And this is the final webinar in our series. We hope you were able to join us for the first two sessions and we had such a wonderful time learning about the curriculum and you'll learn more about it today and there is a take and turn learner guide for today's session. It's a sneak peek of the curriculum that is apart of this project and there's a couple of steps to take to extend your learning on today's topic. So we'll be sure and make sure you will access that on the event page as well. We have Sarah Giskin, Becky Shaknovich who is the department head at the central children's department and the field teen center. Suzin Weber is the branch manager at the Tacony neighborhood library and Shahadah Abdul-Rashid will be joining Lynn Williamson as our facilitators for our today's session and welcome Lynn who is the chief of neighborhood library services and the lead on this wonderful project. So I'm going to go ahead and have Lynn get us started. Welcome to all of you and thanks so much for being here today. 
>> Thank you and good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us today so we can talk about connecting to our communities. 
This webinar is meant to give a taste of the curriculum that the free library of Philadelphia has been developing for the past three years with the support of an IMLS program grant and together with partners across the U.S. and Canada. In the previous two sessions in this webinar series, we have talked more about the origins of the curriculum. So I won't go into that too much today since many of you have been here before or you may have viewed those recordings. You can always go back and look at them to review it as well. Community centered libraries engage library staff in promoting and supporting positive change in their local communities. In the original workshop, participants start on reflecting on the differences in community outreach or engagement practices and then participants are introduced to the SOAR model, strength, opportunities, aspirations, and they become familiar with facilitation skills which help them conduct meetings with various groups in the library community. They engage in a SOAR analysis as a model for the type of discussion they will have with their community members later. For additional SOAR and facilitation practice, participants roll play a back to school meeting. They finish by planning the essential aspects of a SOAR discussion with their community. 
Ultimately, participants gain the skills needed to engage the community in a meaningful dialogue to understand how to best serve their needs. In today's webinar, we have chosen to focus our 60 minutes on the elements of SOAR and the application of those elements in our practice as well as to learn how those ideas are playing out in your libraries. And to the learner guide that JP just mentioned. What we like to call the take and turn. So we'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the workshop. What community engagement practices do you use to build connections with your community? And we'd love to see your responses in chat. Attending community events. Yes, we have free books and Barber shops program as well. Asset mapping, always asset mapping. Right? Story times at farmer's markets. I know Becky has staff that do things like that as well. Keep your responses coming as we move forward. Thank you for engaging and sharing. You'll be able to read through all the contributions from those of you that are typing in. So knowing what matters to our communities helps us set programming and plan initiatives but how do you really find out what your community members want? One way to get a different angle on things is by using a SOAR analysis together with your community. This is a strengths based approach to strategic planning and Shahadah Abdul-Rashid is going to walk us through. 
>> Hello, everyone. So, what is SOAR? SOAR is a strength opportunity aspirations and results analysis and it's the strategic planning tool that focuses an organization on it's current strengths and vision for future development of strategic goals. SOAR also helps to identify and enhance the positive attributes already within your organization as opposed to S.W.A.T. which stands for strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. 
S.W.A.T. is typically a top down approach and it examines perceived threats to the company's success and weaknesses within the association. That's how it's a little different than SOAR. SOAR works strategically to enhance the positive that is already working within your organization and helps to identify to move forward toward a greater success to improve weaknesses. They're a little different. And also, SOAR -- it comes from the Aspen institute communications and society program that was created in partnership with bill and Melinda gates foundation. And it's used to help advance the work that public libraries are doing toed adress community challenges and to support the transformation of communities and their public libraries in the digital age that we're living in. 
>> So we will be speaking about ways that we have used SOAR to create and deepen our connection and engagement with our communities and we'll talk about using this frame work to move beyond the community outreach model in order to create a vision and action plan for community engagement in the library network. So you'll be able to bring these tips and tools back to your library, whatever size library you have. 
