Lake City Public Library.

I see the presenters popping up.

I'm going to have Diana get started and the rest of the team will introduce themselves to the rest of you.

So welcome to our presenters, we're so excited to hear about this amazing work at Salt Lake City Public Library.

>> Thank you.

Welcome, everyone, we are very excited to be sharing our project, Let's Talk Race, racial literacy toolkits with you all today.

Did it.

All right.

So we're going to start quickly by introducing ourselves, then we'll spend time telling you about our understanding of racial literacy and why we felt this topic and project was important.

We'll then go into detail about our toolkits and their development and explain our process, collaborative efforts as well as touch on some of the challenges we experienced.

And finally we'll talk about some of our favorite resources and how we incorporated them into our work.

I believe all our resource thinks have been shared with you already or will be shared, and then we'll end with our thoughts for the future of these toolkits and open it up for questions.

So who are we?

Charlene?

>> CHARLENE DYE: Hi, everyone.

I'm Charlene Dy, the parent to a preschooler and a newborn, I have a master's degree in journalism, I served as the project manager and lead writer for these toolkits.

>> DIANA CASTRO: I'm Diana Castro also a parent of a very wild and active 3-year-old.

I have a master's in education.

I serve as the co-chair for the diversity services round table here at ULA, Utah libraries association, and I work currently in our brand-new department of equity and organizational development.

>> LINDSEY WATTS: Lindsey Watts, currently a manager at the Salt Lake City Public Library.

I manage a department at the main library of adult fiction, teens and periodicals but was not long ago a children's librarian for several years and, yeah, I'm excited to talk about this project.

>> NANCY FUNES: Hi, my name is Nancy Funes, currently the adult services coordinator for the Salt Lake City Public Library but like Lindsey while working on this project I was a children's librarian and had worked in children's services for a number of years.

I am the current EDI council co-chair for our organization.

And I just cycled off of the notable children's books committee.

>> DIANA CASTRO: So let's get into why talk race?

>> CHARLENE DYE: Hi there.

So I wanted to give everyone a little bit of background on why we decided to create these kits.

And to do so, I'll share a story from a book called NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Asche  Merryman.

In 2006 a researcher developed a study to assess whether interventions like conversations about race and exposure to  multicultural stories would have a positive impact on children's racial attitude.

She recruited families in Austin, Texas, with young children and divided them into three groups for a week.

One watched videos about race and multiculturism like from Sesame Street, one watched the videos and received a checklist of topics to talk about race and the topics also promoted interracial friendship.

The third group had talking points but no videos.

Like any good researcher she gave the children an assessment sort of before and after the study to measure their racial attitudes.

That assessment had questions like how many White people are nice?

How many Black people are nice?

And there were -- she gave them answers on a Likert scale ranging from none to almost all.

So she did the study and when she saw the results, it looked like the study had been a complete failure because all the children's answers before and after seemed like they were statistically the same.

But then when she looked a little bit closer and read the parent diaries from that week she realized why.

So over and over again despite being instructed to the parents had opted out of using the checklist of talking points.

Many of them reverted to phrases like, oh, everyone's equal or under our skin we're all the same.

So these parents, they wanted their kids to be colorblind.

They hoped if they didn't directly discuss race maybe their kids wouldn't pick up  racist attitudes or wouldn't see differences based on race.

But while the majority of these parents avoided talking about race to their kids, in those assessments, a majority of the kids answered questions like are -- how many white people are nice or how many white people are mean, a majority of those kids answered none but their answers about Black people were not as positive.

In fact, when they were asked the question do your parents like Black people, 38% answered I don't know.

So even though these parents hoped that being colorblind would give children a positive attitude toward race the research showed that wasn't true.

However the study held one more surprise.

Of all the families given  talking points, only 6 families actually used them.

But for all those six families they all dramatically improved their racial attitudes in that single week.

So as it turned out direct, explicit conversations about race were an effective intervention but the barrier was that parents often didn't know what to say to their kids but didn't want to say the wrong thing which is why they opted out of it.

And that's why we developed these racial literacy toolkits, to better support parents to have successful conversations about race because the research shows that information vacuum, kids are not equipped to figure this out on their own.

But with parental intervention you can get really great  outcome.

I hope that helps explain some of the background of this project.

Now Diana Castro will share how we chose to approach the  concept.

>> NANCY FUNES: Go ahead and click --

>> DIANA CASTRO: I forgot to mute.

