My name is Jennifer Peterson and I am so 
excited about today's session.  A couple more things to remind 
you that our sessions are all recorded and made available 
through web junction.  All of our webinars and self paced 
courses, a number of webinars are all available through 
learn.webjunction.org or through our main web site.  We are 
excited to be able to provide this for free to all who work and 
volunteer in libraries.  So know this is something you can 
recommend to your colleagues and others.  I'll also mention that 
our cross roads is a newsletter we send out twice a month.  It's 
an excellent way for you to stay up to date on all the 
programming and resources and projects we're involved in.  
Again, I've posted that link to chat so you can subscribe there.  

     I'll also remind you too about our learner guide.  We work 
with our presenters to create a guide that can be used by you or 
a group of you on your team to go a little deeper into some of 
that learning with -- this is a tool you can customize and use 
however makes sense for your team.  If you have specific 
questions you wanted to add to the conversation, know that's 
available to you as well.  All right.  Today's session is hosted 
with the association for rural and small libraries.  Cindy comes 
from a rural and small library here herself.  So we're really 
excited to bring that experience to today's webinar.  

     If you are not yet an ARSL member, explore it.  It's an 
excellent way to stay connected with others who work with 
libraries like yours.  Very affordable membership and excellent 
conference too.  I know people are still excited about this last 
year's conference in Fargo.  And next year will be hosted in 
saint George, Utah.  

     We're going to get our recording started.  And I'm going to 
jump over here.  You are so lucky to be joining our session 
today where Cindy Fesemyer who is the director of Columbus 
Public Library in Wisconsin is leading efforts to engage her 
community and her team in planning.  I'm so excited you are 
here, Cindy.  Welcome and I'll let you get started.  Thank you.

>>  Great, thanks, Jennifer.  So hi, everybody.  I know some of 
you are just going to continue dealing with tech issues and 
that's great.  For those of you who are connected and hearing 
fine, I would love to get started with you typing into the chat 
some combination of answers to these questions.  Are you library 
staff or trustee? Where are you geographically? And how many 
people does your library serve? Jennifer, if you can let me know 
a long the way who I'm talking to, I'd love to know if it's more 
trustees or staff or tiny libraries or medium size.  And that 
will help me make sure we're addressing the needs of everybody.  

     I am in Wisconsin.  This is a medium-sized library.  The 
town of Columbus is about 5,000 people.  And we serve another 
probably 10,000 in the surrounding rural areas.  So we serve 
about 15,000.  But 5,000 here in town.  For some of you that's 
really big.  For Wisconsin, that's medium.  Many of I would 
consider that small too.  

     How do I advance -- oh, never mind.  I think I got it.  

     I'm not seeing where I advance the slides.

>>  Yeah.  It's at the top center of the slide.  There's a set 
of arrows on either side.

>>  Yes, I got it.  Thank you so much.  Okay.  So to get 
started, I'm going to give you a little bit of frame of where 
I'm coming from for this.  So I was a lucky recipient to take 
part in the library's transforming communities environment.  
This was a quote about that cohort.  She says ALA started the 
libraries transforming communities initiative because we believe 
that librarians' role as core COMBHUNT leaders and change agents 
is vital to the success of libraries and the communities that 
support them.  Now, obviously, you know what I'm highlighting 
here.  It's the core community leaders and change agents.  So 
just get used to that.  Because this whole presentation is going 
to be about how you can gauge where your community is, what they 
need and what they want and how you can help them make that 
change.  

     Another frame to keep in mind comes from a relatively 
recent report out of the Aspen institute.  The report was called 
rising to the challenge, reenvisioning public libraries.  In the 
forward they say the time has come for a new vision of public 
libraries in the United States.  Communities need public 
libraries.  More people are visiting them and using their 
services, materials and programs than ever before.  But 
communitis' needs continue to change.  So I ask you, what do 
libraries need to do? They also need to continue to change.  
Technology is going quickly.  The way we socialize is changing 
quickly.  Libraries need to track those trends, keep up with 
them and give people what they need and what they want.  

     So just keeping those things in mind, let's talk about 
planning.  And I know that's why you all are here.  And 
actually, let's take this second.  Jennifer, what's it looking 
like for size and trustee versus staff people on the call?

>>  It looks like it's a lot of library directors or branch 
directors or some are logged in as a group of people.  So maybe 
some trustees are with those folks.  And really the size ranges 
from tiny 275 people in a community up to some larger systems 
100,000 from another library in the Midwest.  There's a huge 
range.  Here's a trustee.  There are definitely a few trustees.

