I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started and I'm going to introduce our presenters for today. We're thrilled to have our South Carolina representatives here. First from the University of South Carolina Arnold School of Public Health we have Carrie Draper. Who is the senior resource associate for the Department of Health, promotion, education, and behavior. Ashley Page is the SNAP-Ed program coordinator there, Leighan Cazier is here from the richland Library where she's the experienced support specialist. And Rebecca Antill is the youth services consultant in library development at the South Carolina State Library. We're thrilled to have all of you here and looking forward to learning from South Carolina. And I'm going to have Carrie get us started. Welcome, Carrie. >> Carrie Draper: Thank you so much, Jennifer, and WebJunction for having me as a presenter today. I'm really excited to be here and talk with you all about strengthening communities, food access at your library, and so as Jennifer said and that you can see on the screen, I am a senior research associate in the school public health at the University of South Carolina, and my tenure -- 10-year anniversary being with the Orlando School of Public Health is coming up next month, though my background is in social work. One of the first studies that I did when I first came to the Orlando School was working to understand causes of child hunger and solutions to try to end child hunger in South Carolina. And around the country, and the way that we were collecting the data to figure those things out was to do really extensive surveys with about 550 caregivers of children within eight counties within South Carolina. And so the surveys that we're doing with caregivers, we did those in person, they took about an hour, hour and a half to complete. And I was the only social worker on our team, and so not everybody who was helping collect the data had a lot of comfort in going into people's places of residence. So we started changing our study protocol and asking participants where was a place close by to where they lived that they were able to get to easily, that they felt comfortable meeting with one of us at to do this long very in-depth survey. The number two places that people would say they wanted to meet us that they could get to, that they felt Kabul going to were -- comfortable going to was their local McDonald's or library. This is true in urban settings as well that's small rural settings around the state. So I spent a lot of time in public libraries around South Carolina for about a year and a half, and based on that experience, worked with our local public library, richland Library that Leighan represents on today's call to start internship program with masters of social work students having them do their field placement within the public library there, and so several years later when I started leading SNAP-Ed programming out of the University, I was really excited to also explore working closely with public libraries to implement this program. So what is the SNAP-Ed program? The SNAP-Ed program is a federal United States Department of Agriculture nutrition assistance program, that aims to improve the likelihood that persons eligible for SNAP will make healthy food choices within a limited budget, and choose physically active lifestyles consistent with the current dietary guidelines for Americans, and the United States Department of Agriculture food guidance. As I start to talk more about this SNAP-Ed program and how we've started -- have been working with libraries in South Carolina, through this program the past several years, I'd love for you all to put in the chat whether this is a first time you've ever heard of the SNAP-Ed program, or if you've heard of it before, if you have partnered with your state SNAP-Ed program to date yet. So as the goal statement talked about on the previous slide, SNAP-Ed is really geared towards people who are participating or who are eligible to participate in the SNAP program. SNAP stand for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for many years before it's now called the SNAP program, it was called the Food Stamp Program so you might be familiar with it through that name as well. The way the program works is that eligible individuals and households receive money on what's called an electronic benefits transfer card, looks kind of like a credit card, every month. And that money can go towards purchasing food for the household. And so around 40 million individuals currently participate in the SNAP program. They get on average every month about $150 per person, though that amount can greatly differ especially for older adults, a lot of older adults only get about $16 a month on SNAP. And you can see on the map, you can kind of get an idea based on the population for your state about how many people in your state participate in SNAP. Most people who do participate are households with children, people who have a disability, or older adults. >> Jerianne Davis: Just to jump in to give you a sense of what folks chimed in on chat, it sounds like most people are not familiar with SNAP-Ed, many are familiar with SNAP, but have -- but have not had any sort of p partnership. >> Carrie Draper: Great, thank you. We know that it takes more than just having some resources for food to have a healthy diet. We know that much more than just individual factors like your knowledge of how to cook healthy foods influences what it is that we put into our bodies every day, and therefore ultimately our health outcomes. So the SNAP-Ed model is rooted in what's called the social ecological model that looks at all these different factors that influence our food, and physical activity patterns, and that all these different factors ought to influence that, including social and cultural norms and valuing such as our belief systems, different sectors that exist in our society, like the government, or the healthcare sector, the settings that we interact with every day, including our homes, schools, work sites, libraries within this list would fall into other community settings. And then also that those individual factors. And so with this being the theoretical framework