Thank you to our captioner.
All right.
We're at the top of the hour.
I'll introduce myself.
My name is Jennifer Peterson.
I'm excited to be here, hosting today's session.
Kendra Morgan, my colleague, is logged in as WJ Support and can assist you with any technical-related questions that you have.
Today's session will be recorded, and I will send you all an email later on today once that recording is posted.
I'll also send you all a certificate automatically for attending today.
Know that you can share this webinar as well as all of the other library-specific courses and webinars available in the WebJunction catalog, either made free or available to all who work and volunteer in libraries.
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It's an excellent way for you to access all of the learning that's going on at WebJunction, new projects and resources.
So I'll post a link into chat.
There is a learner guide for today's webinar.
We've been creating a learner guide as a way for people to extend their learning on the topic.
This is a resource available to you.
You can customize it.
It's a wonderful tool to bring others at your library or in the community to the conversation.
So feel free to access the learner guide as well via the event page.
And I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started here.
I'm very excited to have you all here today for our session with these wonderful presenters.
This is the order in which we'll be moving through today.
First we'll have Noah, Lenstra, who's the director of the Let's Move in Libraries, doing fantastic work with Let's Move in Libraries.
Mike McGinn is the executive director for America Walks.
We're thrilled Noah has connected us with America Walks and all the great work they provide to the library community.
We'll also hear from Jeffrey Davis, who is the branch manager at the San Diego Public Library and also author of "The Collection All Around: Sharing our Cities, Towns, and Natural Places."
And we'll hear from Mary Sizemore, director at the High Point Public Library.
Thank you so much for bringing your great work to this webinar.
I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Noah.
>> Great.
Thanks so much, Jennifer.
Thanks, everyone, for being here.
Since we have four panelists, we're going to move through things pretty quickly, but I wanted to start by saying if you have any questions, please do reach out to me.
I'm thrilled and privileged to have this opportunity to share with you all one of the topics that I'm most passionate about, which is how libraries can and do promote healthy, thriving, and livable communities.
What we'll talk about during the next few minutes is the concept of placemaking.
What we're talking about is how libraries can and do make better places, one library at a time.
Before wrapping up, we'll ask what can you do in your community.
These are just some images of the placemaking in action, having a chalk the walk event this summer in Tennessee and inviting teenagers to come down and paint the sidewalk obstacle course at another library this summer.
So placemaking, according to the Project for Public spaces, inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces.
Even though we don't often use this vocabulary, this is something libraries have been doing for years.
So oftentimes it takes the form of doing pop-up demonstration projects to show people how public spaces could look different than the way it currently looks.
So for instance, at Madison Public Library, every summer for the last few years, they've had something called Anji Play, where they use large three-dimensional objects to create their own play spaces, as you see in this picture.
And what does this have to do with public health, you may be wondering.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, one of the major policy areas is to connect activity friendly routes to every day destinations.
So making it easier for people to walk and bicycle and use a wheelchair and use public transportation to get to schools, libraries, work sites, and others.
If you'd like to learn more, the Safe Routes partnership is kind of a clearing house for resources on how to do this.
They have guides for safe routes to schools, safe routes to parks.
My hope is very soon safe routes to libraries.
And libraries are really the perfect place for this type of activity.
As Debbie Kingsland of the New Jersey Department of Transportation discovered, she said holding an awareness event like this at a public library is a great way to reach the people most affected by new transportation policies.
So we're really the ideal places to stimulate community conversations for all ages about how we can all come together to transform public space.
And WebJunction, I'm thrilled, has been supportive of this in many different forms.
But I want to highlight as part of their initiative, they enabled the small town of Wilton, New Hampshire, to contribute, do their part to make Wilton more family friendly, more walkable, and more connected and attract new businesses.
They did that by installing a story walk, but in gardens, and really transformed their outdoor public space and did it in a participatory fashion, which is what we're talking about.
So what are some things you can do?
Well, in a minute, Mike is going to be talking about walk audits.
One of the easiest ways to get started is to embrace the principles of citizen science and use tools that exist to assess how walkable it is around your library.
St. Louis County Library has already done this program.
You can, too.
We can also highlight walking tours, showcase our history and culture.
Iowa City had a mural walk showcasing area artwork.
We can do ghost tours, walking history tour, and we can post those tours online so people can do that at their own pace to enable social distancing.
So what does any of this have to do with libraries, you may be wondering.
I think the perfect answer to this question comes from America's action figure librarian Nancy Pearl, who says, if I don't walk, it's really not a great day.
She does most of her reading now by listening to audiobooks and walking.
So the fact is, librarians care about walking.
We care about healthy communities.
So whatever we can do is not only good for our communities, it's also good for us and our well-being.