Large meeting, small, rural, city, whatever it works. We have been asking a series of questions to you all, our audience, to gain your perspective and acclimate you to some strategies and ways of thinking. So we'll have some for you to answer in the chat. So our first question and we want you to respond in the chat is what is your library known for and what makes your library unique? So feel free to answer in the chat. Okay welcoming staff, adult programs, community engagement preCOVID when we had packed community rooms and meetings. Having friendly staff.
Yes, murals. Having inclusive staff, Spanish speaking. 
Gorgeous downtown locations. 
Team programming. Community spaces. Collection, diversity which is always a wonderful thing. Sorry, it's moving fast. 
Innovative, programming, okay. 
So feel free to keep the -- keep going in the chat and we'll get started with one of our first panelists. So we are actually going to start with Sarah. 
Sarah, what does the community your library serves thinks the community does well and how can we build on that? 
>> Thanks. So, I work as a community initiative specialist which means that I work with a group of six libraries in northwest Philadelphia and I help them with community engagement and building relationships with community groups and bringing community into the libraries. And one of the things that I think some of the libraries I work with really do well is engaging senior citizens. One of my libraries before the pandemic, they used to have monthly programs where they would partner with an elected official that would come in and bring in different service providers. It could be about health care access. It would be services, it could be civic engagement. It could be end of life planning and all kinds of things that were specifically geared toward seniors and we would get dozens and dozens of people every month. It was a really popular event. Some other libraries do events not necessarily geared exclusively toward seniors but things that are open to all ages but that seniors enjoy. And we had sidewalk chalk and there's people of all ages that came out but I think this is one of the key areas where you can think about including people of all ages when you do book giveaways and things, you don't want to only have books for, you know, school aged kids. You want to also have books that adults and specifically seniors might enjoy. One of the other libraries I work with during the pandemic, the actually brand hasn't been able to be open to the public yet. And I think engaging older members of our community and gearing programs to stuff that they appreciate and enjoy is something that we should continue doing. 
>> I'm the children's librarian and department head at central department and at the parkway central library. That is the free library of Philadelphia central or main library. We're located in center city which is what we call our downtown area in Philadelphia. I'll be addressing some of the specifics when working on a project. We also function as the neighborhood library for the community immediately surrounding the library. Due to a variety of factors, the largest demographic group that we serve, by far, is children ages infant to 5 and their caregivers. We're fortunate to have five children's librarians working in the department. And the children's department is well-known for providing stellar story time programming as well as variations on story time programming. Another strength is social media we're active with a fair amount of followers and engagement on each platform. 
Each of our librarians had their own skills and strength that can be applied to engaging with the public via the platforms. I enjoy creating short videos for Instagram to catch the attention of patrons, community partners and other libraries. It's a great way to connect with individuals and organizations. 
And she uses twitter to not only connect with the community but with authors and publishers as well. Who sometimes end up visiting our library. And she was visiting her son in Philadelphia and she came in and said I wanted to meet the librarian because they have been chatting on twitter for a long time choose one that appeals to you and find out where your community members are online. In the past we used social media to promote programs and services and to share information. I began to think about how we could use our popular social media platforms as a place to provide programs and services. 
And story time on Instagram stories, this was in November of 2019. I had no idea that we were going to have to take all of our work to the virtual space very soon. Central children's department staff and I had a head start because of the community center libraries training and project. At first I was nervous about being in front of the camera and putting myself out there. I brought my idea and she really encouraged me, thank you for that at the time I didn't know how I felt about that but now I do it regularly. 
It turns out that video based programming is a strength I didn't even know my staff and I had. Working in a virtual world in 2020, we learned that there was an opportunity to work in virtual media. We have been taking reference questions and parents will ask us and caregivers for a stack of books for their kids. I have included our Instagram, facebook and twitter handles here. View and follow our social media accounts. We will follow you back. 
>> Thanks. Thanks for letting us know about the children's programming. I'm just like, I want to come to a story time. 