>>  That's great.  Okay.  I'll make sure that I speak to both 
sides of the coin then.  Your roles are similar but different 
through the planning process.  And I love that everybody has a 
different version of small and rural.  So that's awesome.  I'll 
just know we're small to medium here.  

     So when you are doing a planning process, this is a 
straight up business model.  The one thing that any planning 
process has to start with is that you have to perform that 
internal audit.  You have to figure out what your organization, 
your library is bringing to the table.  What do you currently 
have as your list of assets that you bring via the library into 
the community? Some obvious ones to start with are your staff, 
what qualities do they bring to the community.  All the way down 
to your tech and maker spaces and whatever you have.  But it's 
everything that you bring to the table before you've done the 
planning.  This is a nice place to start.  What you are going to 
need to do is figure out what communities you serve.  We can 
take this moment and continue to keep your hands on that 
keyboard and tell me what communities you serve as your library 
while I'm telling you about a few of them we serve here.  We 
serve everybody but we have a particular focus on the children 
in the community here.  We have a particular focus on serving 
our business community.  It is a niche we identified through 
your planning process.  And are currently filling that niche for 
the community.  

     We are absolutely filling a role for English is a second 
language or English learners within the community.  And many of 
you, the smaller communities, we found through planning that 
Columbus sits, just like the slide on the lower left hand corner 
at the cross roads of innovation and tradition.  So our 
community is a very old one with residents whose families have 
been in the area for ions.  And they are sort of the roots of 
the community.  But then we're only a half hour from Madison, 
Wisconsin, which is a city with massive university and route of 
state government.  We're becoming a bedroom community Formad 
son, Wisconsin.  And those folks bring a whole different set of 
wants and needs to the table when you start talking about what 
your community needs.  So let's hear communities of folks serve.

>>  This is great.  Elderly with failing vision.  That's a good 
specific community that's being served.  Tribal members, tribal 
community.  Summer residents.  Senior citizens.  A couple 
different folks mentioned community members who do not have 
internet services at home.  Home school families.  Lots and lots 
of good specific identified communities and business owners.  
So, yeah, excellent.

>>  I can say at least a dozen you just mentioned apply to me.  
You all heard a lot that sounds familiar to you as well.  There 
were some that sounded unique and interesting to me too.  So 
this is a cool new frame for me to have.  Thanks for sharing 
that, you guys.  

     As we go along, you need to know what communities you serve 
because you need to know who you need to talk to.  The planning 
process, however, is an internal assessment.  That's the by the 
number stuff.  I'll touch on some of the surveys we did 
internally in our library to get a lay of the land for ourself.  
I'm going to breeze over that quickly.  What we're here is to 
talk about the turn outward stuff and the tools you can use to 
assess your community's aspirations.  And then we'll briefly get 
on writing your actual strategic plan or vision or whatever you 
want to call it.  The big meat today is the turn outward stuff.  

     We'll start with the numbers.  This is all through my 
experience and I'm the director of a smaller-sized library.  
I've got a really nicely engaged bunch of trustees who walk that 
road with me.  And together we went through this process.  We 
did community surveys.  I'm just going to let you know how we 
did them.  We did a pop-up survey for current users of the 
library.  We knew they were current users because the server 
popped up.  Whether you are inside the library in your home, on 
your phone, whatever.  It popped up and you could take the 
survey.  It was an in-depth survey.  We kept paper copies of 
that same survey on the circulation desks where people had to 
visit.  And we found a good half of our surveys were returned on 
paper.  And that surprised me.  I'm going to recommend to you if 
you do participate in a survey, don't put all your eggs in 
either the technological or paper basket.  Do a combination of 
both.  You have nothing to lose other than a little staff time 
because the library staff here then took those paper copies and 
did the data input as if it were a pop-up survey.  

     We did a community survey of the so hard to find nonusers. 
If you kind of get in line with the administrative people there, 
you can put a one-page insert into the bill and we did just 
that.  We filled both sides of the piece of paper to ask people 
what they needed through their COMBHUNT.  We did a lot bit.  But 
just their needs in the community.  They could just return the 
surveys with their check and I popped over to the water and 
light and picked up the surveys.  You could put it in insert 
inside the tax bill annually.  Just explore within your 
municipality what's being mailed anyway and try and get 
something in there.  Also the city of Columbus, every couple few 
years engages with a local university in Wisconsin and they do a 
wide municipal survey.  And we're just certain that the lay 
BRARy is mentioned.  That we get one or two or three questions 
on this wider city survey.  If your municipality does anything 
like that, see if you can get involved.  