And just an example of another place, let's reimagine our libraries as places made by and for our communities.
Here's an example from Heyward County here in North Carolina.
They worked with friends of the library to beautify the grounds.
So let's turn over control and see what we can do together with our communities.
As you get started, don't think you have to do it by yourself.
In fact, I would say don't do it by yourself.
The first question you should ask is who could I work with in my community to transform public space.
Libraries across the country are finding boy scouts, girl scouts, 4H, and many others are more than happy to lend a hand.
Here are examples of Girl Scouts in New Jersey and New York who worked with libraries to get permanent story walk installations off the ground.
But start small and grow.
Really, when we think about transforming public space, it always starts with pop-up projects to demonstrate what can be possible.
If you've never done a story walk before, the barriers to entry have never been lower.
Curiosity City has worked with the publisher Child's Play to create 15 individual high-resolution PDFs of this children's story that are already surrounded by activity prompts.
So if you have a printer, you can do a story walk.
It's really that simple.
So try it out, see where it takes you, and let us know how it goes.
And you can find -- I know winter is coming.
It's going to get cold.
People are going to be like, what can I do during the winter?
You can do it downtown in any season.
Don't think you have to do a story walk in a park.
You can team up with downtown businesses as they have here in Wisconsin and Delaware to do a story walk in any season in any weather.
And just to wrap up, again, I want to encourage you to think about not only what could you do but also who could you work with to transform your community?
Denver Public Library, they worked with the national nonprofit Walk with a Doc.
When you start thinking about doing this in partnership with collaborators, the sky is the limit, but it all starts with a conversation.
Reach out to partners and let us know what you're able to come up with.
So stay connected.
We're constantly showcasing stories like this.
Here's some additional resources.
And I'm going to go ahead and pass things on to Mike.
Thanks again for your time.
>> Okay.
Hi.
Thank you, Noah.
I just want to say, first of all, just how great it was to be introduced to Noah and the work that he's doing and learning so much about what libraries are doing and what library staff are doing in this space.
I don't think we can emphasize enough, you know, as terrible as recent events have been and the pandemic has been, we've also seen across the country this kind of relocalizing of people's lives and peopling gaining appreciation for walking, for mental health and physical activity during this time, and also for the ability to connect with people in their communities.
I know I don't need to say this to the people in this webinar, but libraries are such an integral part of community.
So much more, again, as you all know, than merely books.
I'm reminded of this with all that Noah has been sharing with us.
So the opportunity for a partnership between America Walks and libraries is really exciting to us.
A little bit on my background, I am now the new ED, executive director, of America Walks.
I've been in the job about three months.
I also have some history with libraries, of course, as a user.
I was mayor of Seattle.
We passed a library levee to get more library hours.
Of course, I took my kids to the library.
If you go back far enough, in college, my summer job was being a janitor at the local library.
So the other custodians could take their summer vacation.
So again, I know how integral libraries are to the community.
What I love about them, of course, is their willingness to connect with the community in whatever way make sense and the role and the services that libraries have been giving to the public during this pandemic are just absolutely astounding.
So America Walks, I'm very excited to be part of it now, focuses on building a local and state network of community change advocates.
We work to build partnerships.
We're not a large organization, so we really count on partnerships like this one, and we work to be a voice for walkability at the national level.
We're growing.
We have, you know, over 58,000 people on our mailing list.
We hold regular webinars.
I'd love it if you joined us.
We have a walking college fellows across the nation.
We do granting and have lots of allied organizations.
We'll touch briefly on those as we go forward.
And here's another list of our projects.
I mentioned the first three, but we also do technical assistance work.
So state or local governments can retain us to do a more focused and look at walkability in their communities to make them better.
So if there's a bigger project out there, please contact us.
But I also want to talk about, you know, the other things we do or the things you can do without contacting us.
Here's another significant program we've run called the Walking College.
We've run six classes on this so far.
Six years of this, excuse me, with multiple modules.
So if you are particularly passionate about walkability and want to become an advocate in this space, think about applying to our Walking College.
We're wrapping up one right now and going into another.
This is not -- this is for nonprofessionals in the transportation field.
This is really for community-minded people who want to go to the next level in their advocacy.
I'll skip that one and move to the next one.
We're all over.
If you're from one of the states that has a blank in it, we want you.
We want to fill in that map.
No matter where we are, we'd love if you consider joining us.
Our webinars, I think the library staff would like these.
We're trying to deal with the toughest issues about walkable communities right now.
It's far more than infrastructure, as you know.
People feeling safe in their communities, very dependent on whether the communities accept it, whether their race, background, or culture out in the community.
That's an issue we've been touching as well.
It's critical to climate.
It's critical to economic development, and it's critical to community building as well.