for the SNAP-Ed program, the way that that then translates into what programming broadly looks like within every state in this country is that SNAP-Ed implementers work in communities, work in a variety of different settings to provide direct nutrition education to work with partners to change policy systems and environments to make healthy eating more accessible for people on a low income, and to implement social marketing campaigns. One thing that we did when we first started doing SNAP-Ed programming and evaluation about five, six years ago now was to do a feasibility study in South Carolina to explore the feasibility of SNAP-Ed and library partnerships. And so I'm pleased to say that as of last week, this publication just got accepted and -- to be published in Public Library Quarterly so that should be coming out soon. In exploring the feasibility of SNAP-Ed in library partnerships we spoke with 14 librarians, some that represented state-level library organizations or agencies, as well as librarians that represented single library locations around the state. And so some of the key findings from that study was if there was clear alignment between the mission, purpose, and culture of public libraries, in relationship to the SNAP-Ed program. So librarians talked about mission statements that included things like being in the business of serving the community, or improving the quality of life for everyone in the community, they talked about the changing culture of libraries to nurture not just literacy initiatives, but also the social, economic and educational well-being of everyone's life within their community. And librarians also talked about clear connections between SNAP-Ed eligible populations, so the people we talked about earlier, people who live on a low income who receive SNAP, or are eligible to receive SNAP and might not be participating. So overlap between those priority populations and the people that are interacting with the library on a daily basis. So one librarian, for example, talked about knowing that a lot of people coming to the library that they also regularly used the soup kitchen down the street, or the food pantry close by. Or libraries that we talked to who did outreach in the community, they talked about going to do programming at the local Live Oak housing facility close by -- Live Oak housing if a -- around understanding barrier -- when it came to barriers knowing how to cook with healthy foods, as well as more of those structural systems barriers like not having a lot of grocery store availability in the community. And then also they articulated opportunities for specific SNAP-Ed partnerships, so things like knowing that they could easily integrate healthy eating messages into current programming that they already were doing. And then they also articulated some challenges that would need to be overcome or taken into consideration when thinking about these partnerships that maybe are some challenges that you all can relate to as well that will be talked about throughout this presentation. But things like not necessarily having a lot of space on their property to do a large in-ground vegetable garden. So you can find out more about SNAP-Ed programming in your state at the national SNAP-Ed website. They have tons of resources on the website that you might be interested in using and loo and SNAP-Ed programming and implementing the agencies that implement programming differ state to state. So when you go on to SNAP-Ed Connection you can click on the link to access the state SNAP-Ed program information, click on your state, and then that will bring up any success stories that your SNAP-Ed implementing agencies have gotten posted to the website, as well as down below this screen shot here is the contact information for the agencies that do SNAP-Ed programming in your state. And this is of course South Carolina's page, and two of the success stories that we have on this website are specific to our library programming that you'll hear more about on this presentation. But also can check out afterwards. So that is my last slide, Jennifer. I don't know, I can turn it over to Ashley now or if there was anything else you wanted to talk about at this point in the chat. >> Let's just quickly, I don't know, this is something that I know always comes up for folks. Someone said that they suggested the lunch program over the summer at their library and the PR person at their library at the time said that was no need for it. We know advocating for these kinds of partnerships and connections is key. So I just encourage, if you want to comment on that, Carrie, I know that Rebecca is going to talk more about connecting with state libraries, there was already a connection in chat with someone from another state library. But if you have thoughts, if you have needed to support libraries as they advocate with their leadership to pursue these partnerships. >> Carrie Draper: Sure. In terms of needing to advocate based on there being need, I think especially now with COVID, we know food insecurity has significantly increased, especially among households with children. So SNAP-Ed Connection also links you to a lot of good resources on data for your state and location that might be helpful to use in those discussions. And that's also something, you know, something you might want to reach out to your SNAP-Ed implementing agencies about as well, every state, every year has to include a needs assessment within their -- the proposal that goes to the USDA to get approved. And so they also -- they likely would have a lot of good data and justification for why it is definitely a need across the country. >> Excellent. That's great. And then there's been a flurry of folks excited to hear about Alex's seed library, thanks Alex for chiming in. And I'll also say when there's this much interest about what someone is doing, I'll probably follow up with you, Alex, and see if we can get a little more information that we can probably post to WebJunction. So thanks for that connection as well. And we'll go ahead and have Ashley move us on. Welcome, Ashley. >> Ashley Page: Good afternoon, everyone. I keep looking at the chat and at the attendees, so I'm in amazement to see 