Okay. We're going to move on to Suzin. I have a slightly different question for you. What key resources give the library an advantage to connect with their communities in a world where information resources can be found nearly everywhere. 
>> My name is Suzin Weber. I'm the branch manager at the City of Philadelphia. I have been a librarian for 25 years with the free library. 21 of those years I have been a branch manager. 
Also for 16 of those years I have been a children's librarian and an adult teen librarian. I now consider myself to be a true generalist. So in answer to the question about what key resources give the library an advantage, one of the distinctions is the difference between real information and misinformation and disinformation and in a world where we talk a lot about fake news and misinformation and disinformation, libraries are very important because of one main thing and that's the trust factor. After all, in many communities, libraries have been there for a century or more and there are generations of people who have memories of going to the library along with that, people have grown up with fond childhood memories. They remember coming to the library with teachers. They have come for homework help. They remember coming with parents, grandparents. They remember engagements with specific librarians over the years. So that contributes to the fact that we're a trusted community anchor. Also libraries are safe spaces. We're safe spaces for children and teens so there's an element of trust around safety of ideas, your ability to do researching, your ability to find truth, discuss, learn, expand and be exposed to new ideas and challenging. Along with our history of fond childhood memories and engagement with the communities, we have a history of literacy and homework help. We all to the public are information professionals and it's the idea that we are professionals and that we have specialized training and specialized skills and specialized knowledge that adds to that trust factor. And again we are a helping profession. It's considered a service even though a lot of it is focused on technology, we are really a service organization. 
We have a history of information networking and we share information with trusted community partners. We share their information out as their trusted community partner as part of of our networks. Other municipal and regional agencies and things like that. It's all of these factors that come together that our advantage is the trust factor, where as in a world of fake news, misinformation and disinformation, people have come to expect that when they come to the library, what they will receive will be courteous and factual and trustworthy. Some of these slides that I am sharing here are pictures of different activities that we have had at the library that contribute to each one of these topics that I have discussed. For instance, we worked with city partners to provide free Coronavirus vaccines. We have worked with the fund and worked to provide a safe space for teen after school programming. We have worked with specific neighborhood groups that are part of a smaller community within a broader community. And another one of the things that we're very proud of is one of our favorite memories that we have done is that we provided indoor minigolf as part of a summer in February event that we did a few years ago and it's activities like indoor mini golf. 
>> Children move fluidly and it's nice to know that as they come and as they go and as they move through their lives that we're planting seeds of happy memories, reinforcing good things in their lives and things they might not otherwise be exposed to. And with this indoor mini golf that was a year that we had Syrian refugees that were settled in the area and it was lovely to see the families come in and see children learning about miniature golf. Something that they never had an opportunity to do and that's really our advantage. 
>> I love this story about the children and the mini golf. It's so important for people to work in libraries to recognize all the good that we already do. 
We're always challenging ourselves to do better and more which is obviously important. 
What are key areas of untapped potential through your library. 
Health equity. I agree. We can always involve our teams, especially if they get older. 
Yes. 
We can tap others to have expertise. Nutrition and cooking, yeah. 
And a systemic approach to partnering with marginalized communities. Absolutely. We explore the concept of opportunities or unexplored opportunities is what community needs and wants. So I know Sarah has some thoughts. Sarah, in your area of the library, what community needs and wants could the library address? 
>> They want it to be open more.
And I don't know if folks in other places have similar issues, I would imagine it's a common thing and we can't be open. We don't have as many open hours as we would like to. It's not a simple thing to fix because it has to do with the budget and staffing levels and all kinds of things. And it's a barrier to folks using all the great services that we offer if we don't have weekend hours or we don't have evening hours and can't make it into the library most of the time that we're open. Or they met in order to advocate to get more funding to be able to have the staff open longlonger and there's other people to it too. And many of them are not ADA accessible. I know we have -- in my -- in the northwest part of the city I have a library that has an elevator but it's broken all the time. We have gotten it fixed and then it breaks again. Old buildings that need a lot of care and maintenance. So that's a huge issue in terms of being accessible to our communities. 
