Welcome, Audrey. >> Thank you so much, Jen. Can you hear me all right? >> Yep. You sound great. >> All right. Perfect. Thank you for having me here. It is a pleasure to be back at WebJunction. I love to work with you and everything that you have to offer to the community. And personally I read through my E-Mail every time it shows up in my inbox. I will give you credit for that one. I'm here to talk about taking community partnerships to the next level. I'm going to kick us off by telling you a little bit about what my background in community engagement looks like so you know the perspective that I'm from. A couple of key experiences I have had around community engagement. Currently in my role I'm building a strategy for engaging our business community at a large library system and specifically focusing on the tech community but really any kind of economic and business development. Previous to that, I was working at the Kip Kitsap regional library where we had a lot of community engagement prior to that I was on the ground. I have been a librarian for adults, teens and kids and I have been a subject specialist. So I have made the rounds and also managed mobile services. I've done a little bit of everything and I bring those perspectives, as an adult focused person now and I love to bring that perspective of what we can learn from kid and TV library. I have program adults just wanna have fun. It starts with partnerships and relationships. So it was a natural progression for me here. What we will do the next hour is talk about why we do partnerships in public libraries. Why they are important why they benefit us and our communities, what we mean when we say "partnership" because that's a specific form of community engagement. I will give you examples from my own work, how some of those played out. We will talk about real-life examples, some of the challenges you face in partnering and how to address them and despite those challenges you should do it any way. And I will have a few moments where we pause and invite you to share your ideas and experiences. There are 128 of you in here, and that's a lot of wisdom in the room. So I'm going to make sure we have a few small chances to share that with each other. Do feel free at anytime to text message chat. You don't have to wait for those moments. Jennifer will help to keep an eye on that for us. Thanks. So, I'm here to kick it off with involvement from you here if the beginning. Why partnerships? I want to hear that from you. Why are you here? Why do you do partnership in your libraries? Why do you form them or are you interested in them? I will be quiet and let you add some things in chat. I will ask you, Jennifer, if you don't mind rounding them up and sharing them with me. >> Absolutely. Grants require partnerships more and more. >> Very true. >> Another one on grants. Stay engaged with the community, expand reach, expand reach to new audiences, don't want to isolate the library, as long as libraries have been around the library does that. Way to access money and workers. Low-cost programming. Don't need to use limited staff time. Getting community buy-in. Definitely emphasis on reaching different populations, people that maybe don't come to the library. Making sure the community knows all that we have to offer. And helping the community to access specific resources. Definitely ways to understand your community better. Bring in expert knowledge, those partners bring in expert knowledge. Businesses can find us as a valuable resource, too. Definitely making sure the partners know about our resources. Definitely don't have to do it alone. Reaching communities that come to the library, whether elderly, migrant. Yeah, you guys can keep them coming. As a reminder, too, the chat will be available for you all to review. So this is a great resource for everyone. >> Thanks. So those are all amazing responses and I want to highlight a few things in there that I find to be particularly salient. I noticed that the responses, there were two angles on why we have partnerships. Some things were about us learning and some things about the community learning. I'm hearing the community will know what we can off them or we will be able to improve the services we offer to the community, and then the other side hearing well, we will learn about them, we will learn what we need to be offering or reach people we wouldn't otherwise reach. That's the neat thing about partnership. It engages both sides. Someone early on put it is in their strategic plan or that people understand what we offer them. That is a specific alignment with community goals. That makes you relevant. I never want to hear are libraries still relevant conversation in the age of Google ever again. Because when we work with partners, the community is deciding what's important. It is someone that is already out there, an organization, a person or government that is already out there, in the community, doing work. There is already consensus the community cares about that work and we are helping to make it happen. We are demonstrating why the library is a potent force in helping communities achieve their own goals and dreams. That makes us immediately and constantly relevant, right? It is not about do people need this thing we offer. It's here's what you care about and the library is a powerful way to make that happen. Another essential piece of our partnership is they are deeply tied to our core values, equity, diversity and inclusion is a key value. At my library it is in our organizational goals and I imagine it is true at many other libraries, as well, something similar. True inclusion requires having the voices of the community involved in the services that are offered to that community. It means empathy and copartnership. Partnerships are a way we live our values. Your commission statement probably says something about building community or community engagement, and strategic plan likely says something like that. Internally when you partner you are showing your