So that's important to us.
We have a virtual caught summit we're tentatively planning now, and we'll have a national walking summit, we hope, in late 2022.
Hopefully we'll be post-pandemic then.
We'll have to see about that, but we're doing the planning now because we think people are going to want to get together again soon.
The thing I really want to share the most with you is this concept of a walk audit, which Noah spoke about.
When you hear -- when I first heard the phrase walk audit, it sounded kind of technical.
An audit, like a tax audit or a financial audit.
In that respect, it's a misleading phrase.
A walk audit is actually an extremely accessible thing for any person to do.
The basic concept of a walk audit is that you bring together a group of people of varying backgrounds who know the community, and you just walk through the community to identify the obstacles to walk in, whether it's a sidewalk that has problems, whether it's a crosswalk, whether it's distance from fast cars on a street, or how to improve your crossing, just find the places that don't work.
We worked with Northern Virginia to develop a great walk audit video.
These are screen captures from it.
I'd really encourage you to look at that, as well as the AARP guide that was shared before because this is an anybody can do it kind of thing.
This is the cookbook on how to do it.
It's really great, again, bringing in a variety and diverse set of community members, including people from the disability community who can bring their perspective to it is critical.
If you can get an elected official or two along on the walk or local department of transportation official, they can be in a position then to understand the needs of the community, and there are oftentimes lots of modest changes that can be made immediately to improve walkability in a community.
Obviously, there are other things which are bigger capital expenses and a bigger political lift to get through, but the starting point, again, oftentimes is the smaller fixes that can be done.
I don't know that there's any set of public employees more respected than library staff in the community.
In my experience, they're about the most helpful people you can find, and I think that when library staff ask for a little help for their library, that would be well received.
So I'm just really excited about this, and I'd really encourage people to check out the walk audits and think about including that to go along with some of their other types of outdoor activities with the community during this time.
And I guess -- oh, I think I skipped one there.
The other thing I'd call to your attention is our Community Change Grants.
We've put them out for people to apply to.
They're modest in amount.
It's about, you know, $1500 apiece, but if there's something in particular that you can see a little bit of money would help you along towards creating a more walkable community, please check out the criteria and think about making an application to do so.
We'd love to have -- we'd love to see more proposals from library staff as well.
Finally, of course, follow us on social media.
We'd love to have you and keep you up to date on everything we're doing and share our ideas on how to make your communities more walkable.
Again, thanks for having me here.
>> Fantastic.
Thank you so much, both Noah and Mike.
I'm going to just pause here and check in.
I haven't seen any questions come through for either of you yet, but a reminder to everyone that you can post your questions in chat as they come to mind, and we'll be sure and circle back.
Or if you have answers to each other's questions, be sure to chime in on chat.
I'd also love to encourage you -- I know Noah shared a lot of great examples in his segment, but if you have programming and events that you're doing and you have links to share, be sure to post those as well.
This is a great opportunity for people to learn from your great work as well.
So I think we'll go ahead and continue on and move on over to Jeffrey's segment here.
Like I said, post your questions, and we can circle back during our next check-in.
>> Wonderful.
Thanks, everyone, for being here.
Thanks to the panel for inviting me to talk.
Real pleasure.
I'm a manager with San Diego Public Library, the neighborhood branch.
I think I was invited on just to share some of the projects we've done here and to be able to answer questions.
So hopefully you all will have some.
These are projects that, like I said, I've done here, but the ideas are not unique to me.
I'm just available to be able to tell you some of the ways we've implemented them.
So this story begins in about 2013.
We have a branch in an urban neighborhood where there's a lot of overcrowding, and we were very interested from the beginning in trying to create more public spaces for folks.
That began inside the library, finding folks ways to sit, chat, read, or whatever they need to do, looking for ways to open things up and expand things for folks.
Having done a lot of that, we started to look around and see, what else can we do?
So we started to look at spaces immediately around the library.
We're looking here at a piece of parking lot.
We happen to have a fairly large parking lot here, but there's a piece of the parking lot that we thought, you know, I think we can do something here to create a public space.
There isn't much of that in the neighborhood.
So we worked with a nonprofit community center here, with the local town council, the planning group, got permission from police and fire, and we set about creating a pavement park using community members to help repaint the area and create this, which we see in action.
So this is being used for play.
We've had outdoor movies here.
Folks come before we open to just sit.
So this is one way we were able to expand the library, create new public spaces for activity around the library.
And this is our kick-off event as well.
I'll mostly be sticking to things we've done ourselves here at this branch, but I want to share this one from just about ten miles from us that was done around the same time.
In this case, the library staff there had recognized that there's a sort of commercial walking street diagonally across the street from the library.
