And I'm going to welcome our moderator for today's session, my colleague, Anna Musun-Miller is the realm toolkit editor for museums and it's been an honor and pleasure working with her this past year on this project.

And Anna is going to get us started and introduce you to our presenters for today.

Welcome, Anna.

>> ANNA: Thank you so much.

Joining us today is a powerhouse of library museum experts.

We have Cassandra Williams Rush joining us from the C. Williams Rush museum of African-American arts and culture.

Julie Brophy from Baltimore county library.

Sherry Aragon from espanola library and Stacen goldman.

They are sharing us stories of collaborations at their own institutions and I'm very grateful for the time they've shared with us today and their willingness to speak up and contribute to the learnings of the whole field.

I am the toolkit editor for museums for the realm project.

And I wanted to give a quick overview if you're not familiar with the Realm project, we've been producing content since two years now, just after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We're a funded project focused on producing library, archives and museums specifically sources during COVID-19.

Realm stands for reopening archives, libraries and museums and our initial focus was on the decision making necessary to go through the process of that initial reopening and as our organizations have started to shift their own focus from reopening to sustaining during an endemic rather than a pandemic, we have shifted our output so initially, we were focused on reviewing and summarizing SARS-Co-V-2 research as well as conducting original laboratory testing on materials pertinent to our field through our colleagues at the laboratories.

And since that initial purpose, we've now shifted to delivering a collection of toolkit resources that can help with ongoing decision making necessary during this crisis.

And we've learned extensively from subject matter experts like our generous panelists today as well as a whole collection of library archive and museum professionals on our steering committee's working groups and other advisory capacities.

The toolkit resources provided by the realm project are available for free.

None of these are behind any kind of pay wall so you don't have to be a member of any kind of organization to access them.

You can go right on to the realm website and download a whole collection of checklists, resource roundups which are resources on specific topics.

Summaries of pertinent resource as well as interviews with other subject matter experts like our panelists today who were working in high  libraries, archives and museums and provide their perspective of specific topics and the challenges of reopening and coming up later this year, I'd encourage you to keep an eye out for our public health crisis management toolkit.

This is a subset of materials that are specifically built around the lessons learned from our COVID-19 experience and looking ahead, trying to prepare ourselves as a field for the next crisis.

So these will be delivered both through our website as well as a printable playbook for folks who like to have things in a three-ring binder, we'll have it available in that format as well.

That will be coming out later this year.

And again, it will be a completely free resource so we hope you will take advantage of it.

That is our quick overview of the realm project and I want to get straight into our presentations.

So our first presenter this morning is Cassandra Williams Rush.

Thank you, Cassandra.

>> CASSANDRA: Hi, thank you!

>> ANNA: You should be able to advance your slide at will, I believe.

>> CASSANDRA: OK.

Yes, we are the C. Williams Rush museum of African-American arts and culture in Kinstree, South Carolina.

It's the county seat for the county and the county has a population of 67% African-Americans so we are a county that's predominantly a majority African-Americans.

The museum is presenting this through partnership with the communities for immunity and the title of our project, as you can see there is "victory through COVID-19 vaccines with South Carolina black heroes in medicine."

And we are using illustrations and stories of one, Dr. MA tilde A Evans, Dr. Joseph A. Mason and Dr. Spann.

Three black physicians in South Carolina's history that will be projecting examples from our past of overcoming, you know, the health threats through persistence, education, perseverance and medicines.

We'll get back -- we'll cover more information on them shortly.

The communities for immunity project, some of our deliverables and our project focus included expanding the scope of the project from round 1 with additional partners.

So we did receive a round 1 community grant in the amount of $10,000 and we were very excited when we were provided the opportunity to apply for round two which we received because we were able to expand on the partners that we created in round one and created quite a few more partners for round two.

Round two started on December 10th of 2022 and was to end March 31st and was extended another month so it just ended at the end of April.

So by doing so, we're able to provide additional opportunities for vaccine access.

We were able to scale up our outreach to include black fathers and their families in vaccine distribution so one of the main focus was to increase vaccine competence in the African-American community and focus on the black men because they are the least vaccinated in the population.

And they have the greatest percentage of negative outcomes, more deaths.

We are to create an exhibition focused on the historical efforts by black medical professionals.