administration or your board 0 or community how you live your mission. Several mentioned extending resources. We can't do it all. We have limited time and money and when we work together with we can stretch the resources farther. For the last one -- I'm going to tell a story about that. You may have heard the phrase if you are not at the table you are on the menu. If you are not there when important decisions are being made, you are not being considered in those decisions. I have often heard that said about libraries being at the table with local government or right when there are coalitions forming in the community. So I mentioned it at one point during the community engagement process that I was co-leading at kit nap Regional Library. I said something to the director of communications. He said you need to be at the table. And I said if you are not at the table you are on the menu and he said we don't want to be at the table, we want to be the table. I thought that was interesting. I read a report that describes the library as a platform. Instead of saying we have this particular agenda and we are going to partner with you to achieve it. We are saying, we are a platform for you. We are the resources, and values and we can help you, in the community, accomplish the stuff that you care about. We can help bring people together and be conveners and help you get what you need to be able to collectively have an impact or a platform or a table. So what actually makes a partnership? When we talk about partnerships, what are we talking about? How is a partnership different from other forms of other ways of working together? I will turn this back over to you in the chat. What do you think makes a partnership? >> While you are posting that I posted a link at the Aspen Institute Report. There are a number of resources. So you can read through that. The balanced give and take. Trust and a common goal. Mutual goals. Where both partners get something of value. Shared values and missions. Alignment of goals and priorities. Mutual, equal commitment to the process and goal. Libraries can partner with orcommunity resources to better provide services to all citizens who we both serve. Shared audience, each is able to bring the best in each other, working together, working together with different strengths. Clear understanding of benefits and goals. Lots and lots around that. Desire for community impact. Active participation from both or all partners working towards a goal. Oh, being there to take up each other's slack. I like that. Good partnership is two or more organizations working together for the greater good. Stronger together. Shared intelligence. I like that. And it's not necessarily equal or mutual. I've heard there is something that benefits both parties without having to have equal mission. So there are definitely different ways of sharing output. Collaborations. Strength in different areas. Definitely a lot on shared outcomes and values and goals. >> Excellent. Thank you. It's fine to keep these coming again the chat will be captured. Those are all fantastic and not only did the group hit it on the head with a lot of it but you avoided some of the most common pitfalls in libraries and partnerships. I've addressed a couple of those, as well. So I think you will hear -- the ones I want to highlight are similar to what we heard in the chat, mutual benefit. I would not say -- there's some discussion about equality in the chat. I would not say all or both parties have to contribute equally but every has to derive benefit. If it is just one organization giving entirely to the other, that is okay and works in some situations but that's not a partnership. To that end there needs to be mutual contribution. You can't have one party or only some of the parties doing all of the work. You have to have shared goals. That's going to be the crux of the matter and that is captured well in the chat. You have to know where you are heading and you want to wind up in the same place together. That's essential. One that we didn't capture much in the chat but is important that I think underlies a lot of what came out of shared power, when we make the decisions ourselves, even if we get input from the community or there are other ways to work with people. In a partnership, we don't get to make all of the decisions. The power for those final decisions is made by everyone involved, or some are responsible for some and some for the other. But that's really important and one of the hardest parts of partnership. Tough to do. Aligned values. Some people mentioned this in the chat that you have similar values. I do want to emphasize aligned. You don't have to have exactly the same values. People sometimes say how can a library partner with a business or something for profit. We don't have to agree 100% on everything, but least within the realm of the work we are doing we have to have some aligned values. We have to do it for reasons that are similar enough that we will be able to make decisions together that work for everybody. You need to have clear roles. You have to know who is going to do what. A lot of times partnerships sound great in terms of yes, we want to get to the same thing and work together and collaborate and make decisions together and we are going to all benefit and put in. If you don't have a mutual understanding of who will do what of those roles that can make the whole thing fall apart. This is the pitfall and I'm pleased that no one fell in to, which is that exchanging money doesn't create a partnership. That is a transaction. There's nothing wrong with that, but so often I have heard interactions where, you know, I will say to someone, oh, are you partnering on that and they will say, oh, sure, I paid a presenter or we partnered with that organization. We paid them to come in and lead a class. That can certainly be part of a partnership. It's not that there is something inherently problematic about money but it is that exchanging funds is not partnering. It is a