So they were seeing folks trying to come to the library but having to weave with strollers, with kids in tow, through a parking lot, through cars, and what they did then is said we're going to sacrifice some parking spaces in order to make it so people can walk here.
They created this passage through the parking area along with some seating, just better access for folks to go from the library.
Another thing we did here a couple years later at my branch is create what I call this next door nature map.
We heard from folks they wanted our neighborhood to have more in the way of parks and nature available to folks, but there wasn't a lot here.
But we also sort of heard from folks that they didn't know what was available.
We knew there were some resources.
Folks didn't always know what those were.
So we created a map to improve that access, highlight and make visible what was in the area.
This type of thing has been something we've been able to build on.
So this is a beginning to that.
That was later built on for this historical walking tour.
We worked with the town council here to research the history of the neighborhood, sites we thought made sense to go into more detail on, research those, and create this self-guided walking tour with the library at the center of it, as the stop and start of the tour.
We were able to get money from the county for printing these brochures of the tour.
Those we were able to place with the tourist kiosks.
And this has primarily been a self-guided tour, but we were able to hold an event where we took a group out to the sites and were able to talk about them more in depth and have conversations about them, including some local representatives.
And this is that same tour migrating online.
I've enjoyed working with this.
It's a nonprofit that makes it possible to create tours or just identify individual sites and add photos and write those up.
That's available to you all as well.
This is one that we have not done at our library yet, but I wanted to talk about it.
We were approached by folks from the United Way about adding a learning trail here, partly because they'd seen the work we'd done on the historical walking tour and the next door nature map.
These are little activity courses for early learning that have been created with signage in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
A number of libraries have done similar DIY projects like this during the quarantine.
I just wanted to include this.
Like I said, we may still be doing that hopefully here one of these days.
Safe Routes to School you've heard about already from Mike and Noah.
We were able to participate in that in our area.
The program was led by the children's hospital that's near us.
Just simply by being there as a participant, participating in the walk, we were able to give a voice to the library's perspective, be a seat at the table sort of thing.
I recommend if those things are happening in your area, simply being there to represent the library is a positive thing.
In the bottom right corner, another example from nearby us where a local transportation group had run a similar program using volunteers from the Natural History Museum to take kids from elementary school to the neighborhood and to parks by way of the trails that were in the area.
So be able to do sort of a nature walk connection through their neighborhood.
And hopefully, you know, through all these, these ways of opening up the spaces around us, making them available to folks, contributes to the health, to ownership of our surroundings, that sort of thing.
So an example of that, this is from the planning and design for an intersection mural in the neighborhood.
This was led by our community center in the area and with the middle school.
They were able to create a mural for one of the intersections.
Again, this is a way for the community to participate, to take some ownership of the land around them, and create this mural, which helps sort of give a little flag to drivers to pay attention, slow down, that sort of thing.
Nature backpacks are fairly widespread program.
If you're not familiar, typically it's a backpack that circulates like books or other materials.
It will include field guides, binoculars, work books, first-aid kit, water bottle, that sort of thing.
In some cases, it does include things like state park passes.
These have been done at the level of individual libraries all the way up to state libraries.
Here we are trying to get something going, and I worked with the local branch of the Children and Nature Network.
We were able to do this really on a shoe string.
You know, gather up a little bit of money to purchase things and get it started.
We started it at this branch and a few others.
Then later on, we were able to, sort of through demonstrating that, find grant money to expand that to other library systems around the county here.
And these are some of the contents from that where we were able to create really localized material.
So a nature map that we had done a number of years before to highlight, here are some things right by you, to create a handout for parents that these are some sort of prompts you can give to kids.
You're at the library, things that are immediately around the library, things around the neighborhood, and then farther out from the neighborhood.
Some of that contributed to doing an economic development tour of the neighborhood, working with University of San Diego and the economic Development Independent Agency of the city.
So we had a tour bus of 50 or so -- professional, investors, educators, and so on -- where we were able to really explain the neighborhood to folk.
These are some of the opportunities.
These are some of the concerns and needs in the neighborhood.
And to make stops at a number of different sites where we had speakers representing those institutions to talk about what we thought the development and future of the neighborhood looked like.
All right.
I want to return things back to the library.
We're lucky to have a nice, large patio here at the branch.
We're seeing a painting program.
You see play and construction in the background, people sitting and reading.
It's a place for folks to watch kids.
We've had this space and have slowly been adding little things to make it more active and more usable.
We wanted to try and really support that better, the many different types of uses it sees.
Recently we were able to get money from the state library to have professional design work done to design a patio space that really serves these kind of outdoor education, early learning activity, all these types of uses that we've been talking about.
We have a space designed now that we hope to be able to implement soon with an outdoor classroom, outdoor meeting space, interactives, play areas, shade that we can move.