That we mentioned earlier, we'll create a guide and facilitate replication nationally.

And include medical professionals to assist and assess the needs in our target communities.

Oops.

OK, so what you see on the screen here are from two of our events.

We have a mobile health unit we incorporated in our team of P.A., Ph.D., Dr. Stewart Darby and we always also would have a registered nurse on hand.

We collaborated with South Carolina department of health and environmental control and their contractors to get nurses on board who provided vaccinations at the great majority of our events and we were able to provide vaccine -- 

I'm sorry, COVID testing, blood pressure checks, glucose checks so we provided some added value to our events as well by so doing.

And we participated in the parade, Christmas parade in Kingstree, South Carolina which was, of course, a well attended event and that was a help to get our intent out there, our exposure and our activities and that event went over really well.

These are some of the examples of the flyers that we used.

Free COVID-19 vaccine clinics.

For instance, on the left and on the right, it was one that was an ad also that was incorporated into the local newspaper, the Kingstree news comes out once weekly.

We did advertise in there about our events.

We learn coming from a small, it's small rural community, we get the best outcome when we can partner and collaborate with others in their events.

It's hard to expect someone to drive 15 and 20 miles to come to a certain location for just one thing.

So we tried to make it as beneficial as possible when people do come out and encourage them to come out and that works really well.

We also provide incentives.

As well.

We were giving out hams and at two big events at the museum one March 1st and the other April 1st, it was like a big community day.

So it was good communication.

We got people tested.

Blood pressure checks, glucose checks, S.T.D. screenings, food, D.J., I mean, it was just coming out of the pandemic with so many people being confined for so long, you know, a lot of seniors in my category were anxious to come out.

They came out early and they stayed late and thoroughly enjoyed it and participated.

We mentioned earlier about the exhibition of communities for immunity.

What you see here is what I'm calling the evolving exhibition, some of the -- on the left, for instance, is the exhibition that included the doctors that we mentioned, Dr. Mason who was from Kingstree, chief of staff of the benevolence societies hospital there.

The hospital was started by blacks in 1947 with menial means because of the Jim Crowe era and we were not allowed to go to the other hospitals.

Dr. Spann of Columbia was chief of staff of the waiverly good Samaritan hospital.

He and Dr. Mason knew each other.

Dr. Spann would travel to Kingstree on Thursdays to provide surgeries at the benevolent societies hospital in Kingstreet and Dr. Evans was the first black licensed female physician in the state of South Carolina.

So these three persons had to endure a lot.

They were persistent and they helped to make the health situation in our communities much better every day.

And on the right, it was just a close-up of the board with some of the items on there.

And I think the next one as part of the exhibition, we contracted with three artists.

One gentleman did not show up when we did the big opening on March 1st but on the left, we have Forrest Fortier, the art on the left was done by a renowned South Carolina artist.

Hidden behind her dress there, she did a really good job at creating individual scenes involving each of the medical doctors, their home or their hospital or their offices, the historical markers associated with that and the gentleman on the right is Desmon Rush, the gentleman that did the picture of -- excuse me, the portrait of Dr. Mason and Dr. Spann.

I just covered Dr. Matilda Evans, 1872 to 1935 in Columbia, first licensed black female doctor in the state of South Carolina in 1897.

Dr. Mason 1894 to 1996.

He was the chief of staff of the benevolent societies hospital, very well respected gentleman.

I knew him through high school and then, you know, he passed.

Dr. Spann lived to be 1979 and I do recommend getting medical service at his office building there in Kingstreet.

As we said before, we can't go it alone, this is the community center collaboration doing COVID-19 and here included is my contact information, the address of the museum is 200 Hampton avenue and I have a website so we'll invite you to go there as well.

And we were -- are -- were, I guess, we're in the process now of finalizing our report of participating museums in the communities for immunity project.

Thank you.

>> ANNA: Thank you so much.

Great to hear about the connections between historical figures like that and modern day and the way those stories can be inspirational to people in this specific context.

So it's great.

Thank you.

Now we're going to pass the ball to Julie Brophy, adult and community engagement manager at Baltimore County public library.

>> JULIE: Thank you so much, Anna and thank you, Cassandra, that was really interesting to learn more about.

I want to look up those doctors, too, to see.

