And introduce our presenters from Halifax Public Libraries. We have with us Amander Fullerton, who is the manager of the eastern shore and -- oh, Amanda, you're going to have to say this. >> Musquodoboit Valley. >> Musquodoboit Valley Library service, also Heather MacKenzie, and Ken Williment, who is the branch manager at the Sackville Public Library and acting manager at the Tantallon and Hubbards Libraries. And we're so glad to have Ken back. He actually presented a webinar with us on this work a while ago, and it's really exciting to have you all here to talk about what's happened since then. Welcome to all of you. >> Thank you for having us here. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We really look forward to going through this presentation. We have a fair bit of material, so I guess we'll get started. So first thing I want to talk about is the context which asset mapping was first used within the Canadian library context. In -- from 2004-2008, there was a national project funded by the federal government and four major urban Canadian library settings, and Halifax, Toronto, reJill Steina and Vancouver Public Libraries, there's a project known as the working together project, which looked at developing library services for those who don't traditionally use traditional use libraries. So the -- all four different libraries, we're looking at underserved community members, and each location focused on different low-income neighborhoods. During that project, we began to use community development approaches and started to adapt some of the philosophy and techniques that are used by community developers to work in communities, but specifically from a library contact. This emphasized learning from the community and developing and adapting library programs and services to meet the community's stated needs. We'll delve further on in a couple slides about some of the different techniques and the philosophy, but this community engagement chart, it's actually a continuum, it's found in the community tool kit, one of the major outcomes from the four-year project. In this continuum, it talks about the continuum on the left side of course is around giving information, and this is kind of a traditional approach to promoting library materials open to the community, and as you shift more towards right, it becomes more of an engagement partner and collaborative process in which strong relationships with individual community members are developed over time, and based on those relationships, library staff began hearing about the needs of existing community and tried to place that within the library context. So the working together project really taught us about the importance of partner and collaborating when working with socially excluded communities, and specifically reaching out directly to community members. There's a lot of value in using a number of different approaches at different times within different contexts and with different communities. >> One of the things that shifts when you move to this sort of approach is instead of information going out from the library, so that would be the library promoting services that already exist, typical marketing and promotion, and we're designing and generating programs that we think are a good idea, instead of that approach, we sort of shifted to asking questions of the community to see what it is that they need, what it is they already have, and where do they see the library fitting in in their community. What that does is makes the community members, those individuals, they're the experts of their own needs. So we're not diagnosing what it is that the individual needs, they're letting us know what those things are. One thing I did want to mention from the previous slide, over on the left where we have the giving and getting information, sometimes it's not really a clear line between those two things. Sometimes we're in a position where we're -- we are giving information, we're putting information out, so one example of that might be if we've got an outreach booth set up at a community event. So we are kind of communicating out, these are some of the services we have, this is what we offer, but we also, that's an opportunity for us to hear from the community, so sometimes organically that can lead to a chance for community members to give us feedback about things that they've noticed or barriers they might be facing. So basically what needs to happen is that shift from speaking and taking a pause and listening and really hearing what it is that the community is saying, and maybe what it is that they're asking for. >> During the four-year project, we used a number of different community engagement techniques, or community entry techniques to start building relationships and having conversations with both service providers and individuals and community. So on the left-hand side of this slide you'll see that there's a technique known as third-party facilitation. So for the context of asset mapping, this is where it would fit in a community entry technique. This is where we would go out and meet with individuals, service providers who would then provide us with access to immigrant community members. However, thinking -- I'm thinking in the American context, once you get into large urban areas, especially where you have ethnic enclaves, door-to-door neighborhood walk-abouts, maybe a goods community entry techniques, there's word of mouth which tends to happen through community members, there's community events and meetings, and a word of caution, one of the ways in which we use -- work in community events and meetings is we don't go there to promote activities, instead we're at the events and we're listening and having conversations and building relationships with community members. And then of course there's the traditional outreach activities that Amanda just talked about. Terminology I like to use once in a while is the -- is to be the -- I look at community outreach activities as the field of dream approach, because you build a particular program or service, you go into the community and you're hoping they're going to come. >> So asset mapping specifically, there are lots of benefits to using this specific tool. And you'll hear us say again and again throughout this presentation that really one of the main benefits is that it creates and builds relationships with community organizations and their clients. So this can help to determine program and service needs of community members. One of the other real letter noticeable benefits of doing asset mapping, especially if you've got library employees who are new to a