Just excited about this.
And that is it.
I tried to move quickly.
I hope there will be some questions.
This slide is also here to prompt me to plug a book I put together a couple years ago.
It includes programs like this, mainly from other libraries around the country.
But also a theme sort of adjacent to what we're talking about of libraries trying to make the riches of the cities and town around folks more accessible to them.
Through these types of programs but also through things like community calendars and so on.
So I hope you have some questions.
I'd love to talk about all this.
>> Fantastic.
Thanks so much, Jeffrey.
This is so exciting to see.
I love to see all the ideas being shared in chat.
Thank you to everyone who's sharing what they've got going on.
And there are some great questions.
Some quick ones for you, Jeffrey.
Someone asked for the born learning trails, was that funded through a grant or private funding?
>> That particular one is a United Way program that they sponsor.
We haven't been able to do that here yet, though we were approached about doing one.
It just didn't come together at the time.
But United Way funds that program, which they pay for, working with libraries, with parks, community centers, and so on.
So absolutely reach out to them.
But like I said, we've also seen other libraries just sort of do DIY versions of that themselves that have been really exciting.
>> Yeah, definitely.
And I just want to note, I did notice that the bornlearning.org site has one of those horrible, scary warnings.
So I've contacted them to let them know.
If you click through to it, you get to it.
So just a little note about that.
The other question specifically for you was if the backpacks circulate.
>> Correct.
Yes, they are.
>> Excellent.
>> Folks often ask about if everything gets returned.
For the most part, yes.
We sort of anticipate there's going to be a little bit of stuff that doesn't come back to us.
There's some items in there that are not intended to, like the whistle and water bottle.
We keep supplies for those.
A certain amount of resupply material for other things that might not come back.
For the most part, everything does.
We have a scheme worked out for being able to charge people, but for the most part, we've been able to skip over that, and they've been handled real well.
Those have been going here about two years, I think.
>> Excellent.
That's great.
So there were a couple questions.
Someone said they're in a relatively big city with many existing organizations advocating for bicycling, walk with a doc, which sounds awesome, a complete streets program under way.
The question is, if there's all these other things going on, what's the best way to get involved in case the library is not necessarily the only catalyst?
So I don't know if you want to speak to that, and maybe we can have Noah chime in as well.
>> I can let them jump in.
>> Oh, okay.
Mike, do you have thoughts on that in terms of how to -- how the library can bring added value to perhaps existing programs?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And of course in this area of trying to get more walkable communities, multiple voices count.
I think we're all aware that we've built our streets and places in a way that oftentimes are hostile to walking.
It's a big deal to change it sometimes.
So multiple voices count.
If there's a local organization in your city, actually reaching out to them and connecting would be great.
Oftentimes local organizations want to do walk audits with partners in a community.
They're trying to coalition build as well.
Whether you're reaching out as an individual, just a resident of your town or city, or whether you're reaching out in the role of being library staff, it's just finding the right partners for that, to do that.
There's usually in city government -- I shouldn't say usually.
In a big city, there may be a pedestrian master plan or some type of walkability plan or maybe an environmental sustainability planning process under way.
If the library department or whatever the department of government is, isn't participating in that, that would be a great official way to get involved as well.
Those commissions usually have folks from other agencies, as well as advocates from the community, as well as other residents in it.
Again, those are two different pathways in.
As an individual or as an organization.
I know, for example, in Washington State, an organization I did some work with, Feet First, they partner with school districts doing walking audits for them and can help staff them and organize them.
They want to get paid to do t or they'd like to find grant money to do it, but they were really eager to partner with local institutions to do things like that.
That's maybe true in your community as well.
Feel free to send me an email, mike@Americawalks.org.
We can see if we can connect you, if we know somebody in the right advocacy organization in your community.
>> Fantastic.
Mike, I'll ask you another question.
There was a comment about this kind of work being a tall order in communities where maybe statistically the community is considered dangerous for pedestrians.
I don't know if you have good stories of how communities have partnered to sort of overcome that assumption.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
>> Well, I think it can be a tall order in a lot of places to make something safe.
It may well depend on if you're looking at it from the perspective of libraries.
Like, where is the library situated?
Is it on the street grid of the traditional town?
Is it in a more auto-dependent suburban area?
Where the library is does matter a lot.
But no matter the location, what the walk audit tool gives one is to just pick out the most important thing.
Or most important things and focus on that.
There's lots of examples of -- 
and there's examples both ways.
So I don't want to make it sound like it's easy, but there are examples both ways where organizing to create a new crossing of an otherwise dangerous street has been accomplished.
Narrowing the street down by extending the curbs at the crosswalk, for example, so people are more visible to the moving cars and it's a shorter crossing distance.