And one thing that we have done has been adapting to the virtual world and having, you know, digital programming, live streaming on social media, but then also having, you know, like hotlines and phone numbers that people can call for information and to learn how to use digital resources if they're not already there so I think some of that stuff is stuff that we should continue doing even after the pandemic to continue being accessible to, you know, our community and our patrons in different ways and meeting different people's needs. 
>> I don't know if you're leaning away from your microphone but if you could lean to it. We're always having challenges with our building situation and trying to keep up with some of our older buildings and things. So definitely appreciate it. In terms of the neighborhood where you work, what community needs and wants can the library address. 
>> One of the things that I find very important to remember when we're working with community needs and wants is that while you may be talking about it there's also the fact that there's multiple communities and microcommunities and groups within your larger community. So it's very important to not look at your service area with monochromatic glasses. And when we imbed, we get out of our building, we spend a lot of time-out in the community. And we do a lot of listening. When we're listening, we're starting to hear not only what it is that people believe about the library but what their personal aspirations are. Either for them as individuals or for the population group that they're aware of. We start to hear what some of these needs, desires, aspirations and we can talk to them about what is it that our library could be doing in order to help to meet those needs or meet their goals. Some of the examples of what we have been able to provide. Homework help. 
Enrichment activities for children, computer skills. Help with careers and job readiness. 
Adult education which has been ABE glasses, GED glasses, other languages, citizenship glasses, and opportunities for adults to get up and share some of their interests. And historically marginalized parts of the community and was able to have performing arts for some of the performing arts based high schools. They were able to come to some of the workout sessions and get an idea of what they needed in order to do a successful audition and then run through some of the requirements and we have worked with neighborhood partners like turning points for children in order to provide a specialized LGBTQ cafe and to have that as a safe space as a meet up with LGBTQ teens and their allies could get together a couple of times a month and meet and engage and talk about issues and concerns. We worked to provide free business resources glasses that have enabled people to start their own micro businesses or even aspire to move into a store front. And during the pandemic we worked with Philly food share and elected officials to give out food boxes. So these are a number of the services that we are able to provide and what I really want to emphasize around that is you find out about the services needed and the community partners that you can work with imbedding yourself in the community and doing an awful lot of listening and engagement. 
>> Partnerships can come from just about anywhere. I'm a strong believer in embracing Serendipity and keeping my eyes open. We can draw on the strength to help partners connect with our library community while simultaneously drawing on resources to grow and expand our community. We have been able to take existing partnerships and bring them into the virtual space, create new partnerships through social media and even bring virtual programs to real life with the help of community partners. I'll give you some examples. How do we take it online. They're located here in Philadelphia and they also take their therapy goats on the road. When we connected with them, it turned out I already knew the director.
Talk about Serndipity. In the past she had worked for an organization that provided early childhood education for children with autism and I had worked closely with her on story time programming. The indoor outdoor event drew over 200 people. 
Later when we were doing all of our programming virtually in 2020, we asked Philly goat project to create a video for us to be shared with our patrons on social media. This time the video was viewed by almost a thousand people on facebook and Youtube combined. Virtual programming expands our reach and our capacity. And now they're back for visiting neighborhood libraries for outdoor programming. Social media helps us create new partnerships. The most recent success story is our partnership with the local author and illustrator. She saw her book, can I sit with you featured in an unboxing video we posted on Instagram. Patrons enjoy behind the scenes content and unboxing and reactions tend to do well. 
It's another way to browse our collections from home and make decisions about what they would like to place on hold and check out. It's always great to tag the authors and illustrators and publishers because they will respond a lot of the time. She wanted to come to one of our existing virtual programs. I was going to talk a little bit about our read to a therapy dog program but as we're running a little bit short on time, I'm going to skip over that. The communications department invites the public to post picks of their dogs with books and use the hashtag FLP dog days. For years I wanted to host an actual dog day event at the library for people to bring their dogs, mingle, and have community partners tabling. But something always gets in the way. Time, logistics, budget, this year it was outside and we had an author with a book about a dog interested in doing an event. It was the perfect opportunity. We tied it in with our summer reading program and brought in new and existing partners to table including paws. It was a super fun day and will hopefully become an annual tradition along with the social media campaign. 