     Another thing we relied upon heavily, space needs are a big 
issue for us in our beautiful historic teeny tiny library.  I 
give you this link and it will be in the user guide too.  That's 
all I know about.  That's where I am.  They have a lovely space 
needs calculation spread sheet.  So you'll have the link to 
that.  That's only Wisconsin.  And the numbers used there are 
really rather old.  And they are currently revising these 
numbers.  It is by no means the bible of space needs.  And if 
you have a really nice calculating tool for space needs, I would 
love to know what that is and collect them up.  So another quick 
look at the numbers.  There are more things that are out there.  
We're going to talk quickly about the edge assessment, the 
impact survey and analytics.  All of these were being crafted 
when we did our strategic plan maybe a year ago.  We finished it 
up.  Which sounds to me like it's time to look at it.  You'll 
have the links to all of this through the guide.  It's an 
internal tool.  You'll want to use it and look at your library 
compared to bench marks on aspects of a library.  It's all a 
canned thing and put in the director's best guest.  I had to 
consult with the staff to see what they thought.  The cool thing 
is it pops to you a nice set of resource recommendations.  You 
might look at getting a faster epiload speed or whatever.  But 
ends up being a nice polished piece.  And I appreciated that.  

     The impact survey is external survey.  That also is a pop 
up.  We did it easily a month after we did the other community 
pop-up survey.  We didn't want people to get survey fatigue.  

     And that focused on our patron's techniques and what do 
they use at the library.  That too had a really nice end 
product.  Analytics might price out.  They were beta testing it.  
And the person helping was able to get us on board for very 
reasonably relatively cheap costs.  And the thing that gale 
analytics will do is give you data about users.  Can take a live 
into ILS if you want that.  You need to decide how you feel 
about that.  That means sharing data with outside organization.  
That might be a conversation trustees and a director would want 
to have together.  They were beta testing a tool that sounded 
pretty powerful to me.  The rich demographic data is really 
pointed toward profit organizations and businesses.  It's weird 
to try and assess out what they mean.  40% of your customers are 
Bohosheek soccer moms or retirees or something like that.  You 
need to figure out what the world that means.  None came to a 
huge surprise to any of the library staff here though.  &%F0

>> I just want to jump in with a quick question before we move 
too far away.  Somebody did ask how many responses did you get 
through your municipal survey?

>>  I'm sorry.  Through your what?

>>  Through your municipal survey?

>>  Oh, yeah, sure.  Let me go back.  The survey here refers to 
a survey done by an outside survey organization.  A full two 
years before we did our planning.  I don't know what kind of a 
response rate they got.  The thing I can tell you on the 
Columbus water and light bill insert, now it's terrible.  Off 
the top of my head I don't recall how many we got back of the X 
number of utility subscribers in the municipality.  The outside 
consultant who we hired, by the way, to help us with this 
process.  Actually, I'll talk about that in a minute.  On all of 
our surveys, any pop up survey, any paper survey for users or 
nonusers tech programs or whatever.  He was really impressed 
with our rate of return.  For me, it seemed relatively low.  To 
him, it seemed phenomenal.  I would have to rely upon a planning 
professional's knowledge.  And I'm sorry to say I just don't 
know what our numbers were.

>>  No, that's fine.  If other folks have had experience, feel 
free to chime in and chat.

>>  Great.  You heard me say a couple times now our consultant.  
Yes, we paid money.  We paid a consultant.  And I'm going to 
advance as I talk.  I, as the director of the organization, am 
thrilled that we did that.  I want to say -- I know you all want 
to know the answer.  We spent about $5,000, maybe, on this 
person who held our hand through the process.  He gave us the 
overview of what to expect. And he and I worked really closely 
for a decent amount of time.  And he was the one who brought 
those tools and the impact survey.  He brought those to the 
table.  I would not have known about them.  So I was happy to 
have someone else have a familiarity with that.  Just send me 
the code in the web site and there you go.  He helped us 
interpret the data as it came through.  They mapped our users 
for us and did a lot of things that were useful to me.  And I 
don't think I have the time to do them.  I could have figured it 
out.  Would have taken me days and weeks whereas they can pop it 
out for us.  We set a time line together and Bruce, our 
consultant, would check in with me in a loving way as I know 
they have to do and say so, Cindy, where are you at writing that 
thing up? And I really appreciated that.  If you are at all 
considering hiring a consultant for any aspect of this, hire a 
consultant who does the things that your director isn't a 
natural at.  For me, that was the data.  Might be the writing 
part that your director wasn't a natural at.  Try and make up 
for something that will take longer with director.  And our 
consultant presented the whole thing with our board and the 
final presentation at the end too. So just a plug for 
consultants.  