Sorry about that.

Let's talk about what racial literacy means.

Our project is aimed for children and families but I want us to first consider the implications that racial literacy has for us as adults in our adult lives.

I'm going to quickly ask you a few questions from the UK's Black curriculum to quietly reflect on.

Are you comfortable talking about race?

Do you feel you have the knowledge necessary to have a conversation about race?

But what if you were talking to a Black person?

Do you avoid saying "Black people" to a Black person?

I myself have struggled with these answers to these questions many times, and I continue to struggle sometimes.

Racial literacy means having the knowledge, the tools and awareness to be able to have these conversations and engage with people from different backgrounds and lived experiences and our own competence or ability is crucial when we think about the impacts on children, ours and others'.

So that's how we view the goal of racial literacy for this project, to promote possible racial awareness development in children.

Then the benefits of that awareness will allow us to recognize, address and counter different forms of everyday racism.

Children start receiving those explicit and implicit messages about the meaning of race from birth.

Our children really need our help to learn about race.

So I want to touch on two of the key concepts of racial literacy that we chose to focus on for this project in our toolkits.

The first is the understanding that racial injustice is real and it is wrong.

And you'll notice with our book selections and within our guides that we discourage an "I don't see color" or race doesn't matter to me approach.

The reality is race shouldn't matter but it does so while a colorblind approach can sometimes be well-intentioned it reinforces the false idea that a person's race does not have an impact on their lives.

The financial executive who pioneered an idea of being color brave stressing the need to be realistic about race issues and the need to have these difficult conversations and reflections, hence the need to be brave.

And that really leads us into our second key concept which is about accountability and the reason we began with an adult perspective of racial literacy.

Sometimes we assume that only bad people are racist and adopt an us versus them mentality.

But if we're honest with ourselves and brave we can begin to realize and admit that's not true.

Any of us can perpetuate or uphold racism without meaning  to.

We all make mistakes, I know I have.

We need to recognize our mistakes and reflect on them.

If and when it happens we hold ourselves accountable for those mistakes by acknowledging the harm that we may have caused, trying to repair it and learning to do better.

Our discussion guides were built to lead us through this process of accountability and offer reflective questions that ask what can we do to engage in racial justice every day and how to celebrate those who fight oppression.

So I want to mention why we believe libraries and librarians should promote racial literacy.

Libraries are of an educational ecosystem with a wide array of subjects.

For children we focus a a lot on those early literacy skills reading, writing, because we really understand that children who do not learn these basic literacies are at a  disadvantage.

As we explained, children who do not learn about racial literacy are at a similar disadvantage so we encourage you to view racial literacy as any other critical literacy.

They're all important for how our children engage with the world.

Additionally racial literacy is not taught in schools.

Unfortunately, right?

Children will learn about MLK Jr., Rosa Parks but few teachers talk about what's going on  today.

Racial literacy and our toolkits can bring those experiences out of the past, into the present.

We believe libraries could and should advocate for historically marginalized communities and provide access to resources and information that may not be available in schools or at home.

So Angela Davis said in a racist society it is not enough to be nonracist, we must be  anti-racist, and we believe anti-racism is a practice and our toolkits are there to assist us, all of us, in being actively anti-racist.

And I'll hand that over.

>> LINDSEY WATTS: Next is the beginning of our kit development or kit developments because we've turned -- made several kits.

So first off we identified our goals, which we chose three.

And the first one is more about support.

And a lot of this kind of will be a reflection on a lot of the things Diana just talked to all of us about.

But with our kits, we hope to support, you know, children and their caregivers with really specific learning concepts.

Prejudice, stereotypes, oppression, very specific language, and provide opportunities for them to reflect on how these concepts will affect their own lives.

And just to also say that our kits have glossaries at the ends -- at the end to help define all of these terms that we really specifically point  out.

And hope that these kits through the support will promote, like, an understanding that racial injustice is real and wrong just like Diana and Charlene mentioned to all of us.

Then through encouraging open and accurate conversations about race.

That doesn't mean that we won't make mistakes or that the caregivers won't make mistakes or maybe not have an answer to a question right away.

If a child brings up a question, you know, to give them the support and encouragement to say that they may not have the answer right away but let's learn together or let me go and find these answers but just really give that encouragement that it's okay to embark on this learning journey together that, you know, hopefully doesn't end.

Right?

So then also in our -- to affirm that we all have a part to play in social justice.