As Anna says, I'm the adult and community engagement manager at Baltimore County public library and like other library systems, you know, we shut down in 2020 first for a couple of weeks and then longer and then with limited public service and slowly ramped back up.

But changing -- expanding our changing work with existing partners and then finding others as well helped us continue to show ourselves to be an integral part of the community.

And when I talk about our community, I'd like to tell you a little bit about Baltimore County so we surround but don't include the city of Baltimore.

We serve the more than 830,000 residents of the county in 19 branches with more branches in the more densely populated areas of the county.

We have three bookmobiles that primarily serve senior communities and youth.

And our newest vehicle is the mobile library law center and I'll talk a little bit about that more when I talk about some legal services in a few minutes.

Assist  -- as I talk about how we leverage partners to extend our reach and their reach, we are a large, generally well staffed, generally well funded library.

But there are limits to what we can do as for any size library system, right?

So finding partners who can offer specialized services, subject matter of experts helps us and our partners help our community.

So I'm going to talk about a few broader areas and describe kind of how we work with partners in each of those areas.

Many times successfully but not always.

That's the nature of partnerships, right?

Things work and sometimes things don't.

It made the most sense to start with community health as our jumping off topic.

It was on everyone's mind, right over the last couple of years and continues to be and like many other libraries throughout the pandemic, Baltimore County public libraries was asked to distribute COVID test kits and masks.

That all went very well from our local county department of health.

>> Julie, I'm going to jump in really quickly.

Your audio is a little spotty.

>> JULIE: These included like small bottles of hand sanitizers and disposable masks.

They were really targeting those that are having difficulty initially finding paying for those items.

When we started giving out these COVID safety kits --

>> Julie, I'm going to jump in quick.

Your audio is a little spotty.

I'm wondering if you should turn off your video.

Julie, your audio is a little spotty.

So maybe turn off your video.

I don't know if that would help.

>> JULIE: Is it better?

>> Let's give it a try, yeah.

>> JULIE: I just did.

Can you hear me?

>> Yep, I can hear you.

>> JULIE: OK, you can hear me now?

>> Yep, uh-huh.

>> JULIE: OK, all right.

So I think I was talking about COVID safety kits.

We had received over 10,000 of them and when the rush to get them had slowed a bit, we had kits left over.

And so using how we are uniquely situated in the community and an excellent partner for other organizations and what other -- 

like other partners that we have in the case of the COVID safety kits, we distributed them to other local partners and sometimes that was shelters, churches, mosques, synagogues, anyone who was, you know, locally and was really situated within the community, even a co-working space took some.

Just as a way to get those items distributed, we leveraged the library's unique role in the community and that sets us apart from other county agencies.

While the COVID-19 pandemic went on, so did the opioid epidemic.

Baltimore County has the second highest fatalities in the state.

We continued to offer Narcan training virtually with something that had been offered in person at branches.

And we distributed -- through us, we distributed disposal kits and used data to identify which zip codes and branches locateed in those zip codes that had the higher overdose rate.

So all of those things worked, you know, with a few hiccups.

Worked fairly well.

So I'd like to tell you about something that didn't work well.

Not for any other reason but capacity.

So Maryland hunger solutions is a great nonprofit and works to end hunger and improve nutrition for everyone in Maryland.

And so at one point, they reached out to us.

We worked with them to get some staff trained to help individuals over the phone offer -- apply for SNAP benefits and the staff did get trained.

As we tried to take that next step connecting the staff with the individuals who needed to apply for SNAP benefits, the group, Maryland hunger solutions was so overwhelmed that they couldn't take that on anymore.

And I say that as a remind, partners have capacity issues, too, and we need to be cognizant as that as we look to partners to extend our reach.

And as we talked about hunger and food insecurity and other expanded service thanks to our partners, around food distribution.

Actually, in the fall of 2015, we started distributing snacks after school during the school year and meals during the summer for youths ages 18 and under.

That was with partners of good harvest through St. Vincent dePaul society and Baltimore county schools with additional support from Maryland food bank.

Starting in the pandemic, we offered meals year round to 12 locations so 12 branches that met the criteria for distribution from these grant funded partners and generally associated with title one schools, socioeconomic areas.

The meals are prepared by good harvest and include two breakfasts and two lunches for Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

We distributed more than 77,000 meals in 2021.