     So I want to go back to the turn outward.  So that you can 
give it to them.  Kind of start figuring that out.  You can't 
really know unless you ask people.  In order to ask people, you 
need to be part of the community itself.  So you need to do this 
thing on the screen here.  That trained us as the library's 
transforming communities grant cohort.  Turning outward is these 
three things.  The act of seeing and hearing those in the 
community and acting with intentionality to create change.  So 
it's not staying inside your four walls.  It's looking outside 
and being outside the four walls.  And it is a framework for 
making choices about public life.  If you are deciding if you 
want to launch this new series of programs, don't just look 
inside your four walls, look in the community.  Or if they can 
help you make it better somehow.  

     So for some of us, that's a little bit of a scary prospect.  
And I'm going to say, for me, learning these tools, we had about 
a three and-a-half day really intensive training.  About our 18 
month training and the American library association.  50 of us 
came together.  5 people on each team across the country.  And 
in my estimation we were built back up.  One of the leaders said 
can you stand on the table and tell people in your community 
what they want? Can you do that with authority and authenticity? 
I lost my cool.  I didn't get angry.  But just shut down and 
didn't want to do exercises.  I thought who am I to tell people 
what they want? The background is I live in Madison and I 
commute to Columbus everyday.  It's only a half hour away.  So 
not a big commute.  But I will never live in Columbus and I was 
a brand new director when we engaged in planning for the first 
time.  And I really thought who am I to tell anyone this? And 
we're going to talk about how you can gain a little bit of 
confidence in telling people in your community what they want 
and how you can do that with authority, authenticity and 
accountability.  But that's my second question to you today or I 
guess third now.  

     Tell me how the idea of standing on the table in the middle 
of a crowded room, probably not a cabinet meeting, but stand 
obstetrics-gynecology a table in the middle of a crowded room in 
your community, how does that make you feel? Do you have it? 
Like oh, yeah, I can do this no problem.  That's me.  I know 
this.  Or does it kind of terrify you a little bit? I may have 
had to go out to the hall and shed a few tears.  I did lose it a 
little bit.  Then I got the tools to feel more confident.  

     So yeah, people are kind of afraid.  Especially 
face-to-face.  Am I missing any here? Does anybody have it? 
Anybody that can do this?

>>  No.  We have scared, scared.  Nervous.  Second guessing.  
Terrified.

>>  That makes me feel better.

>>  But also know it's important.  Fairly confident.

>>  Good for you.

>>  Somebody would pass out.

>>  Don't pass out.  Here are ways to really easily get yourself 
in front of your community.  

     So you want to figure out what your community aspires to.  
Jennifer mentioned you are going to get a whole set of links.  
You don't need to worry about this slide too much.  The 18 month 
process that I went through as part of that cohort is sort of 
encapsulated in this little 90 day program and I would recommend 
don't think you can do it in 90 days.  I can do it in a year 
and-a-half.  But all the tools are there for you.  The ones 
we're going to talk about today are the ASK exercise and 
something special.  The ASK exercise is a very quick and easy 
down and dirty community tool.  The community conversation is a 
very long well thought out tool.  And then there's lots of other 
stuff.  So the ASK exercise.  Four questions.  That's it.  What 
kind of community do you want to live in? Why? And what would 
need to change? In exercise we did as a survey.  I would take 
these four questions and lay them out on a page so you end up 
with a half page of just the four questions.  And go out into 
the community and ask people these questions.  Library staff 
should do it.  And it's a really nice way to get your feet wet.  
Hey, do you have a minute? Could I talk to you about your 
community for a second? And people are really, really happy to 
talk about their community.  This might be a two-minute 
exchange.  Might be a 20-minute exchange.  But it's meant to be 
quick and down and dirty just to get quick answers.  