transaction to provide a service. And this is a place for that but to have a full partnership there needs to be some co-design and shared responsibility. We can't just be paying one party to provide something without any kind of other input on it. The other thing that isn't really partnership is promotion. Sometimes we will say we are partnering with someone because we send them flyers or news letter. And promotion is great and important, and you can have an agreement say with an organization to say co-promote each other's things, but a full, meaningful partnership will involve working together to create something that you didn't have alone. I think this is actually pretty common in libraries. We talk a lot about partnerships or collaboration and what we mean is promotion. I want to encourage us to think in that realm of engagement. That space of leaning on each other to create a taller mignon tower. And to talk about that a little more, I want to bring up the dessert spectrum of public participation. This is shared by Hennepin County library staff. The original one is from IAP2. It is the International Association of Public. We talk about engagement or partnerships quite a bit in a way that means a lot, that encompasses a lot of different relationships. So this spectrum helps to break it down so you can talk specifically about what you are doing and what you mean. I find it incredibly helpful. I learned about it when Hennepin County boiled it down to the concept of deciding what to have for dessert, which I find fantastic. The basic level of participation is inform, we are having cherry pie for dessert. There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you have a program next Thursday and all you need is for people to know it is happening 7 p.m. next Thursday. There's no need for a discussion. That's great. There is consulting. In the case of consulting, you are asking and providing the basic framework, you are asking for a little bit of input and -- oh, I can see in the chat you love the clarity of the graphic. So it is -- the actual graphic is from Make You Share put out by Kitsap Regional Library. So in consult you have the frame and ultimately you have the power. You are making the decision. You get input but you are making the decision. That is similar to where you may be helping -- you are allowing the other part to have more of the basic framing, but ultimately you are still driving the conversation and holding the power. When you get up in to collaborate and empower that you are really until the realm of partnership. To collaborate you may say let's discuss and decide together what to have for dessert. Maybe shop together. In that that case it is truly a co-creation. And then whatever you decide for dessert we will have it is empower. That doesn't mean I will throw the decision at you and walk away but I will empower you to make it. I will put my resources, my meeting room, my staff time, my expertise at your disposal to help you create the thing that you care about. Again, these are all good things. There's a place for all of them. It's just a matter of understanding which one you are using when and knowing when you can drive something a little higher up on the spectrum. So, I'm going to dive in to how we build these partnerships. How do you actually go about creating something where you are truly collaborating or empowering -- collaborating with or empowering someone else in your community? It all sounds well and good, but what are the nuts and bolts? The fundamental thing and if you take one thing away from this today I hope it is this, partnerships grow from relationships. There are a lot of tools out there that give you a method to do this. There are all kinds of community assessment, toolkits, asset mapping stuff. You can always embed in libraries. There's a lot of guidance on how to embed in community organizations. What I'm talking about there is joining a bunch of stuff in your community, sit on boards, go to the chamber, help to answer reference questions at your city council meeting. Be there, be involved in the community, provide service at the point of need. Ultimately, even just showing up and listening is a powerful tool. There are all kinds of fancy things out there. If you want structure and guidance you can find tools for doing research or for taking steps to get involved, but the big thing is start to form relationships. You don't have to come in with an idea for a thing you want to do together. You come in with an idea of who you want to build a relationship and often you have no idea what will come out of that. Or may be you come in thinking you will know where it will head but you find out after listening to people that you are totally wrong. The best thing to do is get out in your community and start listening, start building relationships. However it makes sense for you to do that. Once you have a relationship with someone and you have identified something that you think you want to do together, you want to begin at the end. Work backwards. I saw in the chat earlier, a lot of people mentions outcomes, goals, right? You want to identify what those are first. If you don't have a clear picture where you are heading, you are going to get stuck somewhere along the road to get there. You'll find that you diverge in a way that maybe you didn't expect. So start by defining an end goal together. Sit down and be clear about the outcomes that you want to accomplish, however you frame that. I will talk about that in just a second. The big thing is whatever format you use for your goals, you want them to be SMART, you will see if you Google SMART goals you will see it stands for 47 different essentially related things, you will see art c plus. What are your goals, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound? Are they specific enough that you are sure you are both on the same page of what you need and are not making assumptions? Measurable meaning that you know what success looks like and you will know when you get