So increasing exposure to racially and ethnically diverse stories and characters, balancing the realities of racism with expressions of hope, justice, empowerment and joy.

So our hope is that our families, patrons who check out these kits, that this will increase their exposure and inspire them to he seek out more racially and ethnically diverse stories and bring them into their home and learning.

That's a touch on our goals.

Let's go into -- woops, I keep going backwards, so sorry.

We landed on three different types of toolkits and we're fortunate enough to be able to create the three different types of toolkits.

Just after having these conversations realizing that there's just these -- there's these different developmental levels for, you know, ages 0-12, right?

Or through elementary.

And I -- definitely there is a way if you -- you know if you're wanting to approach this and are only able to make one kit there's definitely a way but we were able to touch -- be able to create three different toolkits.

So for our babies and toddlers, that's really noticing physical differences.

Right?

Babies and toddlers are really noticing faces, and they can tell differences even at that young age between the  different -- like different  faces and skin color.

So that's what we focused on basically for our babies and toddlers kits.

Then for preschool that's when children are really able to start noticing what's fair and unfair.

You know, so and so got to play with this toy and I didn't get to play with it.

So kind of focusing on that concept.

It feels like it's a continuation, each kit is a add on from the kit before so there's still definitely those physical differences.

But we're also the concept fair versus unfair.

Then elementary-aged kits is a deeper exploration of racism, really more of a deep dive I'd say.

And this is where we're having conversations about historical events.

Structural racism, how they can really -- how they can really, like, understand those concepts and moving forward, learning from historical events or, you know, what has happened in the past.

So like I said, if this is something you'd like to try and you're only able to develop one kit or are starting out with just one there are a lot of resources, and a lot of the ones that we provided that I think would really help in creating one, for example, you could check out diverse book finder in our resource section.

It has a good step by step discussion that is kind of more inclusive for a broader age range.

So that would be a good resource to check out.

So just kind of more specifically what are in the kits, which you'll see coming  up.

There's -- in each kit there's a caregiver's guide, there's a selection of picture books, discussion guides for each book, glossary with key terms, toys and manipulatives in the physical kits.

And then we also have video recordings of each book in the kits.

We have video recordings of them being read.

And we also have, along with that online we also just have the -- all of the guides and glossary and questions and all of that electronic as well.

The nice thing with the physical kits is you can have the toys and manipulatives.

So here is just a picture, just a fun slide that shows some of the manipulatives that are in our pre-K toolkit.

So we've got some -- the people colors jumbo crayons and things that will help the kids interact and get to try, you know, interact and try things out and, yeah.

I think from here passing more kit talk on to Nancy, I believe.

>> NANCY FUNES: Yeah.

Now we're going to dive into kind of the logistics of how we develop these kits.

So the first thing we did was we presented a proposal to our children services coordinator who's kind of in charge of overseeing children's programs and services.

She was able to present that to our executive leadership team which is our administrative  body.

And we were able -- fortunate enough to get a green light on that and get backing from the top.

So they were really supportive about this project just right from get-go.

Our team is a majority -- made up of a majority of people of color.

We have a mix of parents and librarians and education backgrounds.

So that is the four of us here.

Made up our team.

And then we met again with the children services coordinator to discuss costs, timelines, processes, and our coordinator, we're fortunate that she was able to set aside some money and give us a budget to work on putting these together.

So that's kind of where we  started was just kind of setting up what we needed to move forward.

So developing the kits, again, we started with book selection.

So each of us selected three to five titles to enter for consideration.

And we would outline some of the topics that each book could really aid in discussing.

So we would come to our meetings and have those titles ready with all those topics ready.

And then when our -- we would select five to seven titles out of those three to five that each of us brought forward.

We selected five to seven for the kit, and we would split them up and assign the titles to each person.

And each person was responsible for their books, discussion guide and video recording.

The discussion guides are guided questions for each specific title.

So each book in the kit has its own discussion guide included in the kit.

We also worked collaboratively on a caregiver guide for each kit.

So the caregiver guide is an overview of how the kit can be used.

It has ideas for further discussion, information on why having these discussions at this age is really important, and it also has a list of what is included in the kit.

And then finally we would each select three to five  manipulatives to submit for consideration.

And then from there we would select it and whittle it down to two to three.

We would try to find items that were maybe in close alignment with some of the books but some of the manipulatives are also just like a general use item.

So yeah.