163 of you all provide an hour out of your time to hear about exciting food access strategies in libraries. So I want to thank each and every one of you for being a part of today's conversation. So I get the pleasure to work with Carrie, so I want to talk about first as I am the person that does the bulk of our library work, kind of what I do to work at recruiting a library to work with us. So thankfully we have a great relationship with Rebecca over at the State Librarians. On the right you'll see this flyer, so Rebecca usually gets this flyer from me on an annual basis, and she will share this with various libraries across the state. And folks who are interested will fill out that survey link, or they'll email me and reach out so we can begin discussing the possibility of working together, to implement nutrition strategies at their library. But the other opportunity as you all know, once you develop relationships and partnerships, you all know you have one library system, but there may be 10 branches within that system, or eight branches within that system. So a lot of the libraries I work with, once they do one thing, they say, wow, I enjoyed that, and maybe I want to replicate this model over to this other library within our system. So you'll kind of hear a little bit more from that when Leighan talks about how we work on something together, and it went from just one branch to now we're looking at multiple branches within the same system. Replicating the same strategy. But also working with community members and other organizations that have relationships with that may say, hey, Ashley, I know of this work that you do, have you thought about reaching out to X, Y, and Z library, or I know about this is going on in this community, I think you might be really good if you reach out to this library partner to see about doing some support work with that library system. So kind of the way the flow goes is, as you saw on that flyer, first the library completes that intrasurvey. If you don't want to complete the survey, that's fine. Just send me an email and I'll respond. So once that survey is completed or we do that initial email, we will schedule now during COVID times everything is virtual, so in-person or a virtual readiness assessment is completed, and that's really important, really to figure out where is that library, what connections do they have, what strategies are they interested in, what maybe reservations they may have. Those are important to find out. As we're looking at kind of creating a game plan to implement nutrition strategies. Then one of my favorite parts, the library says, hey, Ashley, I'm interested in doing a seed library. Or I'm interested in doing a farmers market, or hey, just worked with a lie bray and they launched on Monday a community Fridge. So it could be different things that folks may be interested, they may just send back one, they may say, hey, I'm interested in multiple. But we kind of want to do one thing at a time. So while we're working on that, I support them in providing technical assistance, I love to tell people, unfortunately we don't come in with money. But we do come in with knowledge and support. So if there are any resources I can share, knowledge, best practices, webinars, even tools, I've done Stedman many letters for folks in thinking about working with the library now and trying to do a seed library, and provided her a letter she can use within her community to try to solicit free donations for seeds within that library. So anything too try to make it easier for libraries, as I know you have a lot of work to do, and I've learned working with smaller libraries, you have less staff. So it's definitely a big help to have someone kind of working with you on that technical assistance aspect. So once we implement that strategy, then we look at how do we sustain this? So I think it's important not just to say, hey, here's this strategy, here's this seed library, here's this farmers market, but how can we sustain this so next year or if staff turnover occurs, or if some event occurs, that strategy just doesn't go by the wayside. So once we look at completing that sustainability plan, then we also will continue to provide additional technical support. So Leighan can say I think I've been working with Richland Library for about three years, so even though we started something, one of our first streedgesz three years ago, I still provide that support to them because I know that is helpful in making sure that this is sustained, but questions can come up, new ideas can come up, so libraries, even though that strategy is implemented and we may have a sustainability plan in place, still want to have that continued relationship to make sure if there's other strategies they want to explore, or to enhance the nutrition strategy we've already implemented together. So these are just some pictures of some work we've been able to do working with libraries. On this top left, I'm hoping you all see my arrow where you see those oranges and bananas. That's a response to COVID-19. There's a group that's been formed that serves three counties, three rural counties in South Carolina. And their mission is to do community gardening and other work within those areas, and when COVID-19 came out, that community said, hey, we need to respond, and we need to do a produce giveaway. That already was work that was being done, but in the face of COVID, they really ramped it up, so they were doing two or three produce giveaways every week. So we worked with the Orangeberg library as well as the Denmark Library for about three or four months, those produce giveaways were occurring. And the back end of that happening, the Calhoun Library got involved and started working and doing and resembling those produce giveaways and we're almost a year since COVID happened, and still some of those libraries and locations are still doing these produce giveaways. Not as frequently as this summer, but still doing those produce giveaways to benefit the community. Next to that you'll see a garden, so with that community garden group, Dan mark Library is a part of that. That's an image of the Denmark garden, and that garden, there was talks about where to place the