there. That you have a shared way of understanding where the finish line is. Achievable, meaning you have actually talked through what both groups can do with the resources that you have. Is this something that is actually feasible, given the realities of our workplaces? Relevant, that gets back to that shared values piece that is this meaningful to both of your organizations and your community? Is this something you can take back to your boss, whoever that may be, what it is administration or the board, and say, we're spending time and resources on this because it is meaningful and here's how we know that. And time bound, when does it end, when it is over and what are the points you will hit along the way? It is important to have those milestones listed out really specifically because they will give you a clue early on if something is getting off track. If you only know what the end point should look like, sometimes you can get off track and not realize it until it is too late to fix without a Herculean effort. That gets to the second point here. Identify structures, rules and milestones when I say "structure," some examples of that are collective impacts, which is sort of a five-point structure for how large groups of organizations can work together. I started to talk about outcomes earlier. OPBEs, you may hear it referred to as theory of change. That is a format especially for identifying and clarifying what your end result is or should be and working backwards to determine together what specifically -- what specific measurable actions are you going to talk and when? As you are seeing in the chat, there's a lot of good courses and articles about these structures and many others. Particular structure you use is not terribly important. Some things will be better suited to certain situations than others, certain types of partnerships, but the big thing is that you have something. You need each organization to have a shared understanding of what is going to happen, who's going to do it and when it is going to happen. That seems really obvious but it is really amazing how easy it is to miscommunicate about this stuff. It is really simple to go in and have this great, inspiring, warm, fuzzy feeling about all the things you want to accomplish together and for everyone to have excellent intentions and really giving it their all and to still really run in to some struggles if you have misunderstood who's going to be responsible for what. So clarifying that from the beginning is going to make the partnership that you are feeling so excited about, that idea, that's what it is going to make successful is hashing out the nuts and bolts. Part of that is a communication plan. The thing that I have seen more partnerships fail or succeed on is their communication. Again, it's immensely easy to assume that other people communicate or have expectations for communication that are similar to ours and again and again it's not the case. It is especially not necessarily the case when you have intentionally seeking out organizations that are diverse, that are different from yours, that are culturally, in some ways, whether it is external different from different race, ethnic background or a different organizational culture. When you are working perhaps with a non-profit or a for-profit business or a small one versus a large one. Sort of a different personality with the culture. It's incredibly easy to assume mal intent there as well. I sent them an E-Mail and they never got back to me and I'm pulling all of the weight but it is not their norm to respond to E-Mail that quickly. It is something to talk about but absolutely talk about how you are going to talk at the very beginning. Actually make a plan for how you will communicate with each other. It smooths over so many possible future bumps in the road. It really helps everything move more smoothly. I've highlighted don't assume as its own bullet point but woven it in already that it's easy to assume because we have the same goal that we are on the same page about how to get there and that's just not true. So really the more explicit and concrete you can be about what's going to happen and who's going to talk about it and all of the nuts and bolts the better. I strongly encourage you to put those things in writing. Not because you are going to go waving a contract under someone's nose and say, you said you were going to do this but because it makes it concrete. It gives every party something to refer back to. It just helps establish that this is what you have agreed on. Just have the act of putting it in writing often means you won't have to wave it under somebody's nose. It means the problem won't happen in the first place. It's just another way to double check that no one is making any assumptions, that you have all agreed to the things that you said you wanted to do together. I'm going to talk about what this looks like in real life with a couple of programs that I did and some of the lessons I learned from them and where they fall. I started a program called ferry tales years ago. This was an idea that the library had which was -- I was a librarian app at Bainbridge Island and most adults working there are commuting in to Seattle by ferry boat. And we see all of these people on the ferry reading but we don't see them in the library because they are busy and they are on the boat when we are open. They are not on the island during the day. So why don't we do to them and host a book club on the ferry? So we went to the ferry system, Washington State Ferries and we said, hey, can we do this? And they said, sure, go ahead and worked out the details together. For example, they said you should do it on the ferry that runs at this time, not that time, et cetera. You can advertise in this way. We will support this, but not that. You know, we will make an announcement for you over the PA system. So we did work together and required the consent of both parties, but this one is really falling down in to the consult area and starting