So talking, looking more in-depth at the book selection, this was probably the most time-consuming part of this project.

Because there are so many great titles out there to start these conversations.

And it was our job to narrow it down to the best five to seven that best encapsulated the discussion topics that we wanted to include in the kit so while we each selected three to five we collectively looked at 40 to 60 titles while dealing each kit.

We did three different kits, 40 to 60 titles each, so it was a lot of reading.

Because we were in quarantine at the time while doing this work, we didn't have access to our physical library collections, we were all working from home at the time.

So we often relied on YouTube to vet some of these books when we couldn't get our hands on them quite yet.

There are a lot of read aloud videos on there so we were able to vet some of those books before we could get them in our hands by watching read alouds and getting up close video of the images.

And during this process we found there were some gaps in our library collections while working on the project.

So we were able to forward those titles to our material selector when we found titles we didn't have in our collection that we felt were important to add to our physical collections.

We also made a conscious decision and effort to try to include only titles written by people with lived experiences in the topic or part of the communities that they were writing about, own voices hashtag.

And let's see.

We also made a concerted effort to not only include books on challenging topics to generate those discussions but also include titles where children were experiencing joy in their lives as Black, Indigenous, or children of color, not just books where they were facing adversity but just having a great time.

So obviously we also wanted to include a variety of racial and ethnic perspectives which was really difficult when we had to narrow it down to five to seven titles but we did our best in the span of the three kits to include a variety of racial and ethnic perspectives.

And although this project could be -- let's see.

Sorry.

We also wanted to emphasize that this process can definitely be done as a team, or on your own, but we would advise that you do it as a team effort.

So we would book-talk a lot of our books.

We'd listen to each other's perspectives on titles, were really candid in our conversations about things that we agreed with with a title or didn't.

If we found inaccurate information in books, appropriation, inappropriate content.

So while this work I think could definitely be done by one  person, we would highly suggest that you get a team of people if you can so they can help identify blind spots in perspective and address issues in specific titles.

So here are the titles that we selected for our pre-K toolkit.

So for example like I was  talking about the wanting to strike a balance in the books that we were including, so books like Whose Knees Are These?  Shades of people, those for  joyous situations, then Not Quite Snow White, where are you froms?

Don't Touch My Hair! were for what racism and prejudice looks like.

And then these are our guides.

So these are the guides that are included in each kit and electronic as well.

The one on the left-hand side is the caregiver guide that gives an overview of the kit.

The two on the right are the discussion guides.

So each book in the kit has a discussion guide specific to that book, and the questions are tailored for that book.

And if -- I don't know how closely you can see the slide, but there's a section there for topics of conversation.

So we listed there just kind of some of the topics that we would touch on with the questions that we asked in the discussion guide.

All right.

So ting with the development of these -- continuing with the development of the kits we moved into the editing phase, editing and discussing everything to make sure we had what we wanted to include and they were  age-appropriate.

We submitted it to the equity diversity and inclusion council who provided feedback.

We originally created our own templates using Canva, a  web-based graphic design tool.

One or two of us would format everything.

And I'll talk a little more about Canva versus what our marketing department provided.

Because we weren't fully open at this time and we had very limited items circulating to patrons we decided to post these on biblioboard first for our virtual and prerecorded programming for the library by our children services coordinator.

While this went live on  biblioboard we were already purchasing and putting together the physical kits.

So Lindsey worked with our technical services department to ensure that things were purchase and were to our liking.

We also bought items in multiple copies to allow for replacements when things went missing to make sure we were communicating that with our technical services department when they were ordering materials for us.

Finally we roped in our marketing department when -- who then decided that they wanted to create in-house templates with our library branding.

I'll have an example of the differences on the next slide.

They also created our -- all sorts of marketing for us including Instagram posts, fliers, posters and even made little business cards that we could include with our -- at the time we were doing holds to go.

So patrons would come and request that we run items out to them, we would include the business cards in the holds to go items.

Also a lot of that publicity happened pretty organically.

People would post on Instagram pictures or videos of their kids using the kits, and the library would just repost those posts to our own Instagram story so others could see the kits in action.

This worked really well, so well that we actually had to have the specific module on biblioboard be unlocked, and what that means is on our biblioboard page, our content that we create is  region-locked so it's only available to the communities that we serve.

So Salt Lake City and Salt Lake  County but we had requests from patrons across the country asking to access those materials because their friends in Salt Lake City had mentioned the resource to them, and they really wanted to check it out.