If you want to see more of the free library programs and partnerships, visit the central children's department on social media, please. 
>> What community partnerships would have greater programming success. 
>> There's four different levels to do a whole range of programming. The first levels are the ones that help us to determine what community groups want and need. They're the ones that we work with and they include schools, the ones that are really involved in people's day-to-day social lives and they can tell us what people are struggling with or aspiring too.
The next level help pay for or provide the programming or the resources and these can include elected officials, social support agencies, civic groups, community development corporations, business improvement districts and the like. The third level of partnerships are the ones that help to provide large scale community programs. These are the type of things where you have block parties. A couple of thousand people come to the program. And houses of worship and civic associations and also it's necessary to bring in elected officials and members of your local municipal leadership.
Finally, it's important to have partners that are good at reaching marginalized community groups and hard to reach populations. Not just to bring in the information about what kind of programming you should be doing but to help to share, network, and outreach to tell people about what you're providing. They can include houses of worship, schools, and it's important to emphasize the trusted individuals because they can really be a gateway into the harder to reach populations. Can you take us from here. 
>> Yes. What is your community passionate about and what does your community want to see from the library? So I'm going to ask a question to all three of our panelists. What strategies and actions support our vision for a future library and community. So let's get started with Becky. 
Learning to manage change is going to be very important in regard to that as well. Also diversity, equity and inclusion has always been a focus of the central children's department since I started working here. We strive toward a welcoming and inclusive environment providing representation to the diverse community we serve and centraling marginalized communities. And programs and displays and diverse performers and partners in our programs and events. We have been looking toward the future, the central children's department will move beyond inclusion and work toward currating a children's collection and we also have a goal to provide LGBTQ plus family programming year around. 
Some of our most popular virtual programming content has been pride month themed. We have lots of LGBTQ plus staff, patrons and community partners at the central children's department. 
We can develop these strengths to meet the opportunity and become a leader in the area of LGBTQ plus family library programming. 
>> Support our vision for future libraries and communities. 
They are our strengths and there's things that people come to expect from us but we don't want them to become a standard that that's the only thing that we are known for and the only thing that we do. So as we're engaging with our communities and we're finding that people would like us to try certain things, sometimes it sounds kind of scary or intimidating. We're not sure whether or not that we have the skills and the abilities to provide the resources that the community is asking for. Or maybe some of the ideas that they're asking the library to sponsor and programming that they would like to bring and present within the library is a little bit different from the way we have done things. And there's always a way to learn and grow. Trust the feedback that you get from your community and rely on them for guidance and to be focused on new, can be very scary but also really exciting. 
>> Thank you, Suzin. Sarah, do you have anything to add to that? 
>> Yeah, I would just say one thing that I think is really important so to engage community members in the decision making processes that are going to impact them and the library services that they use. 
Decisions about what the libraries hours are going to be or what services are going to be offered or, you know, what external organizations we're going to partner with and that kind of thing. So if there's a cool idea, whether it comes from them directly, staff don't have the resources and support to implement it properly, it's not going to be a sustainable thing.
So I think making sure that the people that are using the services and the people that are making it happen are both actively engaged in the decision making processes is going to yield us, you know, the most responsive and sort of, you know, a library system that is meeting the needs of our communities, I think. And we want to hear what the community needs and try to make it happen.
>> Thank you. Now we'll move on.
>> Demonstrating results is so important to our boards, our funders and stake holders and this is about results. And please tell us, considering the opportunities and aspirations, how will we know that we're on track in achieving our goals? 
What results do we want to see? 