Adam Ward, the library wanted some beds, someone else mentioned it, bupt the thought process is hey, let's place it where folks can easily assess it. So the libraries -- the garden is located within a town park that's actually right across the street from a low-income housing complex. So folks just go right over, they harvest the herbs, and fruits, and vegetables, and you can see some of the kids helping out as well. Then y'all have been talking about the seed library, so I loved that conversation, so on the right is an example of when the fairfield library started their seed library, which is a rural county in South Carolina, and it's still growing strong. So glad to see that that is still happening. And then these are some pictures, the bottom two on the left-hand side from the Richland Library, so I know Leighan will discuss that a little bit further, but definitely want to highlight a correlation, because I know some folks said I'm familiar with SNAP and food stamps but not the SNAP-Ed component. So Carrie mentioned that social work relationship. They do have a social work department at Richland Library, and so that department was able to partner with the library during the farmers market hours to actually sign folks up for SNAP benefits. And some of those farmers actually accepted SNAP, so it really worked hand in hand to not just offer produce for folks, but also an opportunity for folks to sign up for SNAP and see if they qualify and learn more about the program, so it really helped to be able to do that. So that's just a cool way that some interdepartmental partnerships formed around this farmers market at Richland Library. If you're interested in learning more, if Carrie or I can do anything to share more about the work that we've been doing in South Carolina, please feel free to reach out to us as you'll find both of our emails on this page, and Leighan, I'm going to toss it over to you to kind of dig in more depth about this pretty awesome farmers market model we got going on at Richland Library. >> Leighan Cazier: Thank you so much, Ashley, I'm very excited to talk with you. Since you were the really the brainstorm and the beginning of our library farmers market at r Richland Library. I'm Leighan Cazier, an experience support specialist at Richland Library. Among the varied duties that fall under the experience support umbrella, since it's kind after strange title, I'm the farmers market coordinator for our library system. In this presentation I'd like to give you background on how we at Richland Library implemented some of the ideas that Ashley spoke about and some concrete ways. We're a library system of 13 location and we have approximately 400 employees. So we are a larger system than probably most of you who are attending today. Our locations are spread throughout the county of 416,000 people, and cover 772 square miles. Columbia is the capital city of South Carolina, and a number of our library locations are located within the city limits, but authorities are located throughout the county, which is a fairly large county. In talking about our farmers market model specifically, I do need to note at the outset that the COVID-19 closure on March 16th of our libraries canceled our entire 2021 farmers market season. We were not able to open at all. We plan to begin our spring season in early April in 2020, and we normally run through the week of Thanksgiving. We had also planned in spring of 2020 to expand our market to two additional library branches or locations as we call them. So if I refer to locations in this presentation, you'll know that we really mean branches. In the past few months we've started to reopen our libraries for limited indoor services. But we have not reintroduced any programming nor do we have any services that would make social distancing difficult. So it's been a struggle. Our current plan, since our county's COVID rates are dropping, is to open our weekly market at our main location, which was our first pilot location and our largest location, on Wednesday, April 21st. We're very excited about that. How did it begin? It's really the brainchild as I said of Ashley Page from whom you just heard a bit about it. And Tracy Allen, who is our former director of library experience of our main location. So she technically was the director of that specific location. Ashley approached Tracy with the idea of beginning a market at the Richland Library. To illustrate what a partnership between a farmers market and public library might look like, Ashley took Tracy to visit another South Carolina library system to show their market in action. That market began as a part of SC Plants the Seed and there might be smog Carrie's slide about SC Plants the Seed which is a collaboration between the South Carolina Department of Health and the environmental control SNAP-Ed program, the South Carolina State Library and the Department of Social Services. One of the SC Plant the Seeds's goals was to -- after visiting the farmers market at the other library system in South Carolina and seeing the other nutritional initiatives that they had implemented there, such as seed libraries, Tracy was convinced we needed to make this happen at Richland Library as well. So she became truly our library champion in-house, and if you need anything, is it a library champion, you need someone who is going to go to bat for you to make this happen. I wanted to include some demographic information about the city of Columbia and Richland County to illustrate the food access challenges we're working with. Within this county we have really varied communities. It goes from very urban, because the county encompasses the state capital Columbia, which houses USC, University of South Carolina, we have suburban areas, and we also have fairly semi rural areas. As you can sphree the statistics on this slide, in 2019, 21.3% of the residents of the city of Columbia were below the poverty level. Which is more than double the national average for 2019, which was 10.5%. Much of the county as you can sphree the map that I included is a food desert. Meaning they do not have easy access to food. We did see at the library an incredible need not just for assistance with nutrition and food