to edge in to collaborate. Basically we went to them and said, we have an idea. Can we do this? And it started really simply, right? It was just a book group. Exactly like every other library book group, read the same book, ten people sit around and talk about it. But it started to snowball because it got some press and we started to be contacted by authors and publishers who said can we come and do an author advertise visit at your group and we started to do have authors doing Q and A on the ferry and that involved in to other partnerships and one author who came was a cookbook author and there was a little business with a commercial kitchen within walking distance of the ferry on the Bainbridge Island side. We walked over and did a tasting. That was so successful that the store Intentional Table said with can we do a cookbook club together? We had no previous contact with the ferry system, nothing formal. When they remodeled the terminal, they said hey, would you like a space in the terminal, just wall space to advertise something about the library and we said, yes, we would. We created an eBookshelf. You have seen pictures of that kind of thing, just the covers of ten e books. You can put in a quick code or snap a picture of the code and be taken to them for commuters reading ebooks. These communities opened up because of the relationship we started. and it drew a lot of attention. Locally and nationally. That was because of the partnership. This was the exactly the same in cob tent as a book group I was leading on Tuesday nights in the library. and no national news outlet has ever written about my Tuesday night book group in the library. Even though the content was the same, the setting, what the partnership afforded is what made it a successful program. So when I think of what I learned from that, obviously partnerships really amplify what we do. The reach -- the reach that we have there is entirely because of the partnership. It was -- it absolutely transformed that program. Starting with an idea is harder than starting with a relationship. I had to go to the ferry system and say, I want you to do this thing. You have never met me before. We have no pre-existing relationship. I thought about this all by myself in the vacuum or the library has and now we have to sell you on our idea. It is -- in this case, they were very on board and they bought in very quickly. But that is harder than having a relationship already and having immediate buy-in because there is an idea you came up with together. That's not really the ideal way to get started. It was also really important because we did have to sell them, knowing your partners priorities and speaking their language. I could tell you a million reasons that a book club on the ferry would be great for the library or the community but I had to tell them why it was important for them to let me use some of their resources. Why it was important for them to invest their time in this and figure out -- put time and effort in to figuring out the nuances and the things that come up. So I had to really understand their mission and their values, and maybe even more importantly their language. You have to put it in terms that are going to be meaningful for them, and not in a library speak that is meaningful for us. So really doing your homework ahead of time and learning about the organization and getting familiar with their materials, even checking out their website or reading pamphlets. I like to look at mission statements and strategic plans because you learn their internal lingo. Be open and flexible. Share power and control when people started to come to me and saying, hey can with do this other thing, can we bring this author on or do you want to do a cookbook club just say yes. It would have been -- there were a couple of moments where I was thinking, do I want to hold to my vision of the thing that I wanted to do here or should I let somebody else run with this? Should I try something new? Should I turn over some power and control to somebody else? All of the amazing things that came from it, the best, lasting things happened because I let go. So don't try to hold on to it or stick to only your initial vision. Be a little open and flexible and share that control with partners. It's amazing what can come out of that. So, another example that I will give you -- this one now is pretty fully collaborates and starting to edge in to empower I would say. This is the Work Source connection site. Work Source is in every state. If someone is on unemployment and you are told they have to go to a number of classes or get certain hours, Work Sourced a mensters that. You have one in your community, it might be called something else. This is something that was planned pretty much completely together. We are turning all of the libraries -- we have a few on board now and rolling more in all the time in to Work Source connection sites. That means when a job seeker walks in to our library, they see the Work Source branding and support services, information, some of it is publicly available but some you have to go through Work Source to get and that means you can go through us at the library to get them. That meant upgrades to the computers, staff training. We had to sit down together completely and say, how does this jive with what we want to accomplish? Why are we doing this? How are we going to make it happen? We had a shared audience of job seekers and helping them get jobs and helping employers find the talent they need for those jobs, right? This started with a relationship. The person at the Workforce Development Council is a group that oversees Work Source. So they are a little bit of a packaged deal. I had put myself out there and I was going to conferences and meetings about Workforce Development. I had no idea what we would do with it but I knew I needed to meet some folks. I met a woman from the council and we said we care about the same things and we are serving the same people. We want to get the right people in