community or you're trying to get to know a community that you're not familiar with, so in this case maybe you've got a new immigrant community in your area, it can really help to be an introduction between the library and that specific community. So if you're not sure what the needs are, this is a really good place to start. And there are lots of benefits, one of them you'll see on the fourth points on the slide there, it helps to avoid duplication of service. Maybe your library has a great idea for a preschool program, but once you are out there and you're meeting with community members and other service providers, you realize, they've already got a strong program, maybe there's another area where we can better focus our resources instead of duplicating something that the community already has. So it really helps to build awareness of what's already available. So my specific experience using asset mapping is actually working in a rural community where Halifax Public Libraries doesn't have a library branch. We previously had a mobile library that serves that area, and when that service ended, there was a bit of an opportunity to sort of change the way we provide service in that area. And from working in that community, asset mapping was really a great place to start. It was a really ideal way for me to introduce myself and to get to know what services were already being provided and really how the library could fit in and partner and support the work that was already happening. So really the partnership aspect of asset mapping is really -- can't really be understated. And the last point on the slide here, it can also help to identify barriers to library use. So you might have some ideas about why people are or aren't using the library, and that can be -- it can really confirm what it is you might be thinking. So it gives the community members an opportunity to say, yeah, this isn't working for us, these hours aren't working, or it's really -- the fines are overwhelming. So it gives them an opportunity to let you know and -- what is working and what isn't. And I just also wanted to give a quick shout out to where some of this asset mapping work came from. So this was first developed by Jon McKnight out of the institute for policy research at northwestern University. And really, the whole -- the weight behind this is easy for us to working at the library to speculate on what the needs are, and make assumptions about the community. But again, this sort of gives the -- it empowers the community to be the experts and let us know what it is they need and want from us. The primary purpose is to provide the library system with community-based information and feedback and then to take and use that information to develop services and really figure out what priorities you have as our organization. So as I mentioned, the work I have, the experience I have in this area is in the Musquodoboit Valley, a rural area. And so the information that I gathered during that process, doing the asset mapping informed how we designed our rural service for that area. So some of the things that came out of that project for us was that we opened a community office in the area. Like I said, we we don't have a branch there, so we learned we did want that connection to library staff and a place where they could see us. We weren't able to support a full branch but we were able to open an office, and we provide pop-up libraries throughout the community, we do open-site programs, and we increased and changed the way we promote our borrow by mail service, based on feedback we got from the community. We knew people were using the borrow by mail service, but there was a misconception that it was just a service for home bound people or for seniors. So through having those conversations during the asset mapping process, we realized we needed to sort of change some of the information that we had going out about who the service was for, and that is something that we might not have been able to identify without that -- those conversations that we had. So it really does help to avoid those assumptions. What does this all look like? It's not just a list of -- it starts as a list of like names and contact information and addresses, but it goes much beyond that. It's not just a directory. It really is the start of those really important relationships that hopefully will turn into partnerships and partners that you can collaborate with. So it will be the foundation that will help you to grow your library service and really expand how it is that you're working with that given community. >> I'm going to talk briefly about some hints that we learned through a number of asset mapping processes that we went through here in Halifax. Not only do we asset map within our immigrant community, but we also asset map the African Nova Scotia community and our first nations community. We found it was really important when we went in and started to have a conversation with people in the community that we had two people from the library system going out and meeting with people to take -- the importance is because as you're having that conversation you don't want to be taking notes, so you have the other person there with you to take notes. You'll find when you start to doing asset mapping there's a set list of questions which we tend to use here in Halifax. On the next slide I'll show you some of those. We found as we started doing more and more of them, we became more comfortable and instead of going through a number of questions, it became a conversation in which information was gathered. Another thing that you will have to keep in mind is it depends on the size of the organization. You might need to do a number of different asset maps with individuals within the organization. Depends on the number of services that they provide. And the size of the organization, of course, like I mentioned. The other thing we also had to push library staff to do was to ensure that they met with individuals face to face out in the community. It's really easy to feel that it's okay just to pick up a telephone and to make a phone call and have those conversations, but ultimately when you meet somebody in a face-to-face basis, you'll find that first of all the relationship starts to be built, you start to see what it's like to enter the space, and you see their programs in action. You can tell how they interact with their clients. If you walk into one community gathering spot or location, and you find it's a long hallway with a couple of seats, and in order for people to access service, they have to go behind a locked door, it's a lot different