So we had people from across the country accessing those kits on our biblioboard page.

All right.

So this is the comparison of what we designed using Canva, the free web-based graphic design software while we waited for our marketing team to create something for us.

We wanted to create something quickly to throw on biblioboard to get the information out  there.

So the one on the left, Canva, is what we created.

And then the one on the right using adobe InDesign is what our marketing department created and more -- aligns more closely with our library branding.

The design on both of these documents was really  intentional.

We wanted to make sure we weren't falling into the trap of using animals instead of showing diversity, I'm sure most of you have seen that graphic from SLJ about the CBC's about diversity, there are more about animals than Black, Indigenous, and children of color combined.

Originally when we sent the materials to marketing they did come back to us with an animal design so we had to send it back and say, actually we don't want that.

But we also didn't want to unintentionally tokenize by including or not including different depictions of children or send a message that the kits were only for families that looked a certain way so we went with a neutral color blocking design and the final product was made with all the feedback provided to them.

This is just to show if you don't have an internal marketing department you could very easily create something on Canva.

There's a pro version that unlocks a lot of features but I use the free version of Canva to create the guide that is on the screen right now, so . . .

All right.

And then average costs for the kit.

So here's kind of the breakdown for time and materials.

So we included five to seven books and two to three manipulatives in each kit and made three copies of each kit so a total of nine kits that are circulating right now.

So the average cost of each of those kits for the physical items ranged between 95 to $180 depending on the kit.

Staff time, if you're looking  at, like, salary questions, each member of our work group worked about one to four hours every week depending on which step in the process we were in.

But I -- I honestly -- I can't remember how long we worked on this.

It was a couple of months where we were meeting almost weekly.

So it took some time to put these together.

We also looked into hiring an  EDI consultant or sensitivity reader and found that the market rates are often about 150 to $200 per hour.

So that was outside of our budget range.

We weren't able to afford that.

But if you are working on this on your own we would highly suggest having somebody look at your work.

0?

And with that I believe I will pass this on to Charlene.

>> CHARLENE DYE: Thanks, Nancy.

I'll go ahead and discuss some of the resources that we used to put together these kits and the good news is that all of these resources are available for free and are accessible to anyone.

So our first stop is a website that I'm sure many of you have heard of, the conscious kid.

We used these to brush up on foundational concepts and book selections.

They have a really great glossary.

Whenever there was a word we wanted to get a better understanding of,  microaggression or the difference between ethnicity and race the conscious kid was the first place we would go to.

A lot of the definitions were very academic, and used pretty advanced language, and so another website that we used was -- called  kids.wordsmith.net,and that often gave a more kid-friendly definition, so the conscious kid first, then this other one to make the language in the kits really acres.

Another was called embrace race.

They had fantastic resources for talking with kids about race, specifically about children's books and reading with a  race-conscious lens.

Those are all free.

They have a series of webinars, I believe, if you have the means to do that.

And finally, diverse book  finder.

This is a great resource for libraries especially if you are hoping to make one kit that serves all ages as Lindsey had mentioned earlier.

If you look at that first link, steps for using picture books to talk about race, they basically show you how to build on concepts with a series of books all in one.

For example the first book might be talking what is race?

Then the second book might be talking about, okay, what does it mean to be fair or unfair?

Then the third book might be talking about an example of injustice and how to stand up to that.

And so that's extremely helpful.

And also have a collection development tool if it's a library you're hoping to expand your titles with more POC  creators or books about people of color.

Next Jessica Anne Bratte has created really wonderful resources.

She as a whole Google folder online that anyone can access on how to talk about race in story times so you can use some of the books that she mentioned in the kit but you can also just use this to expand some of your library's storytime offerings.

She also has a webinar that walks you through it step by step.

That's also free.

If you have it in your budget she also acts as a [indiscernible].

NurtureShock is the story I mentioned earlier in the presentation.

This article if you have time to read it has great additional data and studies about children and race.

Finally we looked at a couple of wonderful blogs that spoke to experiences from specific communities.

One of them is Hijabi Librarians with books with Muslim experiences.

Their tagline was we got it covered.

I thought that was great.

Next, American Indians in children's literature is written by a woman who provides critical analysis about how Indigenous people are looked at and Latinxs in kid lit about Latinx communities.

Somebody earlier in the chat asked what kind of containers we used for these kits.

You can see we used clear plastic tote bags.