So sometimes these things can take a few years to happen, but it's something specifically identified as a dangerous place and there's community support for it, it can move up the ladder, move up the priority list in city hall with that type of public support.
>> Excellent.
And I just want to acknowledge, I know people are talking about COVID and how this has impacted perhaps this work.
I just have to say that I know Noah has been doing a great job highlighting through Let's Move in Libraries of the kind of work happening because of COVID, that libraries are moving some of these efforts outside.
I would say all of your potential partners in the community are obviously struggling with how to address their community needs, accounting for -- like the person that mentioned COVID -- 
the relocalizing trend or relocalizing your work.
So definitely -- and we know it's not going to change tomorrow.
So like Mike says, this can be a long process, but I encourage you to think about those conversations that you could have in your community, with community members and other organizations.
So I think we'll go ahead and move on, but keep posting your questions into chat.
I know you're answering each other's questions.
So definitely those of you who have ideas and resources to share, post those as well.
And let's move on over to Mary.
Welcome, Mary.
>> Good afternoon, everybody.
Greetings from the High Point Public Library in North Carolina.
Our library is very fortunate in that we have a very long history of providing extensive health-related resources and programming.
I've listed here a sampling of some of the programs and partnerships we have developed over the years.
Most of our programs for health are done by the research services staff.
However, over the last couple years, our children's staff have really stepped up and added more health and fitness activities and programs.
We have a pretty extensive teaching garden here at the library.
We have one section now that is just set aside for the children's garden club.
We've got children's yoga sessions.
Our monthly recipe for success, cooking and nutrition classes are hugely popular.
Once we're able to have programming again, we are going to add some additional sessions.
I know that link is on the events page.
I really think people would enjoy looking at that particular program.
It's a great one.
So in the last decade or so, we did our gardening program, our health program.
Everything was great, people were coming.
We were expanding, and we really thought we were doing exactly what a library needed to be doing.
But then in 2014, High Point had a real wake-up call, making us aware of a serious crisis that most of us had absolutely no idea even existed.
This caused us to step back and completely rethink our health, wellness, and even our gardening program.
So I would say it's safe to say that most of us who open our newspapers on the morning of November 19th, 2014, had absolutely no idea that this was an issue, but this series of articles opened our eyes to people from all walks of life who were experiencing serious food insecurity in High Point and the devastating toll it was taking on them physically and psychologically.
We learned that hunger was not just found in low-income neighborhoods, but it was also prevalent in some middle-class subdivisions.
It was hitting senior citizens and children especially hard.
We found out that High Point had a number of food deserts and that our library was located right in the middle of one.
We also learned how these issues impacted chronic health conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure.
So as heartbreaking as this information was, these articles could not have been published at a better time because in late 2013, the city of High Point made the decision to completely redesign our library's parking lot to create a flexible community gathering space that would accommodate a farmer's market.
The reason a farmer's market was part of the plan from the very beginning was that for a number of years, a little pop-up market would spring up in the summer in high Point in various parts of town, usually close to the library.
It eventually ended up on library property.
It was just like three or four, maybe five vendors.
The library staff was helping them promote it, and it grew in popularity.
So continuing to have a farmer's market at the library fit in with the city's desire to bring more people downtown.
So armed with our new knowledge about food insecurity, we started thinking about how we would use this proposed library plaza to provide the community gathering space the city wanted and at the same time take advantage of this opportunity to address a serious community need.
So in 2016, we were very fortunate to receive a local foods, local places technical assistance grant from the EPA.
This helped us better define our library's role in providing access to health and wellness services.
It also helped us develop guidelines that have informed the purpose and function of our market.
It also caused us to shift the focus of our teaching gardens program to emphasize container gardening to show people how they could grow at least a little bit of their own fresh produce, even if they didn't have a yard, even if they lived in an apartment.
They could use a flower pot, a barrel, a laundry basket, anything just to grow a little bit of produce.
It also led us to increase health screening events at the library and to add free exercise programs.
So fast forward to 2020.
We're now in our third farmer's market season in this new plaza.
The four bullet points you see there are from the farmer's market mission statement.
It guides everything we do there.
Of course, we focus on the fresh local produce, but we also feature health and wellness activities such as exercise, dance, martial arts demonstrations.
In normal times, not this summer, but in normal times we'd have weekly cooking demonstrations.
We have health screenings every Saturday.
But of course, this year, most of these types of activities had to be sidelined because of the coronavirus.
However, COVID did create a unique opportunity for the library and farmer's market to promote an activity that really wasn't affected by the virus, which was mentioned earlier, something that we could do alone or with something else pretty safely.
That is walking.