than going into a another organization where you walk in and there might be a community gathering space right there. Another important thing to keep in mind is try not to make it about existing library services in the library. It's easy to default to our own promotions about the stuff in which we're doing. This asset mapping is not a solve job, instead it's an opportunity to hear about community members' perceptions of library services. And -- I'll go to the next slide. This is an example that Amanda is going to talk about with our template that we use here in Halifax. >> This is the template we use at Halifax Public Libraries, and this is something that I believe Jennifer has made available for you to download. Feel free to adapt this in a way that works for your library or organization. So depending on how big you've got your screen, this may be easier or difficult to see. The top of that template really is just the basics, name, contact number, address, telephone number, email, website, the basics. And then below that are sort of more in-depth questions. And really, you should view these as jumping-off points. If you find you ask the first two questions and then the conversation just goes off in a completely different direction, that's okay. Just go with it. This really is something so -- sometimes it can help to have something in hand just to get the conversation started. And one of the things I'm sure you'll find is that when you're sitting down and you're having that conversation, the person who you're meeting with, they're going to really enjoy talking about their organization. And they're also going to want to connect you with other people in the community who they think would be beneficial for you to meet with. So they might mention somebody at a local church, or somebody at a local school, and say, you really need to connect with so-and-so. They really know a lot about this one particular thing. So the types of organizations and service providers that you might want to first put on that list of people who you think you should probably connect with are things like schools, family resource centers, literacy networks, churches, employment centers when dealing with an immigrant population, if there immigrant service providers, those are agencies you'd want to connect with. And depending on the group you're looking to do the asset mapping with, there might be elders that you also need to connect with. >> This allows library staff to start to have interactions with individuals in the community and hopefully have those interactions over time. That's what we do as beginning to develop relationships. In Halifax, when we did this with immigrant service providers, we had some relationships with them, but none of them were very formalized. We did know that a lot of the service providers here in our context also belong to large service organizations, and we knew that if we started to build some relationships with immigrant service providers, that they were the gate keepers to the individuals that were receiving service. So in this context of course it would be immigrants. So when we went in and had those initial conversations, the service providers provide us with their own perceptions of the strengths and needs of immigrant community members. Through having those conversations and building relationships with the service providers, they began to provide us access to individual immigrants. And when we had access to them, to the individual immigrants, that allowed us to also have conversations and see if the immigrants' perceptions aligned with the service providers' perceptions. We wanted to really look for synergies between our organizations, and -- >> so just to sort of zoom back out a little bit, as that mapping is one tool that can -- you can use when you're planning service for your library, so on this particular slide you'll see the top sort of band, those are the traditional ways we plan services for libraries. So we use things like our statistics, and demographic data about our community, and all that information is really valuable, but if you jump down to the bottom band there where you're using community-led approaches, you'll see there's a lot more room and opportunity for community input and things like asset mapping. So when you're doing a community assessment over on the left there, a community-led approach for something like that would be developing relationships with community members. And instead of -- in the next sort of column over, instead of staff identifying what the needs are of the community, you're allowing for discussions with community members to identify what those needs are. And all the way over, even to evaluation, you're giving the community the opportunity to help evaluate your services. >> Here in Halifax there's a couple of key organizations that we worked a lot with. This is just a slide that shows some of those key organizations, just to acknowledge their ability to -- their willingness to meet with us. One thing that's really important to mention is when we did approach service providers, they were really excited to have the library interested in the library being involved in immigrants' lives, and all of them of course said yes to meeting with us. So of course you'll want to know some of the stuff that we heard. Now, the thing with the asset mapping, like Amanda and I focused in on the asset mapping process, because it's important to understand that what we hear is really context-specific. So what we heard from immigrants in Halifax is going to be different from immigrants in your community. So some of the stuff that we began to hear was of course the barriers in which they're experiencing. Accessing library services. And also the difficulty they were having trying to seek employment and volunteering within the library context. We also heard about the importance of integration, which is a two-way process between immigrants and people in the community learning from one another. We also heard about existing programs and services that were being provided in both by the library and also by service providers and the importance of not duplicating those services. We also heard about some of their needs not being met by the library. So although asset mapping is really looking at strengths, you also hear a lot about gaps and weaknesses that exist. We also heard about there not being any ESL or English language learning for elementary-age children. At this point I'm going to turn it over to Heather MacKenzie to talk about the information we gathered and how it informed in which the way Halifax Public Libraries has provided service to