They're very, very roomy and all the books and the manipulatives as well as the guides fit in there, and because they're clear it was sort of tempting to patrons because they can see a little bit about what's inside.

And then moving forward.

So we completed this project and launched it February of last year.

However, the project has continued to evolve.

One of our hopes for the future is to be able to provide these kits in other languages.

Here in Salt Lake City there are many Spanish-speaking communities, we'd love to have a Spanish language kit to support those communities.

Likely that will be just one kit that covers from baby to elementary.

Unfortunately that project has been delayed due to staff availability but that is a hope.

We also hope to create kits for other age groups.

We are now creating a teen kit for preteens to high schoolers.

Finally talking about maintenance in the kits themselves we discuss equity, it was an important concept for us, we wanted to live that out in handling damaged or lost items.

If we want we opted for a flat fee of 15 to $16 because we thought that would be more affordable for families as opposed to the manipulatives that were 30 bucks or more.

In terms of updating we hope to update these kits every few years.

Since we completed these kits so many additional books have been published by and about people of color, and we would love to freshen up the kits.

Recently published books helps the circulation of these kits.

Even though I served as the project manager for these kits I don't work with the library full time.

For the long-term it made more sense for this project to live with a full-time librarian.

Nancy was a full-time librarian and had a deep knowledge of books by POC creators so we assigned her to be sort of the caretaker of this project longer term and made sure we could sustain it.

Thank you for coming to this presentation, we hope it was helpful I believe we'll start the question and answer but Nancy's contact information is on the last side,  Nfunes@slcpl.org.

Keep your questions coming.

>> Thank you, this is so exciting.

I can tell the excitement is palpable in chat.

People are very excited and eager to bra try this on  their -- eager and excited to try this on their own.

There was a question towards the beginning about how many of the kits you made.

>> NANCY FUNES: Yeah.

So I guess I'll jump in on that one.

We made three kits -- well, three of each kit.

So we had a kit for baby  toddler, we had a kit for pre-K, and then we had a kit for elementary.

And for each of those levels we made three copies of those kits.

I tallied up the circulations for them today, and for each of those kits the pre-K kit combining the three kits has circulated 47 times in the last year.

The baby/toddler one circulated 46 times and the elementary kit has circulated 29 times.

>> Excellent.

Great.

That's great to hear.

Someone did answer the question about issues -- I think there might have been some confusion about mention of the YouTube videos and I think Charlene clarified that they were using YouTube to view book  read-alouds, finding them on YouTube when they weren't able to get the physical book during the pandemic as they were reviewing.

Is that correct, Charlene?

>> CHARLENE DYE: Yes, that's right.

So there are a lot of book  read-aloud accounts on  YouTube.

We would use those to vet the books if we weren't able to order a copy in time.

>> Excellent.

Someone else also answered the question when you shared the image of the manipulatives that were in the kits, somebody asked are those part of the kits.

Are they expected to be returned?

And yes, they are expected to be returned.

And of course that would be a great way for folks to keep  them.

I was curious, related to that, do you have -- because your guides and your booklets are so great do you also provide  handouts of those outside of the toolkits at the library or is it still pretty much within the toolkit?

>> NANCY FUNES: In the toolkit they're laminated so meant to come back with the physical toolkit but they are available in our biblioboard page.

From there they're able to be printed and reproduced.

So I guess if patrons asked if they could have copies of them we would direct them to the biblioboard page to find and print them from there.

>> Excellent.

There are lots of questions coming in.

Let's make sure -- so aside -- I was -- great to hear your circulation numbers.

Can you maybe share, someone asked about feedback on the electronic versions for sure, but what -- can you just give us a sense, I know you talked about lots of other libraries around the country are eager or other patrons but can you just talk about the success you've heard and maybe pair that with a question that came through about have you received any backlash about the kits.

And how do you respond to that sort of backlash?

And I don't know who would like to take that.

>> CHARLENE DYE: Those are great questions.

I'll jump in for part and if the other librarians have another perspectives I'd love for you to chime in as well.

We have received a lot of positive feedback especially on social media with people posting on Instagram pictures of their kits using the kits, oh, we really enjoyed these, thank you for making them.

Privately we received at least one email from a patron saying my 5-year-old found some of these concepts to be a little beyond them so we responded to that patron, thank you so much for that information, when we update the kits we'll keep that in mind and make sure we're really trying to hit kids at the right developmental level.