access in general, but for assistance with obtaining fresh food. As many of you know from around the country, there are large areas of the country that do not have access to a normal grocery store. People are shopping at dollar stores, Dollar General something like that, and we know they don't Carrey fresh fruits and vegetables. We did see people were able to come to the library, that was a place where people wanted to meet. They're able to get to the public library, they're using our libraries, we wanted to make the library even more useful for our populations by making -- being able to bridge the gap and supply fresh food to those who need it. Question are a little bit different -- we are a little bit different. We do have -- we established strategic plans every three years for our library. It's a huge system. We're extremely lucky to have great members in our library system. We had an initiative called Advancing Our Community which is quite broad and carried through a number of our different strategic plans. This initiative was the reason that we were able to bring our farmers market dream to life. Because our library locations and we do have 13 locations, were funded by a bond referendum, we are prohibited from generating income in our spaces. That applies to both the library, we can't sell anything, we wouldn't be able to sell a library mug or pencil or anything like that, because we would be generating income, but that also applies to community members who are generating income in our spaces. As a side note, that also influences our meeting room use policy, too. And who we allow to use our meeting rooms. We thought this prohibition would really make it impossible to make the farmers market happen in our spaces, but we knew we want it to happen, we knew we'd fight to make it happen, so we did some creative and slightly crafty thinking and we were able to use the strategic initiative of advancing our community to justify the market. And we do have a memorandum of understanding which states that kind of thing. We have not really been asked about it, which is lucky for us. No one is really questioning it. But we had to make sure that all of our Is were dotted and our Ts were crossed. So you can sphree this slide that I've included here, that we really did carefully connect that strategic focus of advancing our community with the programmatic aspect of the farmers market. We probably are the only library in the nation, certainly the only library I've worked for that has the restriction of income generation in our spaces. But my advice would be if you're interested in piloting a farmers market in your library, you may want to check some of your internal policies. We are a library culture who are very supportive of innovation and ideas. We could afford that. We're very well-funded, we're very well-staffed. I know some of you are not so lucky. We have so many creative thinkers, and the answer to almost any reasonable idea someone comes up with is, let's find a way to make this happen. The first steps to any new program are innovation. Our system is, let's pilot this project. Let's try it. Let's see if it works. Let's see what doesn't work. And we'll see if it's worth continuing. Again, very, very lucky our executive leadership team is very supportive of anything we'd like to try. So because we were a bit apprehensive about a brand-new program, totally outside of our scope, we'd never run a farmers market before, the original plan was to run our farmers market from November through January, and then reevaluate to see if it was successful. If we felt it was, then we'd regroup and reschedule and start again at a later date, sometime in the future. But we found that the market was so popular with customers, and the staff and the vendors who were involved, that we never stopped it. You're probably wondering too how could we run a farmers market is and especially piloting a new farmers market in November? November to January, it's not exactly prime growing season. Even here in the south. Our regional vendor that we had and we only had one vendor, when we piloted the program, was a produce wholesaler who worked at various markets in our area. It was great in that we could start the market when we wanted to, and there was a huge selection of produce that they could bring to us. They also had a fantastic business model in that they offered a $10 produce box, so you could fill this box with anything from lettuce, to oranges, to onions, to whatever. Strawberries. And it was only $10. We unfortunately don't work with that vendor any longer, fore various reasons that I can discuss later. But we were able to in that spring, the spring after we started, start working with different vendors, some local farmers who could provide locally grown products, not just what you could buy in the grocery store. So we did not have the same selection which to some extent is a slight downfall, but it's so much more important to us to support local farmers. Okay. We decided to pilot at our main low cautions. We do have Tylee different locations in our system, but we did start at our main location for a number of reasons. First it's the largest location we have, it's four levels, and almost an entire city block. We have the most customer attendance, mostly because of all the amenities we offer there. Our local history center is at main, we have maker spaces but most importantly for the farmers market, that's where our social work department is located. We are incredibly lucky to have a social work Department of I believe it's up to five people at this point who are full-time employees of our library. They don't just take a space from us, they are library employees. We are also in the center of the city, so we are close to various bus lines, so transportation is not an issue for our customers. We also have at this location the largest number of staff who are not just working, and I know all of you librarians know what I'm saying, we're not all front line public service staff. We have a little bit of flexibility to do things like work in the farmers market, help organize that. And we also have in this location an indoor atrium space, and that's where we piloted our farmers market. It's fantastic