immigrants moving forward. >> Hi, everybody. I'm going to take you through a little bit of the development of newcomer services at Halifax Public Libraries, and what we had going on before the asset mapping project and what that enabled us to do, develop directly out of that project, and then sort of where we are today and a little bit about where we hope to get to in the future. I'm just learning how to turn the slide. Okay. So this is to give you a bit of context on our community. I'm going to give a very brief look at sort of immigration trends in our community. So Halifax where we are now is home to about 83% of all immigrants to Nova Scotia. And Nova Scotia just gets a little more than 1.5% of all immigrants to Canada. And immigrants in Nova Scotia represent about 6.1% of the total population, about 2500 people per year coming into the different immigration streams. We have a wide variety of host countries, but the top three in recent years have been the Philippines, united kingdom, and China. I was having trouble advancing the slide. We had a big surge in 2016 as everyone knows, in that year there was a huge influx of Syrian refugees around the world. And we had about 1800 that came to Halifax. And normally we'd get 200-300 per year, so that was a huge surge, a huge community response that the library was part of. In that welcoming and settlement, and toward the end of the presentation I'll tell you a little bit more of how we worked with our community partners to respond to that demand. Just a bit of where we started with immigrant services at Halifax Public Libraries. Before the asset mapping really got started, mainly before that, our main service to newcomers was our English language learning program, which was a one-on-one tutoring program run by volunteers. It began in 1998, so it was fairly well established program. It began at five branches there, they're now running at seven, for 2017 and 2018, we had over 650 learners enrolled in our program. And it's funded through the Nova Scotia office of immigration. And it's restricted to newcomers who are permanent residents, so there was some eligible -- there is an eligibility requirement there. And we've since developed other programs that don't have that restriction, which I'll talk about in a few minutes. It's a very, very diverse program. We have over 26 source countries, and as I mentioned, we have -- it's delivered by a very large and dedicated group of volunteer tutors. Aside from that, of those early years we basically had the ELL program, and books in about 24 languages, and that was pretty much about it. Until the asset mapping got started and until the municipalities started to develop, identify services to newcomers is a priority, that's pretty much what we had going. But when it started to become a municipal priority, we decided we needed to develop immigrant services plans in the library system. The first plan I was involved in developing, it covered 2010-2013. Part of that was the asset mapping activities that Ken's already gone over, so there was a phase of asset mapping, and then the service development and delivery coming out of the asset mapping, which is sort of where I came in. Originally I wasn't in my current position, so I wasn't involved in the early stages. But I came in when the asset mapping had been completed, and the library was ready to take a next staff into service development. And one piece that had been done as a result of the asset mapping was a funding application had been successful through immigration Canada through a community engagement project, with newcomers of the Keshen Goodman Public Library. So I'm going to briefly walk you through what that project entails. It's our first real major initiative in developing newcomer services. So it was called immigrant integration to engagement with Public Libraries, so we called it opening doors. It operated from November 2012 to march 2013. We hired some staff positions, it was critical for that project that the staff people we hired came from immigrant communities. We hired two immigrant services coordinators for the project, and also one program facilitator. And there were three women from -- each from a different community, so we had their perspective that were really valuable for us in managing the project, and also they had the strong community connections who they were able to provide bridges for the library for us to meet other members of the community as well. And it was funding for other pieces, not just the salaries, but we were able to do some programming resources, which I'll go into, and some staff training. And it was based at our Keshen Goodman Public Library, as I mentioned, why Keshen Goodman? Because it was the most -- it is the most diverse community served by Halifax Public Libraries, it has the highest concentration of immigrants and newcomers in our region. For 10 years between 1996-2006, the immigrant population in the area increased by almost 50%, and it has over 24% of the entire immigrant population of HRM, so it's still very concentrated, still very high. For example, they have a high school that's almost next door to the library, and there's 50 languages, over 50 languages spoken at that high school. So that was the obvious place for us to really start doing service development and the community engagement in a meaningful way with such a large community. So our key project outcomes and activities for that project were library collection and development. So we added to our multilingual collection and we got community input into that collection, not just in terms of what to add, but how to display and promote that collection. I'll remember one funny thing, I was manager at the branch at the time as well, and we had a multilingual collection, and we had the Arabic book, a shelf label, and it said Arabic in English, and one of my community members said, why don't you actually put it in Arabic language? Duh, right? So just having that perspective for little things made a big difference. We wanted to provide access to community information, for developing information resources, so we developed, for example, informational cards that gave basic information about the library, of interest to newcomers in six different languages, we wanted to be able to approve people's -- improve people's ability to navigate library service and multilingual information was part of that. We developed programming with their input, and we really wanted to help find ways we could play a role in reporting settlement integration as part of the overall community effort. We knew we couldn't reach everybody. We had a limited number