>> We learned what types of content our patrons wanted to consume virtually. The 0 to 5 age group has a shorter attention span for screen time than in real life. Collecting this information helps us work smarter and not harder and we can create focus programming geared toward what our patrons have told and showed us they want. Circulation statistics show that people continue to engage with us online and place holds on books despite our location being closed. On the whole pick up list each day, we saw a lot of the titles that we had featured in the virtual programs, posts and displays. 
Also qualitative data is just as important as quantitative data although we're not getting the immediate intrinsic reward that is positive feedback from a child or a family at a story time program that all children's librarians know and love. And say Hi, library fans. That warms our hearts. Two times I was recognized by strangers outside.
One time a neighbor I didn't know recognized my voice and asked are you from the library? 
My children and I watch you on Instagram and we love the mindfulness activities. Virtual programming has chosen to be a success and we have will continue to provide it through social media for the foreseeable future. So how might we track the impact or changes that have happened and we're looking at just a couple of minutes response each. Sorry to rush you. So super quickly, there's a lot of important ways to gather that feedback. I think qualitative and quantitative are really important so I always like surveys. You can do digital surveys or paper surveys, sometimes at the end of a program. But that's never going to replace the qualitative feedback and how the library is doing. The services that they're using. Maybe the services that they don't know about that we need to do a better job of getting the word out. That kind of thing which is harder during the pandemic. But we can ask people what they think and incorporate the feedback into the decisions that we're making going forward. 
>> The other thing that's important to keep in mind is that there's a lot of things that we never really know. We know not through our intellect but through our experience. He's one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century and what something means to the individual is not necessarily what can be gathered through big data. Experience trumps numbers.
So the way that a person experiences a library engagement or library program, we may never really be able to know what that means to that person because they internalized it and it's become part of that entire network of lifetime experiences that is going into the making of that person. Some of the things that libraries do best and our resources and strengths, we were talking about the importance of trust and the importance of fond childhood memories. Well, we don't know how ten, 20 years from now, the way that somebody engaged with the library and program today or tomorrow is going to impact the trust that they have in us and that they might come back to us in the future. We also don't know about how when somebody is a member of a marginalized community historically challenged and vulnerable community or they themselves are going through a very traumatic portion of their life we're feeling affirmed. 
What that has done for them as an individual. We need to strike a balance when we look at how we track results between the data that we gather or the long-term seeds of the long-term impacts that we're having on people's person hood. That's something that I would like to leave everybody with is a thought. 
That we don't really know the importance that we may be to somebody today. And what it will mean to them in the future. 
>> Thank you. I'd like to thank you for sharing your experiences with us and then also Lynn Williamson my co-facilitator. 
We'd be happy to connect with all of you about community engagement or the community center library's curriculum. 
Feel free to reach out to any or all of us. Just reach out to the content information right below our names and faces. 
>> The learner guide on the landing page is a packet that can help you plan a successful conversation in our community. 
And I mentioned toward the beginning of this webinar that this packet will have some practical facilitation tips. You can use it as a tool to dive into what the community wants and needs. The learner guide exercise will help you prepare the logistics and also think through your goals to be better prepared to listen to your community in an asset based stance. If you're interested in receiving the announcement when our curriculum is released later this month, sign up to notified using the link that is posted here and also it will be in chat and thank you so much for participating today. Let's continue to be in touch. 


>> Fantastic. Thank you for all of you. It's been such a pleasure and honor to learn about this awesome project and we look forward to the launch of the curriculum and we'll also announce that in crossroads so stay tuned for that later this month and thank you to our captioner today. I will send you all an e-mail later today once the recording is posted and I'll also send you all automatically certificate for today's session later on next week and we're going to send you to a short survey as you leave. We love to get your feedback on our sessions. It helps us guide our on going programming and we'll share that with our presenters for today. All right. Everyone have a great rest of your weekend and thank you so much again for everyone and a special thanks to all of your staff for all of the great work they have done as a part of the skills for community center libraries project.