So when the library plaza construction was completed, we applied for America Walks grant to fund the creation of a map.
The idea was that people could come and safely park their cars at the library, look at this map, and visit local landmarks within walking distance of the library.
We worked with the city's parks and rec department to identify appropriate destinations and to test those routes to make sure they were safe.
The sidewalks were in good order, sufficient lighting, et cetera.
I learned today I guess what we did was a mini walking audit.
So I've learned a lot.
So last summer we finally got the map finalized.
We created a sign, and it's now posted permanently near the farmer's market area of the parking lot.
So each of the destinations we selected represents a unique aspect of High Point.
Oakwood Cemetery dates back to 1859 and is where High Point's earlier residents are buried.
It takes us to the High Point Museum and its park, where there are historic structures and exhibits to tell the history.
Triangle Park is a small neighborhood park not too far from the library.
The reason we selected that is that it takes people through the Emory Wood neighborhood, which is well-known locally for its variety of architectural styles.
High Point University with its incredible expansion represents how we hope High Point continues to be revitalized.
And the High Point Greenway, which is only several blocks from the library, it takes people to the museum, through High Point University, up to the Piedmont Environmental Center and other parks.
We added city hall into our map because it's a good distance for a lunchtime walk.
So during March and April, our library was closed to the public, but we were starting to notice more and more people were coming to park their cars in the parking lot and look at the map and start walking.
So with the parks and the gyms and the playgrounds and everything else pretty much shut down at this point -- this is like early April -- people were actually desperate for any kind of distraction.
So we decided we would use this opportunity to market the urban hikes.
So we posted a challenge on our Facebook page, encouraging people to walk at least five of the eight paths and post a selfie at each destination.
So the two families you see here are some that took the challenge, and they came to the farmer's market in early June to pick up their prizes.
Obviously, this is before the mask mandate.
So, what's next for our urban hikes?
I have learned so much.
I really want to do what Jeffrey is doing with the historical brochures.
That's one thing we're thinking about, some guided walks with local historians, maybe a preservation expert to take people to talk about the architecture there.
We want to do more challenges.
They're easy and fun.
And we're going to start targeting specific populations such as parents with children in strollers, senior citizens, new people to High Point, crazy dog people looking for things to do with other crazy dog people, and we also want to add some additional urban paths in the future, maybe one, for example, that would go through High Point's furniture district.
So these are just some of the ways that our library has been working to create a healthier community.
So to wrap up, if you are thinking about starting health and wellness activities or expanding, these are some things I encourage you to consider.
They're all really important, but I would focus on the last one, which is stay committed.
This is important work, but it requires a strong commitment over a long period of time because you're not going to see your results right away.
As Mike was saying, you know, libraries are such trusted agencies that we are really in a unique position to make a serious impact on our community's health and well-being.
So, thank you for your attention, and I'll pass this back to Jennifer.
>> Fantastic.
Thank you so much, Mary.
It's so exciting to see all your great work.
Somebody did ask if you have the walking map available on your website.
I was poking around a little bit, but maybe we can add that to the event page.
And thank you, somebody just posted the additional EPA funding opportunity for building blocks.
Mary mentioned that as another funding resource, so that's great to hear.
I wanted to emphasize, too, that the learner guide that we pulled together for this session, that's also available on the event page.
It kind of walks through some of these steps and has a number of additional resources for you to take.
Like everyone is saying, you have to be committed.
It's going to take a little while.
But I think lots of it is about creating those relationships with your community to take this work forward.
So don't hesitate to bring in other folks in your planning process, and you can customize that learning guide perhaps before you bring other folks into the process.
So yes, somebody is saying my mind is swimming with ideas.
There's a little fire hosing going on here.
If other folks have questions to chime in on, Noah, Mike, and Jeff, feel free to chime in if you have other thoughts and questions here.
I know folks were interested in how Jeffrey created the maps, if you maybe want to verbally talk a little bit about that so folks have some of those ideas.
>> Sure.
I'm not sure there's an awful lot to say.
You know, it's done sort of by hand, in quotes, on a computer using base map, maybe originally from Google.
Now there's openstreetmaps.org.
In a vector drawing program like Illustrator, or the free one, Ink Scape, just using the base map as a layer, drawing on top of it as another layer.
That's all I used to create that.
I'll remind folks about the clio.com, which is where we did that online tour.
That may be all you need for what you're doing, to sort of automate things.
That's an excellent site.
>> Perfect.
Mike or Noah, would you like to speak to maps as well?
I'm sure that there are approaches you take at America Walks in terms of creating maps.
>> This is Mike.
I have to say, I'm not the most technically savvy person in this arena, but what I've seen used is just the Google map.
There's a way to work with Google maps.
I've even seen local advocacy organizations crowdsource a map.