of months for the project, so we did it in four or five target communities, that were larged and established communities. So we basically targeted the Persian community, Arabic speaking, Chinese, and butte knees, they were four of the significant communities in that area, and we focused on them because we had to create something that was doable. So we did focus on those four communities. We wanted to form relationships for the library staff and community members, and we wanted to increase our staff capacity to serve immigrant community members better through training. So some of the ways we did this, we as I said, it was very important for us to be 100% community-led project. One of the first things we did was form a community advisory group. The three staff members that we hired were invaluable in identifying other people from the immigrant community that should be on that committee, so they really knew because they were immigrants themselves, part of that community, they knew who else should be around the table. So they identified key community members that were more than willing to come and work with us, and also service providers as well. And over those months they gave us great feedback, input, and helped us with some of the activities as well. So we really couldn't have done it and the had as much success and connected as well with community without those advisory groups. While the group is no longer meeting regularly, it really met for the duration of the project, we still have maintained those relationships and contacts. Some of the key results, actual things that we actually accomplished through the project and some of the early programs, we had a women's knitting group, the community let us know that a lot of women were isolated at home and didn't have a lot of opportunities to get out in the community to connect with other women. Or even get out at all. We cosponsored this knitting group program with the immigrant settlement association of Nova Scotia who worked directly with a large percentage of all newcomers to help go for settlement support until ways. We cosponsored it with them, and they helped provide transportation to actually get the people to the library. We provided some bus tickets as well. But it brought Canadian and immigrant women together in a common interest of knitting, and it's still going strong. And they have moved beyond just knitting together, they are helping others too. So they do a lot of charity knitting, so they provide baby blankets for the children's hospital, they knit dish clothes for the newcomer families. So they're reaching out beyond that program to help others as well through the knitting. So it's really great. And they're getting 15 to 20 people per week. So they're still meeting. That was one of our early successes that is still going on. We have -- we invited service providers to bring groups of newcomers to the library for community visits. We developed a very simple presentation that was very visual with hardly any English to go along with that. What was interesting, a lot of newcomers came for sure, but also long-time immigrant residents, some of whom had lived in the community for over 20 years who had never been to the library, which was amazing to us, but a lot of these folks came from countries where public libraries were different, they're caption window demic and formal, so they had no conception about what a public library could be here, so they discovered all kinds of things. Those are very productive and positive visits for sure, and a lot of the staff had a knack of connecting with these folks. Another need that was identified to us was multilingual computer classes. We targeted women and seniors, some women have been waiting we were told for over two years to get a chance to learn about computers. So we identified again through our contacts community volunteers. Some of those communities that would do the instruction, so we started with Persian, Arabic and Napalese volunteers who would teach in their language. They were hugely successful. And really met that need. I remember the women wrote necessity a very heartfelt letter begging me to add an extra session, so that Genoas a need directly identified from the community that we were able to meet. The art of belonging was an art show by immigrant women through the grant money we had, the library was also able to purchase freestanding art display units, and we invited again our community -- our staff were able to identify immigrant women artists in the community, many of whom had never had a chance to show their work in public before. We ended up with 25 artists and over 100 pieces rotated through the almost month that we had the show. And some of them even sold pieces as a result of that, and the public loved it. And we continue that on and off today at not just that branch but other locations as well that have the art display. And we did a big immigrants cultural week, so every day of a week we had a different culture represented through programming, food displays, presentations, film, we did a whole week and the final day we brought everyone together. It was a huge effort, and I wouldn't recommend doing five days a row in again, I would recommend spreading it out. But we sort of went for it, and everybody came together, the staff are really heroic in pulling this off, because the library was basically taken over by this every day. There was dancing and music, the community responded, they loved the opportunity to showcase their culture. The general public loved it. We had a day for the Arabic speaking community, Chinese community had a day, and we had one general day. So it was amazing, and our mayor came one day, and we really brought the world into the library. And people really had a chance to experience many, many aspects of the different cultures. It was a huge, huge success. It wasn't all just food and dancing. We did some other things as well. We had multilingual rack cards, staff training and we're still doing staff training on cultural competencies, we do sessions as we can throughout the year for staff, cultural competency and cultural awareness. We're still developing our collections. We have welcome to the library videos on our website in different languages. We just launched a new website a couple weeks ago, and we have a new website that has a much better image and content to support newcomers. We were lucky after the project that we were able to create two permanent staff positions, because we really demonstrated we could meet the need in we had the resources. So we have two permanent staff positions dedicated to immigrant