     The way we did these is events happening in Columbus 
anyway.  The 4th of July parade, whatever.  We're big groups of 
very diverse people.  We're going to be anyway.  And we asked 
them questions.  It was also a lot of fun.  Directors and 
trustees, especially, keep those hats on and keep an eye for 
people down the road for creating programs with you or 
partnering with you on a big community effort.  Raising up their 
leadership skills within the community.  Keep that in mind as 
you go through this.  It's just a quick way to get into your 
community.  You don't have to look people in the eye even.  And 
it's a nice start.  

     I teach a class in community engagement and the first thing 
I have people do, it's for UW Madison's library school.  The 
first thing I have the students do is take three of these 
exercises out somewhere on campus and come back with three sets 
of questions. So just do it.  And then you get started.

>>  Can I just -- I think you are going to head into this.  I 
just want to note there are some comments about the patrons not 
knowing what the library can do for them.  And I know that this 
approach starts not talking about what the library can do.  You 
can maybe emphasize that.

>>  Yeah, no, thanks for that.  I take stuff for granted.  And 
forgot to tell you no, I really do mean community.  That person 
that Jennifer mentioned is very astute.  Doesn't say anything on 
there about the library.  That's the intention.  You are asking 
people about the community only.  You want to know what people 
want for the place they live.  Their parents who are retired or 
whatever it is.  Because at some point, I'm going to show you a 
goofy diagram.  And the library's part in there is actually very 
small.  But we're going to start on the macro level and ask 
people what they want for their community as a whole.  Some 
people might trip you up and say I like the library.  That's 
awesome.  But tell me about the community.  What do you want as 
a resident here or an employee or whatever.  

     So I hope that kind of gives you an idea.  Also, don't use 
that survey inside the library.  Those are your people.  You 
need to use that survey out of the library with people that you 
don't know.  Also, don't just put those four questions on a 
piece of paper and give them to someone or leave them on a 
counter for someone to take home and return to you.  That ASK 
exercise is face-to-face, man.  It is your opportunity to engage 
directly with people you don't normally engage with.  And take 
advantage of this little clip board in front of you as the prop 
and the reason why people should talk to you for a couple of 
minutes.  Just really use that to your advantage.  

     Okay.  So then I was saying lots of tools in between for 
using with staff and using with library boards and, for me, the 
city Council.  I used it at the political level a little bit.  
But for us in Columbus came down to the community conversation.  
And the community conversation is a highly facilitated, 90 
minute to about two-hour conversation that you have with people 
in your community.  Has to be a smaller group.  Probably no more 
than 15 or 20.  You want each of the people to really engage 
with you.  Some people would call this a focus group.  It's not 
a focus group.  You are not asking them about a product.  You 
are not asking them about the library.  These are some of the 
questions. There are 10 questions total.  And 10 questions are 
absolutely enough to guide you through two hours.  Again, this 
is another place where you never mention the libraries.  You are 
asking more questions than that exercise and collecting at the 
outset a whole bunch of things people in the community want for 
their community.  The facilitator is up there directing this and 
taking notes.  And they are paired with somebody in the back 
taking down all the notes they can from the spoken words.  Some 
people video record them and audio record them.  We had someone 
in the back with a laptop madly typing.  We didn't want to shut 
down conversation with any technology in the room that would 
record them.  

     So this conversation gets into greater depth on just one or 
two of those things that the people in the room want for their 
community.  Say you get 50 cool ideas of what people want.  And 
depending who you do this with, you'll hear things like say, 
it's a Chamber of Commerce.  We want more city support in 
marketing our businesses to say it's a bunch of middle 
schoolers.  We want a water slide at school and all kinds of 
stuff in between.  But you dial it down to hopefully one 
over-arching kind of theme of desires for that community.  And 
then you address all the rest of the questions.  The challenges, 
what does progress look like.  What can help us get there.  And 
then at some point you might do the thinking about the library 
now.  I chose not to do that.  I chose to keep it purely 
community centered.  When we go out to the community to have 
more community conversations about the expansion campaign we are 
just now kicking off.  I will absolutely bring it back to the 
library and what kind of space you need.  So it's really mutable 
and something you change.  I ask you to really believe and take 
the leap that you really can make this conversation about the 
community.  

     I'll share with you the results of this and you'll see how 
the library just kind of finds its little niche within those 
community aspirations.  Are we good at this point? Anyone have 
burning questions or should I keep going?

>>  There was one question about how many community 
conversations you hold per initiative or per planning process.