In the meantime, if the pre-K kit is too advanced the  baby/toddler kit even though it says baby/toddler a lot of those are appropriate up to age 5 so we took that feedback to heart.

There hasn't been any negative feedback I'm aware of but if others are, let me know.

>> Fantastic.

>> CHARLENE DYE: We've just been lucky in that sense.

>> Yeah, let's hope so.

Let's hope it continues.

There was a question in terms of collecting feedback.

Do you all collect feedback, perhaps from caregivers?

Someone asked if you do a survey of caregivers.

>> CHARLENE DYE: We haven't been able to do a survey or to collect outcome responses.

We would love to do that but we didn't have, like, a focus group or anything.

Simply because we were developing these during pandemic times.

Most of the development happened between July of 2020 and January 2021.

But I love that idea, and if in the future we are able to get focus groups from the community we would love to do that.

>> I have seen in other kit circulation sometimes there will be a survey in the kit as well.

And say just leave your survey in the kit.

Then of course you have to loop in the circulation folks but hopefully there are some ways to do that.

How long do the kits circulate?

I can't remember if you mentioned that.

>> NANCY FUNES: They've been circulating for about a year  now.

>> How long is the loan period?

>> The loan period is three weeks.

>> Excellent.

Do you have holds?

Are there requests beyond those three?

>> NANCY FUNES: Yeah.

So right now I think there's one or two copies available.

When we first launched them it was a nine to 10 wait list for each kit.

They were in pretty high demand right when they were being released.

>> Somebody asked if -- they're wondering if the circulation will go down after an initial push for their work so maybe you saw a little bit of that after your initial launch?

>> NANCY FUNES: Yeah but it's been pretty recent, like it's been a -- we are just now  starting to see them sitting on the shelf.

We went at least half a year where we didn't see those kits because they just went from hold to hold so they weren't ever, like, in the building available for checkout because there was a waiting list for them.

>> Great.

>> DIANA CASTRO: I think that's why we encourage the refresh of the books.

Then we can do another  promotional push or make sure that they continue to circulate as well.

>> Great.

Let's see.

I didn't catch the name of the site either that you mentioned when you were talking about the glossary, the second site that you use that had more kid friendly terms if you can put that into chat or mention it again.

>> CHARLENE DYE: I just did, and the website is kids.wordsmith, and Smith is [indiscernible].

It's at about 135 if you scroll through.

>> Excellent.

I can get it in there.

Let's see.

And feel free to jump in if you see other questions.

There was a question, have you thought about expanding to other topics, or do you -- are you focused on this for now?

Are there other topics that have popped up that you thought, oh, that would be a good one for some kits?

>> LINDSEY WATTS: I think we had some of that conversation while making the kits.

So many concepts lead into other concepts.

But since many of us -- or some of us have kind of moved on  from, like, the -- that kind of librarianship role, I'm not sure that it's something that this group specifically is going to be working on.

But I do know that those are things that the children's librarian team and the other service teams, the teen and adult service teams are thinking about.

So while I don't know if that's something our group will do, it's definitely something that I think is on the minds of the librarians here.

>> Excellent.

>> NANCY FUNES: And I remember with our children services team having a conversation about putting kits together for other difficult topics that caregivers might need to find language for.

So topics like divorce or grief or, you know, difficult conversations like that.

So yeah, those conversations have happened, we just haven't formally organized to move forward on those projects.

>> Absolutely.

That sounds good, yeah.

And I was curious, did you do any sort of outreach to preschools or day cares or was that more word-of-mouth through your community?

>> NANCY FUNES: So like we've mentioned, we were in the middle of the pandemic.

We were all still working from home.

>> Right.

>> NANCY FUNES: So we didn't really have an opportunity to do anything like that, so yeah, we haven't.

>> That makes sense.

There was a request for clarification of your numbers.

Were those since you launched the kits in 2021?

>> NANCY FUNES: Yeah.

So those would have been for -- when did the physical kits, February of 2021 to now.

So we have three of each kit so individually, so for, like, the pre-K kit we have one that has circulated 12 times, one that circulated 19 and the other that circulated 16 times.

For a total of 47 circulations on that specific kit.

So the number that I gave was the total for all three in that kit.

Yeah.

>> Thanks for clarifying.

People -- I knew people would be interested in your manipulatives and the -- you've already addressed the bag that you used a bag for -- to circulate.