the right jobs. We want to match jobs and employers together for a more greater success for the community, more economic thriving in our community. At that time we had no idea what we would actually do together. We couldn't come up with a concrete thing that made sense for both of our organizations to do. But we kept in touch. We kept that relationship going. Then I saw at the beginning of this chat, a bunch of you mentioned grants, that partnerships are essential for grants. A few months later, Workforce Development Council reached out to me and said we are going to apply for this grant and we need partner and we'd like it to be you. So we sat down and thought what would it take to on board our libraries with Workforce Connection sites? It was big and complicated and the grant itself actually drove the push for the specific project we wanted to work on together. I have to say the benefit was really regardless of the grant results. We actually ended up not taking the grant and I have to say I was somewhat relieved because it was a really big project that would have taken a lot of resources, which we were ready to do, but the major benefit was that we sat down and figured out how we worked together. Most of the things that we laid out in that grant are still going to happen. They are just going to be able to happen on a timeline that we chose, rather than a timeline driven by grant money, which is why I say I was relieved. It is a fantastic opportunity. We are going to make it happen. The big thing was understanding how to work together. It was founded on a relationship. And the grant, as well. What I learned from that is to show up. I was at places that no one was expecting to see a library. No one expected to see a library there. People would say, oh, that's so great. Why does the library have an Economic Development Manager? What does that mean? It was a chance to talk about the library and the values of the library. Talk about the library's role and mission in supporting thriving and equitably thriving community. I knew what I had to offer. Even if I didn't know what we could do together, I know that we have spaces in local communities. I know that we have staff and what they can do. I know the kind of informations and resources, the kind of questions we can answer at the library. So I can share those resources and the other person can tell me what they would want to do with that stuff. Often times they have things they want to do, but it hasn't occurred this them that, hey, they can use a meeting room at the library or there's a database at the library that will help job seekers. And sometimes just sharing that can be the spark for an idea. Lean in to that ambiguity. It is okay if you don't know what you are going to do together in the beginning. Just keep the relationship going. Some of those relationships will never turn in to anything concrete, or they will turn in to things that are less direct like an introduction to someone else who then you eventually end up working don't feel like it has to be an immediate, obvious, practical application. I know that is really hard for a library system where we are all busy and time is scarce and no one feels like they have enough staff or resources but this stuff is important. It is important to start with the relationships and that means making time. At the same time know your priorities. I talked about the importance of being open and flexible. Here I want to say the place where you don't want to be flexible is knowing your core value and your big priorities. When this grant opportunity came up, we didn't have a lot of time to write the grant and I realized it was going to take pretty much all of my time. We had a lot to figure out and a lot of stakeholders. I was able to do that because this was a very high priority for me. I knew already that the areas of workforce development and anything having to do with partnership were the core of what I was focusing on at the moment. It was a quick and easy decision for me to say everything else can wait. I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks on this. So knowing the basic priorities so you can be flexible about the other stuff is really important. Involve others. We reached out to a lot of people in talking about this grant. I reached out to other folks in our organization. We reached out to partners and everything we did was richer because we involved other folks. Last one, the asset building coalition. This is really where we are starting to get more fully in to the realm of empower. The library as an embedded resource. The Asset Building Coalition there is likely something like this in your community, but they are a group from banks and financial institutions -- I believe they are required to give a certain number of service hours in things like free credit advising, free financial advising to give back to the community in that way. Many of them certainly also want to. It looks good for them as businesses. Many of those are also, in fact, nonprofit. In some case credit unions this is their mission. We started going and at first I got a lot of why the heck is the library here at the asset building coalition and we are here because we want to help the community establish goals and complete information gaps. This is an area where you are telling us that people are having trouble getting information they need to be financially successful and you can provide that information and we can be a convener. You want to find people who need information. There are people that need to find you to get the information. We can help to put you together t. I saw earlier in the chat people talking about complimentary resources and expertise. Here at the library, we are not experts in managing yo you are finances, right? We are not experts in fixing your credit score. Professional financial advisors are experts in that stuff. We have something else, right? We have expertise in how to do your own research, when you are looking for a bank perhaps after this. If you