>>  Sure.  Of course, this depends hugely on, I think, the size 
of the people that you are serving.  The number of people that 
you serve.  So if you really are in a community of just a couple 
hundred people, you can have a couple few of these 
conversations.  And that's a big percentage of the area 
population participated with you.  I know bigger libraries will 
have a branch throw some of these.  And the thing I want to say, 
the length that you have about the tools, it gives you a whole 
guide to walk you through figuring out who to invite to these. 
We didn't have good success with ya'll come.  We didn't put up 
posters and say come of the we partnered with groups.  We 
partnered with the Chamber of Commerce and the downtown group 
who had been at logger heads for many years.  We had the 
conversation with both of them together.  It was kind of 
miraculous.  The healing started with this conversation and they 
are still a little dysfunctional.  The library is working with 
both groups together on a big effort here in the community.

>>  Just really quickly.  I know we need to get through the rest 
of it.  There was a question about whether or not it's just 
library people that are asking the questions or could a partner, 
perhaps, maybe the local business chamber.  Somebody else that 
is interested in knowing community needs, could they be involved 
in the process?

>>  Yeah, for sure.  So, for me, I was really lucky I had a team 
of five people being trained in these.  Between the five of us, 
we paired off and put on 12 different community conversations.  
We talked to about 140 people.  It took us months to pull them 
all off because we went to the place that the people wanted us 
to go to on the time line that they wanted us to be there.  So, 
for me, as a rotary member, it was easy to say hey, in a couple 
weeks, can I have the topic and can people stay an extra hour? 
Some of them were much more difficult and some of them we were 
never able to pull together.  And the ones that are really hard 
and aren't happening, let it go.  That's okay.  

     But start with a really easy one.  So for me, it was 
rotary.  All I had to do was say hey, let's do this thing and 
they did it.  And start with the easy ones.  One of our most 
difficult ones was we want today talk to Spanish speakers.  To 
help getting people to the table.  They knew they were already 
working within this community.  And provide interpreting for us.  
So that was a big one to pull together.  There were a lot of 
moving pieces.  And we did that very late in the process.  Just 
reach as deep as you can.

>>  And I'll mention as you move on we did a Spanish language 
outreach project and a key tool in that process is a community 
leader interview guide.  And many of the things you've already 
said I know come up in that guide.  I'll post that link as well.  
And continue posting questions. If we don't get to all of our 
questions, we'll circle back and can post her responses to the 
event page as well.

>>  I'm happy to stick around afterwards too and answer people's 
questions.  

     So moving on, I will take that cue.  At the top of this 
turning outward part, something special for Columbus was a way 
of us reaching out.  One member of my training team is an 
amazing woman who is the president of the literacy Council.  
She's retired at this point.  She's deeply involved in the 
community and cares deeply for the people.  She knows this 
community much better than anybody else.  And we trusted her 
when she told us things like Cindy, it has to be visible.  Can't 
just go in the newspaper.  It has to be visible out in the 
community.  So we wrapped our brains and came up with -- maybe 
it's hard to tell.  But the one on the right, you can see the 
little kids hanging tags on the tree.  That is our very sad 
looking root for Columbus tree.  It's a slight variation on a 
wish tree.  They start popping out in holiday times.  What do 
you wish for, in general.  For us, we asked people one question.  
And that is what kind of a community do you want? The institute 
is really big about the word aspirations.  And that's because 
it's -- excuse me.  [ Coughing ] 

     Just a minute.  Okay.  The word aspirations is neither tiny 
nor is it completely crazy blue sky.  Aspirations are realistic 
things that you aspire to.  But in Columbus here knowing where 
the tree was going to travel to, the word aspirations was way 
too high pollutant.  And we hung it on our root for Columbus 
tree.  That question along with a basket with green and yellow 
tags in it.  And this sad little Charlie brown Christmas tree 
traveled from place to place around Columbus for two months 
until it was a dried stick and we recycled it in a ditch.  So 
every two weeks, it moved someplace different.  Here it's in the 
local elementary school.  We collected hundreds and hundreds of 
answers.  We had a couple static trees.  That's the bulletin 
board and glass doors where people in the library could put 
leaves on those.  But the traveling ones saw the best results.  
We got 400 or 500 of these leaves.  And the really cool thing 
about figuring out a way for you to do a participatory one 
question very visible something is that we got a lot of press 
coverage.  Like a lot of press coverage.  We got strange 
national pick up mostly through library channels.  Library media 
and that kind of thing.  But even I would be at a training for 
continuing ed and somebody would start talking about the root 
for Columbus tree.  I was like hello, that's ours.  So when you 
do a thing like this, if you can figure out something visual and 
participatory, we went with the tree because we're the red bud 
city.  Pretty kind of tree that are indigenous.  And let people 
know about it. It's strange how they pick up on this feel-good 
stuff.  Which finally started giving us statistical information.  
It's mushy more narrative information that is hard to quantify.  
The leaves from the root for Columbus tree made it easy what we 
were see and going quantify the number of responses that we got 
from various schools, a bank lobby, coffee shops, a gas station, 
the local hospital, all over town.  So nothing glorious.  No 
money involved.  Lots of good results.  