because it makes it weatherproof. We don't have to worry about just rain, but heat and humidity in South Carolina in the summer is just absolutely oppressive, and it's really great to be able to have an air conditioned indoor space in order to hold our farmers market. So after our pilot program ended, we decided upon what became our normal schedule, April through November, to coincide with local growing season. We begin with strawberry season which is always a huge hit, and in November we end up with collards and sweet potatoes, which people are excited about for Thanksgiving. I did want to point out in this slide here the gentleman in the middle wearing a suit is our city's mayor. So that was nice to have him come to visit us. Be and we'll get on to SNAP as Ashley mentioned, we do have the availability of our social work department to help customers and our vendors with SNAP. So we wanted to make sure that not only did everyone have access to healthy food, but they also had the means to purchase it. So the customers can work either with our social work department or social workers from USC's SNAP-Ed program have come in as well to help customers sign up for SNAP benefits. We also now ask that all of our vendors work with Ashley to help the process then a ABC them to accept SNAP benefits from customers as well. Not everylibrary doeses have social workers, as I keep saying. But you may want to reach out to one of your local colleges to see if they have a social work program. They may have interns who are willing to help with your -- to help come in and volunteer to help your customers and your vendors sign up for SNAP benefits or to accept SNAP benefits. There's a website called benefits.gov that is good information for all states. It's a national website, and it can guide you through some of the anaplasmosis and contacts that are available for all types of benefits, including nutrition assistance. Now I'm talking very quickly, I'm sorry, I want to get through these. I might not get through all of these slides, but you'll have them for reference in the future. So based upon the success we had at our main library location, which started in November of 2017, we expanded to one of our locations in Sand Hills in the spring of 2018, and then in the spring of 2019 we expanded to our north main location. We tended to have the same vendors come to all of the locations, which is great, because the two smaller locations were monthly markets rather than weekly markets. It worked for them, it was different times of day, and we did try to take advantage of different neighborhood demographics and different hours. So the market at Main is open in the morning, the market in North Main is open in the afternoon so we could take advantage of people picking their children up from school, or heading home after work. This is a very wordy slide here, but I wanted to give you some idea of what kind of vendor agreements we have. And here's really the nitty gritty of it. We found through experience that it was absolutely necessary to have very specific vendor agreements to cover all the kinds of situations and details that could come up with the market. An example here states USC's SNAP-Ed Program has entered into an agreement with the vendors. Because of that mandate I spoke about, about not being able to generate income in our spaces, we absolutely had to use this legal work-around. So there's an understanding that the market is run through the authority of USC's SNAP-Ed program, and Richland Library is providing a site for the program, for the market. After the vendors passed through an initial vetting process with Ashley Page -- thank you, Ashley, she does everything for us -- she ensures that they have the correct lie business ever sensing to sell what they sell, you have to have a specific lie stones sell eggs as opposed to produce. She works with them then on applying to become SNAP retailers. After that we decide they're going to work with us, Richland Library staff becomes a primary contact to the vendors and we deal with the week-to-week logistics. The specificity of these agreements could really minimize your staff time and effort so it's important to think through the entire process. You'll see the details in this agreement, that seem insignificant. Oh, you're really telling them to clean up afterward and leave their space in premarket condition? Yes, because if you have a small staff you don't have time to clean up after someone or set up tables, or do anything like that. So writing this into your contract can make this possible for you. I can say personally that our market really does not take much staff time at this point. Now that the vendors are vetted, they're set up, they have a schedule, it's established, I tend to on some Wednesday mornings is our main market. It begins at 10:00, and around 9:30 they trickle in, I'll help set up tables, I'll help them carry things from their trucks just so I can do a little catch-up with them to see what kinds of product they have for sale that day, that kind of thing. But it then runs itself. I truly do not have to be there, I do not have to be on site. We also know -- found, and this is one of the reasons why we stopped working with the original wholesalers, we found that reliability in attendance is probably the most important detail to include in your vendor agreement. Customers won't return if they come to the -- make a special trip and find the vendor is not there. Especially if it's your only vendor. But again, people will come to say, I want that man who sells the blueberries, why isn't he here? They will stop coming if they've made a trip for nothing. So really, really make sure that you choose the most reliable vendors that you can. I'm checking on time here. We are also extremely lucky at our library that we have in-house marketing. So they support all of our programming through event announcements on our website, they have blog posts about our farmers market that they publish, social media promotion on a weekly basis, and that's where checking to see what a vendor has that day comes in, I can say, hey, I snapped a cute picture of a child who was choosing tomatoes today, and they will post it on social media