want access to MorningStar for investing. We can help the banks and people find each other. Even though this was government, non-profit, for-profit, huge banks and little tiny insurance companies with three people in an office, we had the shared goal of hoping individuals and families achieve financial success through education. So we were able to work together on this, even though in many other arenas, right, we might be going in very different directions. Because this was really about bag platform and being embedded as a member of the community, there's not one single result that came out of this. It is not like our partnership was a project. As things came up -- as things came up, we jumped in and found a way to support them. Some examples of those, they did what they called a Super Saturday, which was a blitz of financial resources. So there would be credit counseling and tax preparations and you could talk to people with different resources and get them in one place. They realized they wanted to try it in a new location and they wanted to try it on Fridays instead of standards. We were able to say, hey, we have a library in that location and our offices are open on Friday. We were able to provide that link in to a new community and some staff support for a time that was difficult for them but good for their patrons. We started a financial education series at the library, a series of programs that were caught by ABC Volunteers and they would give a few minutes beyond what the resources the library has to offer. Each person brought their expertise. We could provide access to space and resources. We provide referrals and warm handoffs. Now that we know each other better it is easier when someone comes in and says, you know who can answer that question is so and so from the credit union who is committed to donating some of their time to do this, and is going to have appointments next Thursday. What's next? Since this is an ongoing relationship, anything could happen. So show up. Keep the conversation going even if you don't have a thing to do right away. Participate and figure out how the library has a role in supporting community priorities. Make things with people, not at or for them. Service providers are not the same as the people they serve. First of all, when you partner, you have taken a step closer to making things with people. Not saying, I think you need this. So I'm going to throw it at you. But someone coming and saying, we need this and us saying let us help support you. Service providers sometimes are also sometimes making things at instead of so it is something to be aware of. Obviously this is not always easy. With we had a participation bit but I see we are running behind time. In the chat, as I am talking share the challenges you may have faced in partnership. They are time-consuming. They are enormously time-consuming, and that's okay. It's worth it, but make the time in advance. If you think that it is going to save you time to partner, chances are it is usually not, especially not in the beginning if this is a new partnership. It is worth it but you need to make time for it or you will find yourself crunched later. It is hard not to be in charge. We talked about that. Communication is always an issue. Disparities in money, resources and timeline. I'm seeing here, communication, E-Mails and phone calls not answered, a lot of organizations involved. But it can be really hard. If this is an expectation that both groups will chip in equally, well, both organizations may not have the same amount of money or the same amount of staff or they may not work on the same timeline. Many library have deadlines when you have to get stuff in for the quarter or month to get your PR going and their time lines may not line up. This stuff, especially money and resources can be contentious if you haven't talked about it in the beginning. It's a sensitive area for people. Be clear in the beginning. Again, those partners do not have to give equally or equally in each arebbe that. Maybe you have more money and they have more time or something similar. Talk about that stuff up front. You can have differences in expectations. The assumptions I talked about earlier, different culture, different direction you are going. And service providers are not people. They serve. Sometimes they are also not directly reflecting the needs and assets of their companies. So, what are some solutions for both? Prioritize spending time on partnering and be proactive. Right? Partnerships attack a lot of work. If something is worrying you or you see something needs communicated about take initiative there. I'm seeing some of you are sharing some of the things that worked for you as solutions. So keep doing that. Great. Communicate, clearly, often, early. I will keep saying it, communicate. Know your goals and values and stick to those. Those are your core. Do not let yourself get dragged away from those things to accommodate a partner. Those are essential. But try to be flexible about everything else. The sword you want to die on is not some detail, right? Really be clear about the purpose of what you are doing, commit to that, and then try to let go as much as possible as everything else to make it work with your partner, even if it is outside of your goals, and know when to stop. I learned positive and negative lessons from each one. If you are making partnerships you are going to have failures. That's okay. In fact, it is incredibly important to stop or pull out when you realize there isn't a way that you can both benefit and stick to your goals. So just be aware of that in advance. Be okay with stepping out of partnership as long as you fell forward oar learned something from a partnership that didn't pan out that is fine. That is absolutely fine. It will happen and if it doesn't you should be out there trying to make more partnerships. In conclusion, they are worth it. Partnerships are your library's mission in action. They lead to innovation. When you are working together