     Okay.  And the final part in participating or asking your 
community to participate with you on this journey is you must 
take the time to report back.  This is a great way for trustees 
to get involved.  All of these wish tree leaves.  All of this 
information that people shared with us.  But I had trouble 
getting my staff to get on board here.  Times are changing 
slowly and I have more and more staff on board.  But this was -- 
I mean I'm lucky I had a team behind me with this process.  Then 
on the RORTD back part, report back to the library board and 
find out who is in the claim better of commerce, who wants to go 
to city Council and report this back.  And get them to start 
taking ownership and sharing the findings.  In the case, we 
heard that people want a sense of community.  And they wanted to 
heal those tradition versus innovation logger heads that were at 
here.  They wanted to heal those hurts.  They wanted more stuff 
fourteens to do.  They wanted more stuff for school-aged kids to 
do.  And they wanted more social stuff in general to do as 
adults.  Clearly, people just wanted to know people.  

     They also wanted one-stop shopping for all the stuff that 
was going on around town.  That was the little link here.  We 
partnered with four other community agencies, the hospital, 
recreation, senior center and the schools.  And together, we are 
like 50 bucks a year and put up an online community calendar 
where anybody can send us information.  And this is what 
somebody else was talking about.  We heard a lot of stuff to 
have nothing to do with libraries.  Like people hated all the 
pot holes and we will always hear that.  People don't want 
higher taxes.  You hear a lot of stuff you can't affect change 
on.  But still report it back.  People want to know they were 
heard.  Not just that you didn't just hear what you wanted to 
hear but that you heard everything that they said.  We reported 
back that you want the pot holes fixed.  

     To act upon these things, some are easier than others for a 
library to take a role.  People wanted one-stop shopping for 
social events.  We gave it to them immediately.  They wanted 
more stuff for kids to do after school.  Right away, started 
with an after-school timed lego club.  And in 2017, we are 
rolling out a once a week club on a different theme each week 
within a month.  So we're giving people what they want.  All we 
can do is promise we'll tell the roads division that they need 
to fix the pot holes.  You can pass on the information that you 
can't do anything about to the powers at be.  

     Another important part of this, this you are going to want 
to look at in the link that you got.  You need to know how much 
change your community can bear.  And at this point I'm going to 
start zooming through some of this stuff.  But hold your 
questions until the end and I'll be happy to answer them.  So 
you need to figure out where your community is.  It's probably 
hard for you to read this.  There are four different places.  
Columbus itself was somewhere between impasse and catalytic.  
People were still emotionally touchy about some of the issues 
indicative of impasse.  Some people were starting to get over 
it.  And that's more catalytic.  And that tells you what you can 
try.  So if you're at impasse and people really haven't been 
working together.  Because they are still having all these 
feelings.  But you could try something really little.  And I'll 
tell you that what we did is just started having pot lucks.  
That was our big offering.  We created a program to have the 
root for Columbus action pot luck.  And together brainstormed 
ideas to work on.  That's a whole other PowerPoint.  

     So you take all the tools from the data-driven stuff down 
to the community conversations. And then you lay it up next to 
where they are in the community.  So that public capital, that's 
this.  What's the stuff you should work on together as a 
community.  Then at the start of this process, you mapped out 
the assets that your library brings to the table within its 
community.  These are some of the questions you can ask.  I'm 
going to blow past these.  