And perhaps we can have -- I can maybe circle back with the  folks, the Seattle -- Salt Lake City Public Library folks to get some of those suggested vendors.

We don't usually pull all that stuff in here but we can certainly make sure and share that info as well.

And let's see.

Oh!

The -- there was a great question about the sort of did you get a sense -- or did you see an impact on your library culture overall from the kits?

Are your stormytimes or programs more diverse?

And are conversations about race happening there?

>> DIANA CASTRO: I can touch on this and Nancy and Lindsey can talk about the impact on children's librarians but I think that initially we -- our library system had a big push toward equity and diversity and inclusion, and we founded our first EDI council.

We then hired our first EDI administrator, and have a new department revolving around equity, and I think the kits really came out of this big systemic push for EDI work.

As well as other things.

But I'd love to hear what the children's librarians saw.

>> NANCY FUNES: I can jump in.

So we had previously, I remember our children's selector had done an audit on the books that we were using in storytimes to see what -- you know, what books are you using?

Are you including all kinds of perspectives?

And so some of that work was kind of already happening.

As far as programming, we haven't quite moved back into  in-person programming.

We've been really fortunate that our organization has been trying -- they're doing their best to kind of keep staff and patrons safe.

So most of our programming has been virtual.

So we haven't really had much of an opportunity to do programming with these kits yet but that is part of the plan is to maybe start doing story times based around having conversations about race with families that are interested in doing that together.

>> And you've done so much work to build on that, so yeah,  great.

>> CHARLENE DYE: In terms of the video recordings, I see a couple of questions, I just wanted to jump on, piggyback off of Nancy, do we have time?

>> Absolutely.

>> CHARLENE DYE: I know -- I remember last summer we did, like, an -- a video program, it was -- I forget the exact name so correct me but around the world with Carmen San Diego type of program.

We featured a lot of different countries, and I remember the person in charge of that program really took pains to make sure that when talking about those countries they had a representative from the library actually from that country, making sure those voices were heard, and they were really thoughtful about book selection as well.

I appreciated that.

I'm from Canada so I was talking about Canadian books, and I just thought they were really, really thoughtful on how they approached that.

I appreciated that as an employee and the mother of a small child.

There is that.

For those who asked about the video recordings how they've been accessed, I don't know if we have numbers on how many times people clicked on the biblioboard.

>> LINDSEY WATTS: Sorry, I know that we can get some data about how often different -- different pages on our biblioboard are viewed.

And I know that's been shared with us in the past by our children services coordinator but I don't have an up to date number now.

But they can -- we can see,  like, how often something's been clicked on, and so we can see some info that way.

But then as we've mentioned, there have been caregivers across the country who have asked to view them, so there you go.

Okay.

>> Well then I have a feeling after today's session your analytics might get a little boost.

So hopefully I know that many, many libraries appreciate the work you've done.

I guess the one other final question I had is if other libraries do take this path I know that they're interested in giving you attribution for all your work.

So if you have preferences for how people credit any of the work, you know, on any of the resources they share I think that might be something that folks would like to know.

Maybe you haven't thought about that but I'm sure that people will be interested.

We can maybe add something to the event page afterwards.

>> NANCY FUNES: Really quickly I pulled up the biblioboard numbers.

The biblioboard page for the Let's Talk Race literacy kits has been accessed 509 times.

>> Fantastic.

That's great.

That definitely shows there's lots of people accessing the electronic resources, too, so wonderful.

All right.

We're at the top of the hour, I'm so grateful to you all for the work you've done and for bringing your story to web junction webinar, we're so excited to be able to share  this.

I will send you all an email once the recording is posted later today and also send you a certificate for attending.

That will come out probably a little bit later in the week.

I also am sending you to a short survey as you leave the room and your feedback is very  appreciated by our presenters as well as our team as we continue making programming choices so thanks for taking that time.

The link to the survey will also be in the email I send you so if you need to head back to the desk know that you can access that as well.

Thank you so much, all of you, and we look forward to accessing your resources and sharing the story and then hopefully lots of other libraries will be doing similar works.

For thanks for being such an inspiration, and I have to give a shout-out to your window washer.

So great.

First time, I think, for us.

>> NANCY FUNES: We didn't know they were coming today, so  sorry.

>> Excellent.

Well, everyone have a fantastic day.

Thank you to our captioner as well.

>> Thank you so much.

>> CHARLENE DYE: Thank you.

Bye-bye.