services. One is still based at Keshen Goodman because of the high concentration there, and a regional position that works with me. Still developing all kinds of great partnerships to do different things, and we've been able to expand our promotions. So we're really moving ahead, we've been able to move ahead and maintain a lot of our connections that way. We did a community quilt project with women a couple yeerg ago that brought local quilters into met with imgrant women to create a quilt. What we've learned, we have to built funding capacity. We've been very fortunate our senior management has seen the value of this work, and given us those resources whether it's through creating permanent positions, supporting other activities as well, so we are very fortunate there. You never want a project, when it ends everything dries up and nothing happens. That hasn't happened here. We've been able to -- some cultures they don't have the history of volunteering that we do in North America, so we've -- we have worked with that and we actually do have lots of newcomers volunteering in our English language program. Which is great. Food is huge, and all programs, food brings people together and it's a really culturally important thing for people to share food. Everything we do, we get all this amazing food brought to almost everything. We've developed some programs such as our conversation groups that don't have any eligibility restrictions, I mentioned our government funded ELL programrestrict it to permanent residence, so as in answer to that we were getting demand from people that couldn't participate in those programs, like international students, people on work Visas. So we developed our own conversation groups with volunteers who -- it's totally library funded so we can take anyone who has a need, so that's brought more people in for English support there. Are negative attitudes, as we all know, but with positive messaging and more staff training we're doing our bit to combat that. And it really is all worth it when you hear the feedback and see the impact these programs can have on people's lives. We did respond to the community when the Syrian refugees came. We worked with our partners to make sure we were well informed about when people were coming, where they were going to be. When they came they were housed in a hotel close to the Keshen Goodman Library. We worked with the settlement agencies to have people brought in for tours and do that early welcoming piece with them there. We expand our English language programs in communities where a lot of refugees were settled to help -- they were in need of English, so we expanded programs where we could as close to where they were as possible. A lot of them had lo level or no English at all, so we adapted our programs, gave our tutors extra training in working with beginners, can did everything we could to make those programs accessible to them. And we increased our Arabic collection, did things like that. So we did respond to those needs. You. >>> See our current initiatives, things are continuing, citizenship preparation classes, we're also doing an Arabic English story time at Keshen Goodman. You can see the different things we're doing there. Continuing it's a new initiative as well. Again, we're doing cultural competency training and we've been able to hire some staff who speak different languages, which has been great. And that's our new website, which is -- it bringing all our information together in a more accessible way. I'm not a tech person, so -- there we go. What's next? I hope we can bring in more staff, we're doing a food safety course to give people certificates they can actually use to be more ployable, if they're looking for employment in the food services industry, so we'll be doing that. Continue to provide -- develop opportunities to make our services as inclusive as we can and help people integrate better into the community so we can see some of the things we're going to be working on in the future. And that's all I have to say, so I'll turn it back to the group to see if there's any questions. >> Fantastic. That's so great. Thank you so much, all three of you. It's really exciting to see both the story of where you came from and then all this great work that you've been able to do as a result of your asset mapping. So definitely well worth the time and effort to connect with your communities. There were a handful of questions, and I encourage people to pose any other ones to chat at this point. There was a question when you talked about the library office that was in that rural community. Is the library office within the community in a space that you rent, or do you have a community partner that provides that space for free? >> That's a great question. For the initial phase of the project I was just borrowing community space, but after the end of the project when we really developed our service plan, it was decided and recognized that we really needed a permanent location. So we do rent space. We're really lucky we were able to find a space that sort of colocated with some of our partners. So we're actually on the second floor of a building where in the same space there's also a literacy network, an employment agency and a family resource center. So our office is quite small, it really is just an office, but we do rent space there. And then when we're doing -- it's large enough we can do small programs, things like one-on-one I.T. sessions, or even we do small kids' programs during march break. But if ever there's a time where we need a larger space, if we're bringing in a performer or doing an author meeting we rely on our partner organizations for those larger venues when we're doing bigger programs. >> And how much of that -- how much of the time is it staffed by library staff? >> Right now it's just myself and our community lie yair bran who staff the community office, and both of us also work at two branch libraries that are in a similar area. So it's really just staffed one day a week. So we have open office hours on Mondays and then if a community member really wanted a one-on-one session, learning how to use an E-reader, we could arrange to be available at other times as well, but right now it's really just the one day a week where we're scheduled to be there. >> Excellent. It was interesting, as you were speaking earlier, especially Ken when you were talking about the conversation -- the relationships, building the relationships with service providers from the work we did with the rural -- the Spanish language outreach project, we also found that the assumptions that we gathered from the