immediately. They also have designed individualized collateral for our market, we have signs that you can see that are library branded, and we have branded tote bags that we've given out to customers in the market. I did include a bit, I wanted to highlight some of our vendors that we use. I will probably ZIP through this quickly and not speak too specifically about it. But I do want to mention that finding vendors is not as difficult as you would think. We originally used Ashley because of her network of contacts among the farmers and farmers market in the county and the state. Once she put us in contact with some farmers and we got going, really their network took over. We had one farmer who would say, I have a friend who has blueberries, and he's really looking for a market that runs on weekdays. Here's his number Y. don't you give him a call. We also have a number of outdoor markets, filly flea -- flea markets, fruit and vegetables markets right around us in Columbia, and I do find myself visiting those and handing out my card to try to get them interested in vending in our markets. We will say we think our markets are attractive to some of these vendors for a few reasons. We offer a free space for them rather than a rental. Which many of them do, we don't charge for their space. We do help to promote the market in house, and we highlight the individual vendors so they get some promotion, their farms get promotion as well. And a lot of farmers we have found are looking for markets that take place during the week. Which ours all are. We do not do any weekend markets. They tend to go to the larger markets on weekends to make the bulk of their money, but this is just a nice plus for them. So here's our, one of our EZE Farms, I'm not going to go through this because of time. But feel free to Toledo at your leisure. So we have EZE Farms, we have Organically Roland, one of our favorite vendors as well. And Fabel Farms. We also, as well as our vendors, we do have some additional partnerships that we take advantage of for our market. We have a weekly entrepreneur meet-up group that comes to the library on Wednesday mornings, so there's overlap with our market. And we sometimes have if they are food related, we do have them set up a booth as well to go along with their talk at the entrepreneurs meet-up. We also use the farmers market to support our local authors who are marketing their work. We have enough local authors in our area that we absolutely can have one each week. We allow them to set up at the market, they can talk to customers about their books, and they can sell and sign copies if they'd like to. We do not allow this in our meeting rooms, so this is a great opportunity to connect them with the community and not say no if they ask us. We do have a number of other nutritional initiatives that I'd like to talk about, seems like everybody was interested in the seed libraries. So we had before COVID, we had a seed library that we were housing in an old card catalog. Customers could come N. go up to our second floor, take what seeds they wanted, we would say oh, bring some back if you get the chance. We closed for COVID, we realized customers had no access to this. So we had just established a loi bring of things a few months before we closed, and we took the time that we were closed to try to brainstorm what other kinds of items we could lend to customers to enhance that experience. If do you have the chance, and I should had Jennifer link it, go to our library of things site, we have the most amazing array of items at this point. So now in addition to that freestanding seed lie imli still is not accessible to customers, we have added a number of different types of seed bundles, vegetables, herbs, flowers to our library of things, so the customers go to our website, reserve the seed bundles, they can request a specific pickup date and we'll deliver them curbside to their cars. We have also added a number of garden implements. And we have used our community garden that is at our St. Andrews location when we redesigned that location we built a community garden to the front of the building so it's absolutely apparent and noticeable when you either drive by or need to walk into the entrance. We have a staff that tends the garden, they harvest the vegetables, they put them out on tables in their location for customers to take. And we have also used that garden to try to highlight the gardening implements that we have in our library of things, so we have filmed videos showing customers how to use these various tools, we have tillers, we have rakes, we have pruners, all different kinds of shovels, that kind of thing. We also have in one of our redesigns of our spaces, we have built a teaching kitchen in one of our locations. We use that for programming and nutritional education. And we did partner with a local high school for something called Fresh Food, Fresh Thinking. So what is the future? Our plan is to reopen our main market in April, and see how our COVID protocols work out. We will be outside rather than inside, probably until June because of safety reasons. But hopefully by the time the hot weather pops up, we will be back indoors. In May or June we'll reopen our North Main Market which had already existed before we closed, and we still plan to expand in the spring to two other library locations, so we will actually have a total of four locations with farmers market. And I know I jammed a lot of information in there, and talked really quickly, so if anybody has any questions or wants to talk about any more specific details, please feel free to contact me and my email address is right here. >> Fantastic. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you Leighan. You guys have so much going on. So it's exciting to see. And I think we're going to go ahead and move on and have Rebecca wrap things up. If we do have outstanding questions that we didn't circle back to, the final slide has all their contact information, but we'll also post any additional responses to that event page as they come in. So we'll pass it on over to Rebecca, welcome, Rebecca. >> Rebecca Antill: Thank you, Jennifer. So I will try to move through quickly so we can finish close to on time. My name is Rebecca Antill, I'm the youth services consultant at the South Carolina State Library. I've been here just over four years, and we started our food literacy initiative about 3½ years ago. A little back ground on the libraries in our state. You can see there we have 43 county and regional public library systems. Our population is approximately 5.1 million, and about 12% of our population is considered food insecure. And as Carrie touched on at the beginning, almost half of our households in South Carolina that receive SNAP benefits have children under the age of 18. So there's a real need for a focus on food access as well as information, and information is what public libraries deal in. So that's why we got involved in this initiative. So not every -- Richland Library as Leighan said, Richland Library is our largest library system, and they're very well off. So not every library can do many of the things they're involved in. We have libraries that have courtyard gardens, some of our other libraries have gotten involved with seed libraries, they gave out sprout houses and seed starter kits over the pandemic last year. We have several that have educational gardens, children's gardens, they're involved in their community gardens, and these are all some of our very small rural library systems. Lexington County has gardens at three of their branch libraries and Charlston County, another one of our growing library systems, has begun quite the food access focus. They've worked it into their newest strategic plan, they've begun a community Fridge, they've begun several raised bed gardens at several of their libraries. It's really been a focus with the new library director, as well as a lot of the programming coordinators. So we're excited to see what else will come from them. We have multiple library systems of every size that are serving as pickup points for produce boxes. As well as starting seed libraries. So there's a lot going on at our libraries at every size, and how does the state library support all of this? We provide grants through the LSTA funds, and libraries are able to apply for those each year and use them however their communities need. We were able to fund one, I want to say last year, but it could have been two years ago. That helped a school create a lab, and create an outdoor garden space. So it's really all across the board with what the public libraries need and what they're able to do. We have our statewide food literacy initiative, South Carolina Read Eat Grow and that has expanded due to grant funding to really focus in on health literacy. And within that umbrella of our food literacy initiative, we have SC Plants the Seed which the other presenters already mentioned. And that has been a fabulous program. And what I want to wrap everything up with is partnerships is what makes all of this possible. Our partnership with SNAP-Ed throughout the state, and here in South Carolina we have three different regions and three different organizations that provide SNAP-Ed. And so it's been really important to focus on those three partnerships. We also are -- our partnership has the state library with our public libraries and the relationship we have with them is what makes the success of both of our programs possible. The partnerships with all of the local organizations and making those connections and collaborations, that is what allows the programs that the libraries provide, that is what allows them to thrive. One of my bullet points I suppose you would say, access is super important. So having the produce boxes, having the community friges, all of that is very important. But access to those things without information about how to prepare them is kind of meaningless. Information is what public libraries do best. So when you're having these conversations with your partners, make that one of your focal points. You have the information that people are looking for, and you know how to share it with the community. It's what we do. It's what libraries do best. So please, we kind of had to rush through a lot of things, there's still much to cover. Please feel free to reach out to me and to any of the presenters. Let me see if I can make it to the last slide. There we go. With all of our contact information, we're happy, I talked to folks from all over all the time, I encourage you to reach out to your state library agency. If you want to know who to get contact with at your state library agency, please feel free to contact me about that, I can hook you up. >> That's great, Rebecca. >> Feel free to ask. >> That's a great reminder, Rebecca. I know early on someone asked who do I need to ask, who do I need to get permission from. I think obviously starting locally, checking in, actually I would maybe even start at your state library or as Rebecca says, if you don't know who to contact at your state library, they are a great network of staff. So definitely reach out there, and how wonderful to learn about all these SNAP-Ed resources, and programs. Obviously libraries are good at partnering, but if you want to take some initial steps thinking about who those partners might be locally, the learner guide has some steps to take as well. So I encourage you all to check out the learner guide, customize it if you have specific questions you want to bring to your discussion. And again, thank you to all of you for this fantastic work, I always love bringing different players from a state together to demonstrate what this might look like elsewhere in the state. So thank you South Carolina for stepping forward, and I want to give a shout out to Noah from Let's Move in Libraries who brought us together, Noah is definitely committed to food literacy as well as movement in libraries. So thank you, Noah. Everyone have a fantastic day. I'm going to send you to a short survey as you leave, that will collect your feedback. We'll provide that to our presenters as well as help guide our ongoing programming. I'll also send you all an email later on today once the recording is posted, and I will send you all automatically a certificate next week for attending today. Thank you again to our presenters, to our captioner, and everyone, have a fantastic rest of your week.