Currently, at the end of March, we had distributed 55,000 meals.

We intend on continuing with that.

So we started food distribution with partners pre-pandemic but able to help expand the partnership during and, you know, as we move into endemic.

And sort of the continuing expansion was true for our legal services as well.

So pre-pandemic, we worked with a few legal partners, Maryland legal aid to offer services at our branches.

As we all know, that stopped.

So part of what we wanted to do was find a way to continue the relationship and bring that information and that service they were offering now via phone, sometimes via Zoom, to our customers however we could.

So we did, you know, offered some virtual information programs with our partners on Facebook live and estate planning for everyone on Zoom.

We also held ongoing conversations with them about other ways to reach customers and so we came together to create a variety of videos around legal issues like housing and expungement and the lawyers are the subject matter experts and with staff, doing some interviewing.

We've made them all available on the you tube channel.

And, you know, we use the expertise not just for the content but also sometimes, you know, to helping us determine when we should make these videos available.

So, for example, you know, we wanted to have a video on expungement but we waited until it was last Fall I want to say, November, to post that one to get that one done because the laws, the procedures were all changing.

And we didn't know that.

That was not something we would have known without our partners.

And then, you know, those were two existing partners.

But during the pandemic, we began working with the university of Maryland's low income taxpayer clinics.

That's an academic clinic operating within the university of Maryland school of law and they provide free independent legal representation at the low income taxpayers in disputes with the I.R.S. and we were referred to them and they referred to us, we were kind of connected via Maryland legal aid.

So our existing partners can be particularly useful and, you know, in helping us extend our reach.

One good partnership can lead to others.

So, you know, that is -- then we started with working with them a little bit, expanded in-person clinics when we could as we got through the end of tax season.

And recently, we met with another legal services organization, Maryland volunteer lawyer service.

This partnership is in its infancy, but it's an opportunity to bring crucial legal information into the community.

And, you know, speaking of into the community, it is the mobile library law center that I mentioned at the top of my presentation.

Hopefully, you all could hear me then.

This vehicle went on the road in August 2021.

Right now, attorneys from Maryland legal aid, one-on-one service on the vehicle.

Library staff offer referrals and information services sometimes on the vehicle but mostly outside under an awning.

We didn't expect to roll that out and to try and make this all happen during the pandemic -- as we continue to navigate the pandemic.

But during all this time, we were having ongoing conversations with our partners about safety for our customers and staff theirs and ours.

And even stopped service due to COVID concerns at one point.

And cultivated partnerships are time consuming but can be well worth it because many of these services food distribution, the health and vaccine clinics, legal services, you know, we couldn't do them without our partners.

One other I wanted to mention was something that we did a lot of pre-pandemic which was kids.

During the pandemic, we worked with partners to support the creativity of our young residents courtesy of a couple of local museums to start.

They are distributing kits where they made things like sun catchers and kaleidoscopes and masks.

The picture you see here was shared on our library's Instagram.

It is our Penelope and they did this imagination art kit that they got from the art museum and they had a lot of fun creating Gregory inspired art projects.

At different times, even local organizations like business association or co-working space called Dundalk renaissance provided some kits to branch in the area.

When the museums were transitioning back to visitors, having visitors on site.

We took the opportunity to create our own art kits and made instructional videos to go.

You can see a picture of one of them there.

In this case, the partner inspired us to continue a popular service and keep us connected to our community.

I just wanted to say thank you.

I know I mentioned a lot of different partners and different ways we work with them.

But partnerships played a key role before the pandemic, changed our service model.

They were key during the pandemic for us to continue to connect with our community.

And they will still be crucial in our future work.

But I also want to remind everyone and I always need to remember myself that libraries and museums, we help our partners stay connected to their community, too.

And we've seen it continue, more groups are reaching out to us for support and help.

And a positive result, if you will, is that we're seen by other organizations as a value and invaluable partner in the community.

So I went through a lot of stuff.

Here's my contact information.

If you have any questions, I want to thank you for your time.

>> ANNA: Thank you so much, Julie.

Really interesting to hear about the huge variety of different types of partnerships and the services that -- the very different services that they allow you to then extend to the community and scaffold off each other's success.

That's great.

We're going to transition now to Sherry Aragon from Espanola public library.