community leaders definitely sometimes varied greatly from the newcomers. So I think part of your asset mapping work really emphasizes that it's not necessarily just about finding those gate keepers, but really getting to all the different sort of layers that are within the community, whether they're newcomers or they've been there for a while. So I just wanted to emphasize that. And I'm curious, how -- as a part of the community, do you feel like the intentioniality that you've put within the asset mapping work has changed how other service providers think of the library? >> Oh, yeah. I think just even having those initial conversations and coming in there and -- it's interesting, I think service providers are so used to us coming in and promoting what we do, that when you come in and show an interest in what they're doing and just bring up those questions around potential partnerships, and seeing where the synergies may exist between the two organizations, I think that in and of itself goes a long ways. >> I agree. We used to complain about not being invited to the table, and now I think it would be unheard of for most of the organizations to not invite us around initiatives around newcomers. Sometimes it gets hectic, but we're really seen as a key player now, and we're certainly invited to participate in pretty much everything that's going on in the city around newcomers. So it really has changed the attitudes, and given USA higher profile. >> That's so fantastic. Excellent. There are a few questions about your community visits, sort of tour. You mentioned that the -- that you intentionally used limited English. Are there also bilingual members of those communities, or now maybe some of your staff that are able to have -- to translate? >> There are now. In the beginning we didn't have the staff in place. Keshen Goodman in particular, in the beginning they didn't have staff. We had our project staff that spoke Chinese and Farsi and Arabic, once the project was over we had the one lady remaining that spoke Chinese, but in the last couple years they've added another position, one of the requirements was for the person to speak Arabic, and they've added the second Arabic speaking person now, one of our smaller branches just hired someone who spoke Chinese. So in the last little while it's been easier to identify a position like that to say we need this in our community and to be able to hire foes thoax. So it's baby steps, but we are gradually seeing more diverse staff and branch managers being -- able to identify that when they have a vacancy to add that competency into the position. So I'm very confident that will only grow. >> That's great. Do you all provide a presentation as a part of that tour, or give them handouts, or what is the structure of that tour? >> A lot of groups want to tour our new central library here in Halifax, where we're sitting today. It's a big, big library, it's got five floors, I've been involved in tours myself to help with some of the groups. Pretty much in a big facility it's -- you really are just walking them through and pointing out the highlights. We do a lot of tours in this building for international students who may have very limited English when they come on the tour. So that visually showing them things is more effective. If there's a staff member that speaks the primary language, like central does have many staff that speak probably one of the more diverse staff, so there's a staff member that's available to help with that tour, we'll did if they can take part. We'll give them the will cards in their language. So often time the time is limited, so we find the actual walking and talking is better than just sitting them down in front of a power point. So I would say we generally for tours we would not do a formal power point, we would just walk them around and maybe gather them in the room at the beginning or the end if there are any specific questions. But we find just showing them the visual works best, often they have limited language when they come on the tour, and if there are staff available that can assist, depending on the group they come with, they may have an interpreter with them. >> Excellent. That's great. There's a question about, were there any communities or types of communities that you attempted to make connections with that didn't work out? >> Not -- I have one example that's not -- that didn't work out, but we thought there was -- it didn't seem to pan out. For example, we got a grant from the local community health board to do -- we wanted to do an Arabic-English for the family literacy story time program, because we knew there were a -- the communities there of all the Syrian refugees had been settled close to the branch, they had very low English, low literacy, some of them are coming to our ELL program, but that was just for adults. We felt those families, there wasn't a need there to bring them into the library to expose them to some of the time of programming be we would do for families. So we got the grant, we hired someone who was there to speak from the community to do the program. And despite all the promotion that we did, we did promotion in Arabic, she went to the buildings where these people live, we we did in-person promotion to community members, we could not get anyone to attend that -- they would not come to that program. And we tried to see if we could offer it off site, we thought maybe the library was a barrier, we couldn't find an off-site program. And we had too many members say they would encourage their families to come, we had personal contacts, and it just did not pan out. So actually we moved it to the Keshen Goodman library where it was successful, so there was a program that we thought there would be a need for, we had community members say they would come, we tried to do promotion in that language, we promoted through the school, and it just for some reason it just did not resonate, and they did not respond to that. So that was one learning experience for us that we were serving that community in other ways, the adults were coming to the English support, but for whatever reason, and we tried -- we did a whole lot of outreach to promote that program, we just could not get enough at that particular branch for that program. Maybe we'll try again, maybe we made an assumption. But that was one sort of I guess you want to call it -- it was a failure, but we learned from it and we redirected the program. That was one experience we had last year that we tried and tried and tried, and we could not get uptake at that location. So we learned from that, if we try it again we may have to