So they'll launch something and ask community members to go and draw on the map they've created.
So for example, in Seattle with the pandemic, there was what are the streets that should be opened up to walking and reduced only to local traffic.
That was a really successful crowd-sourcing effort that was done just using, you know, Google Maps and I even went on there and drew a line as to where I thought a street should go.
So I'd look to see what are those local tools for getting input.
>> Fantastic.
Noah, how about you?
Do you have additional thoughts on maps?
>> No, I think just following along with Mike, especially if you're not familiar with any of the advanced tools.
Definitely I think Google Maps is probably the lowest bar to entry.
I would like to add that there may be some folks in your town government or county government who are experts in mapping technology.
So this could also be a great partnership opportunity to reach out to your town or county government and say, hey, we'd like to create some maps, is there anyone there who'd be willing to help us?
The worst they can do is say no.
The best is you'll have a new partnership you can build upon.
>> I'll chime in here.
I work with parks and rec.
They actually made the maps.
You know, they had a lot of experience doing that because they've got all kinds of trails going through the city.
They actually were happy to do it because then the format was consistent with all the other maps in the city.
So I bet, you know, other parks and rec departments would be a great partner for other libraries.
>> Fantastic.
And I know that somebody suggested having a contest, perhaps, with maybe your younger patrons to draw maps of the walking routes.
So lots of opportunities there.
I also want to emphasize, too, a way to sort of brainstorm around getting folks who maybe don't think of themselves as walkers.
You know, we know there's plenty of folks who are right there ready to be engaged with walking programming, but somebody suggested -- was talking about the tree walk or perhaps folks that have interest in native plants, the book club, people doing book club walks, you know, thinking about the interests you can overlap with folks that maybe aren't thinking walk as the first part of it.
Certainly the history piece alludes to that as well.
Yeah, bird watching.
So ways to get outside, moving doesn't necessarily need -- they don't need to be interested in walking.
>> I had meant to say when I was talking about the nature backpacks, just kind of obvious and simple, but the real point was just to get people a little feeling of support and encouragement about getting out to trails.
Folks who are already doing that are probably not going to need this, but it's a way for folks to say, you know, maybe I should do this.
Maybe I can.
I'm not sure what to do.
Here's some trail guides, some field guides, a backpack, a water bottle.
Here's all you need to just go at it and try it.
That's kind of the rationale behind that.
>> I don't recommend connecting with your disability community or advocacy groups, if there's anyone that understanding the obstacles with mobility, it is individuals who may have some type of disability.
They would love to have partnerships in highlighting that.
The great thing is once you design a place that works for, you know, young people or old people or those with disabilities, it works great for everybody.
So I would just say that's another ally to reach out to and coalition build as you're starting to do walk audits and look at how you can improve walkability in the community.
In fact, we've tried to get into the habit of saying, you know, walk and move, not just walk, to recognize that.
>> Right.
I think that you should definitely plan on including those folks, for sure.
>> Absolutely, absolutely.
But just even starting with them to say, hey, what are you working on in your community?
What are the pain points for you in getting to the library?
That would be a great starting point to engage and get more people.
>> Absolutely.
Well, so many ideas.
A reminder that the learner guide will help you sort of break down some steps.
So for those of you that are overwhelmed, come back to the event page, check out the learning guide, and again, you can customize it.
So if you want to drive some discussion locally with your team or other folks in your community, know that you can use that as a place to start.
Here's one more question really quick.
We talked a little bit about arts, but how -- let's see if Mary and Jeffrey, have you connected with folks in your arts community, both for creative -- folks bringing creative visuals to the project, but in terms of art, are there any overlaps there?
>> We have not worked with our art community, but we should.
So thank you.
>> Good, great.
All right.
Well, oh, you have one more thing?
>> Just to answer that.
I know the intersection we've done that's maybe one example of that, we had sort of reached out to community artists to work with the community to help collaboratively design that mural.
>> Fantastic.
That's great.
Excellent.
Yeah, lots of opportunities for overlap with interests and disciplines and organizations.
So fantastic.
Well, thank you so much, Noah, Mike, Jeffrey, and Mary.
Thank you to all your teams for the great work they're doing as well.
And thank you so much to all of you who have joined and contributed so actively to the conversation.
A reminder that I'll send you and email later on today once the recording is posted, and we hope you can share it with others at your organizations.
I'll also send you all a certificate for attending today.
That will come to you later next week.
And one more thing, I'll send you to a short survey as you leave today.
That provides us feedback that we can share with the presenters, and it also helps us guide our ongoing programming.
So we appreciate the time you can take now or later.
The link to the survey will be in your email as well.
All right.
Thank you, everyone, and have a fantastic rest of your week.