with people, as you saw in the Ferry Tales example, stuff comes up that you would have never thought yourself. You extend your resources and the partners resources and to meet those essential community needs. We can't do it alone. You amplify what is already great in your community by empowering the people that are doing this. Instead of saying, we think you should do this and we will offer it. We will say, tell us what you are doing and we will help you make it what you want it to be. We will give you resources to make it happen. That is important for margin aalized voices and we are primarily white female, middle class profession. That means we are seeing one perspective and there are many other perspectives out there and one of the ways to fight for equity is listening to the voices who are already doing amazing things. They don't need us to swoop in and fix it for them. They need us to support them and help them access the resources they should have. It knocks people's socks off. When you tell them what the library is doing, how you are stretching resources, partnering and helping the community achieve goals, people are amazingly impressed and they love you. So I know that I'm slightly over time but I'm happy to stick around and take questions as long as WebJunction folks will let me. >> Great. We can go a little over here. I know that some folks need to leave. So we will keep the recording going and we will revisit that. A few things that came through when you were talking about some of the challenges, one was related to MOUs or letter of agreements. Do you usually have something like that? Your partner sign or does it depend on the situation? >> That's a great question. So I find this is -- I do. If this is money changing hands then we have a big formal contract, and we need a W-9, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a formal contract for that. So things that are a partnership that we want to formalize and talk through who's going to do what but doesn't need to be so really formal, we have a one-page basic MOU and sometimes for things less formal a bunch of E-Mails. When I say I am a big fan of putting things in writing but the actual format you use is up to you. If you think a written MOU will be helpful either because your organization wants it or you are comfortable with that format, that's great and there are a ton tp of examples out there in the universe and they don't have to be from libraries. MOUs live all over the world. >> Good point. >> Thank you. >> MOU is a memorandum of understanding. >> Definitely some scenarios where folks were with partners that had good talk but they didn't follow through. I wonder if you can talk about do you have a contingency plan that you at the library have or do you talk about the contingency plan if it doesn't work out how you wrap it up? >> Absolutely. That is a great question. So, yes. This is why I really emphasize hashing out the nuts and bolts of who is going to do what, and talking about the concrete details in the beginning. Because it is quickly easy to see if things are not going to work. You can bring things to a close early when there's not a lot of consequences or fix it. When there are not a lot of consequences for stop ting, whereas if you planned a big event it is hard to call things off thee days before. In terms of how you do that, for me it is about putting the relationship first. So how you preserve the relationship. Just because this particular thing that you are doing together right now didn't work out, you still started this partnership for a reason. You're still organizations that share an audience, values and goals and you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water there. You want to say, hey, this isn't working for either of us. It seems like it is too big of a strain on our resources. Let's put it on hold for now. There's no point in blame. Keep the focus on the next tile. What will we do differently so it works out better the next time. It is much more positive and not finger pointy. >> Excellent way to state it for sure. I can't help but say, too, that it is so striking to me that your examples really demonstrate that your -- where you started wasn't necessarily where you ended up, but you are really meeting the needs of the community. At the beginning some of the folks that emphasized what your partnership is meeting community needs, understanding the community. That really has come out of the work that you have done through those partnerships. And then that being the table, happens naturally. Now you have all of these relationships and some of the things when you talked about collective impact and this was definitely an interest. It piques their interest in understanding what collective impact is. I don't have if you have favorite resources for that but then it takes on this new life of what community engagement means and how the library serves that role in the community of understanding community needs and working with partners that can help meet those needs. So outstanding work, definitely. Thank you so much for bringing it to a webinar. There are people that are curious about other work that you do in your new role. So you may have to connect with her via E-Mail. I know you had your E-Mail on one of the first slides. >> It's on the first slide, yeah. >> Okay. I can grab the ball. . There you go. Perfect. A lot of other resources we have seen through chat. I will add all of those to the event page and thank you so much for being here again. We will follow up with you later today once the recording is posted. And I will send you all a certificate within the week. And we also will send you to a short survey as you leave. I know many of you need to run off. I will send that link in the followup E-Mail but the survey provides both Audrey with great feedback and helps us in our ongoing programming. So thank you, all. Thank you to our captioner today, as well. Everyone have an excellent day. >> Thank you, everybody. >> Thank you, Audrey. >> Bye-bye.