have different conversations, but that was one instance we assumed there was a need based on what we knew about the community, that we just couldn't get the uptake. >> That brings up a question to, like, in terms of how frequently -- I would assume it would change depending on the kinds of services you're exploring, or the communities that are changing, but do you recommend working through asset mapping, you know, once every year, or once every couple years? Have you gotten to a point where you realized that it's time to do it again? >> I think part of the thing is when we initially did it, it was for the -- to start to develop those relationships. It was actually done -- comparatively large system, compared to some systems that are small, we do have 14 branches, so myself and another regional manager were the ones that did the initial asset mapping process. But that information we knew that we wanted to hand that information over to the brancheses, because that's where people walk in the doors and experience library services. So what we did is we transitioned that over to branch managers who then looked at that information and were able to -- and we transitioned to those relationships from a regional perspective or to the branches where we thought they were the most pertinent or the relationships could be built the best. Now, to revisit it, I'm not quite sure. It's a lot of documentation that happens initially, because what we would do is, let's say we met with six different organizations and we asked the same questions around potential partnerships. Maybe you meet with 10 or 15 different organizations, you'd sit down and look at that question, and the responses you get from the different organizations, and see what the best fit is. I think once you develop those strong relationships and you're at the table with a number of organizations, especially for a number of years, for the amount of time it takes, I'm not sure at this point we would asset map again. It's a good community entry technique. >> Ken is right, we've built up some really strong relationships, there are various things I might want to know something, I have individuals now I could pick up the phone and call. And since this all happened, there's been a Halifax immigration partnership developed that's that brings together all sorts of players. So I think -- I think we have very well established contacts now, personal contax this we could call if a significantly new and different community arrives that we have had a no contact with before, we might. >> And in that context you might find out who the elders are, whoever the people of influence are in the community, so you might not go through a service provider, but you might go through some other gate keeper to have those initial conversations. >> I think it would look different if we did anything similar. >> Right. That's good. That makes total sense. A couple -- let's squeeze in a couple more questions here. There's a question about the translation services, whether or not you have a budget for that, or if you have volunteers that do your translation for you. >> That's a really good question. I have, as a regional manager I have a budget that sometimes I can squeak a little bit out for some translation. We have staff now that are native speakers, so we're able to tap their time if I need something translated. So we haven't -- it's been sort of hit and miss with translation. We haven't really got an overall policy for translation. The folks at central library asked me a couple weeks, their staff were being challenged by providing some of that basic, once you register for your library card, that basic information you want to give to people, they were having trouble communicating that. So I said well give me a one-page or some of the basic stuff in English that you want translated, so things like what happens when you get your card, four or five different topics, so I've actually initiated that being translated with a couple of my contacts. So I do have contacts that will help me do translations on a volunteer basis. I don't have a I have large budget to pay for it. We did have a budget -- as part of the big project that we had, and we got those RAC cards translated. But what happens, I had them translated but when my staff started to look at them, what it turned out to be, the people that had translated them, the professional translators and my community members thought they had done it in a more academic formal English than people that would do them every day. So it's better when you have native speakers from the community to do it rather than sometimes formal academic translators will do it in a language a little too high level that. Was an interesting thing I learned. But I do have some contacts in the key communities I will use for translation for smaller things when I need it. >> Great. And I wanted to get to this one final question. There are a few others that I encourage people, either to reach out to the folks here with their emails or we can circle back and I'll post some of their responses to the bottom of the event page. But there was a great question about where the term "newcomers" came from. Was that a library discovered term, or where did that come from? >> It comes from the community as a whole, as I mean the community from the service provider group, the group I work with, that it's more an inclusive term. Immigrant is one subsection of newcomers, so an immigrant is someone who makes a choice to move to a country, so really it's referring to one group where newcomers include refugees, include international students, it's much more inclusive and welcoming. So there's been a general community decision not to use immigrant, it's much more narrow. And newcomers is just gradually being seen as a much more welcoming and inclusive term. So we have changed over to using newcomers at the library. >> We learned that because the first plan I helped do in 2010-13 was service to immigrants. And then we switched it to newcomers. >> Yeah. So it's just more -- it's more inclusive to everyone who is coming. >> Fantastic. Yes, I think it does definitely ring more inclusive. Well, we should probably wrap up here so folks can head back to their service desks. Thank you so much to all three of you for all the great work you're doing, and for sharing your expertise with us today. And thank you to all of you who joined us, and to our captioner and we hope to see you at our next event, and I'll be connecting with you all via email once the recording is available. Everyone have a fantastic day. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, bye bye.