     What your library is capable of doing.  On top of those 
other two pieces of the ven diagram and you end up with the 
library sweet spot there.  The community sweet spot is what the 
community as a whole, what they want to work on and what amount 
of change they can bear.  And that yellow circle creates a 
little green that is the small piece the library brings to the 
table.  So even though it's small, it is mighty.  And I'm not 
kidding at all.  Especially, within small and rural libraries.  
A library can be the beating heart of the community.  Everybody 
can come here.  Everybody is welcome.  And people feel a sense 
of togetherness and civic pride when they are here.  Even if the 
project is smaller in scope.  The fact the library brings it to 
the table holds a lot of sway and buy in and trust from the get 
go.  So really work hard to craft that library sweet spot and 
move forward with what comes next.  

     We take all of this information and write-up your plan.  
It's cool we only have two minutes for this part.  This part 
seemed so fast compared to the community engagement part.  You 
write a mission statement and this is Columbus's mission 
statement that came directly out of community conversations.  
The lenses which we do our work everyday.  And then we came up 
with our core strategic directions.  In the case of Columbus we 
were to keep on keeping on.  We were to keep on keeping on 
creating programming for people of all ages and interests.  We 
needed to work on and still do our communication and our Public 
Relations efforts in getting out the word about our programming.  
And we need a bigger building or more space somehow.  

     I'll be working on that bigger building forever, probably.  
But this is a sample of the work plan from the early part of the 
work plan for having more physical space.  It's date driven 
activity driven.  And I even said who had to work on it.  
Directors, I'm sorry to say , it's you and you and Pete on this 
one is the library board president.  Perfect.  Katrina is the 
youth services director at the time.  Buddy up and bring other 
people into it.  You are going to have a really big role in 
this.  

     So that's the plan.  That's it.  So that's the last slide.  
So you do as far in advance as you can and revisit it 
frequently.  Revise it.  And keep carrying on.  And I'm happy to 
say on the physical space, this is total icing on the cake.  
Just Tuesday this week, we closed on purchase of the house that 
is adjacent to the library with the intention of one day 
expanding.  So we wrote this plan.  You can see it was the 
summer of 2016.  So it took us until almost winter of -- summer 
of 2015.  Took us until winter of 16 to really start getting 
somewhere.  It all started with the activities you see here 
really just getting the word out.

>>  That's great.  I just want to mention how much I loved 
hearing some of those sort of low-hanging things that you could 
do.  A lot of times with building projects that completely takes 
over everything you are doing and you have to presume the 
community is on board with that.  To be able to have some of 
those more smaller responses or more immediate responses is a 
really great way to demonstrate we're in it for the long hall.  
And here are things we can do to help the community right now.

>>  That's right.  And we say yes almost always to people's 
requests for something or as much as we can.  But I always keep 
in mind to how visible it is and how much chatter I'm going to 
get about it around town.  With the newspaper editor pick this 
up and run with it? Everything we do is building that case.  We 
just need to make people love us so much along the way.  Of 
course, they want more space.

>>  Absolutely.

>>  As somebody pointed out, it's a slow process.  And I dig 
that.

>>  I do want to ask people really liked the root for idea and 
wondered if that was proprietary or if they can steal and use 
acorns.

>>  Steal.  Absolutely do encourage you.  I had somebody I don't 
know where they are send me a newspaper clipping of theirs which 
was Columbus rocks.  They had people painting rocks and started 
putting them all over town.  So it's really just whatever works 
for you.

>>  Love that.

>>  Yeah.  And share ideas.  Yes, of course.  Library and steal.  
That's what we do.

>>  As Kendra says R&D.  Rip off and duplicate.  I appreciate 
you pointing out too there is an additional webinar I know you 
participated in that covers even more of the turning outward 
approach.  

     I continue to see really great work coming from libraries 
that have approached it this way.  Keep your eyes out.  We'll 
make sure and I know the libraries transforming communities 
continues to bring great examples from those libraries.  This 
has been inspiring and I love that there are smaller steps to 
the process that you shared as well as some of the comprehensive 
pieces.  We will definitely have all of these resources on the 
event page.  And I'll put that link in there.  I will send you 
all an email once the recording is posted.  And we'll also send 
you a certificate within a week for those of you who attended 
today.  But if you have other team members who need CE credits, 
those can be obtained via certificate through the catalog where 
the recording will be.  And I'll also send you to a short 
survey.  Provides us great feedback both to Cindy as well as for 
our on-going programming.  So thanks.  And we have great 
response rate to that survey thankfully. So I want to thank 
Cindy, again, and thank you all for being such great 
contributors to the conversation.  And I look forward to seeing 
what comes of all of the excellent work you bring to the 
community.  Thank you all so much.

>>  Thanks, guys.