>> Thank you, Anna.

Good afternoon, everyone.

 I want to introduce myself, my name is Sherry Aragon, the library DREBLTHor here at the Espanola public library and it is situated on the border of Rio in Sante Fe county and between Sante Fe and 30 minutes from Los alamos and the city itself is some centuries old between centuries old and Espanola honors and supports cultural diversity.

It's a blending of its roots of Hispanic and Native American cultures.

Also known as the low rider capital of the world, and the motto here is the heart of northern New Mexico where cultures unite.

And I just wanted to go through some partnerships that we had made during COVID 2020.

We did work with the Espanola public schools and helped to deliver meals, breakfast and lunch and the community services department which involves the library, recreation, parks and the senior center since we were shut down, we would go and help these different organizations to go out and help deliver these meals.

So we were all sent out in different directions.

Also, in the afternoons coming back or working back in the library and doing library duties as always.

Breakfast and lunch for students all over the county and it was at the Espanola high school and they had a proclamation for the hard work the staff was doing, the cafeteria.

We also partnershiped with New Mexico health department and we actually were registering through the call center for vaccines.

People would call from Rio Arriba Counties and people without internet access.

It is a very large county in northern New Mexico and it's very rural.

So there's a lot of places that do not get internet service.

So people were calling in and in the call center, the staff was here.

I have a staff of -- at the time, I had a staff of four.

So we were all, you know, taking turns answering the phones and getting people registered and know that they were moving on and one of the flyers that we had.

Also partnering with Rio Arriba County, our county where we're working on the census 2020.

So at that time, we were going out and doing these gatherings within the city and as you can see, there is a flyer there of a census fiesta drive-through there was different people giving clipboards and people were driving through.

We asked them the information and that was with the Rio Arriba county so we had employees from the county coming over also helping us and we had several of these in 2020, at the start of the census all the way up to the very end.

And we were kind of offering incentives for people to come out so this way, we knew we were getting a lot of the people counted.

You can see Rio Arriba is a very large county on the map there.

It was hard to kind of reach a lot of rural areas, but with this, we had to go to the radio station.

We put it in the newspaper.

There was information that we put on the local marquees that the library runs.

It's on the website for those that get the city website so this is where we were helping during COVID.

We were also helping with tax help New Mexico and the united way of central New Mexico.

We were also another call center and helping people fill out their taxes.

We were just getting the information and we were E-Mailing it off to the people at tax help New Mexico and they were filing the taxes for those that were income at 57 or less of those who were 65 years or older.

And then we did between January 2020 and may 2021.

And total clients we served were 904 clients that we served.

They were coming into the library and we were actually closed but we were working outside and taking these forms.

And we'd get all the information from them.

And then send them off to the tax help New Mexico.

We were also working with the Rio Arriba County senior center, meals on wheels program.

And we were signing up different clients for the nine different sites that the county has.

And we helped deliver lunch meals daily from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 and in 2020, we added 236 to the 400 that were already being served through the county and the number now is bigger than that now.

And total meals served in 2020 was over 25,000 for the county and we still right now partnership -- we have a partnership going with all these entities that we were working with during 2020 so we can still reach out there and grab them and work with the communities and they know that we're here and they know that we're willing to help and just do different things for the community.

And I think that's what it's all about.

Where cultures unite.

So in northern New Mexico, that's what we do and that's how we got through 2020.

I know people were probably looking at the photos there as they were signing up.

And actually, it was our support deck for 2020.

Very fun working with all these entities.

Everybody has more information, my E-Mail there, phone number is available.

And, you know, if you want to, you know, just talk or E-Mail me something, and I can help you to see if you can work with your communities and see what other partnerships we can all create.

And that is it!

Thank you very much.

>> ANNA: Thank you so much, Sherry.

I'm very interested in Larry the support dog.

Maybe we'll have time in the Q&A to ask more about Larry.

Our last presenter for this portion is Stacen Goldman from the Framingham history center, she'll talk about the relationship they worked to build during COVID.

>> STACEN: Hi, everyone fortunately I am the curator at the Framingham history center, as Anna said, and we've been talking about a lot of amazing sort of successful community relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And what we're going to talk about now is sort of how the COVID-19 pandemic actually shined a light on our own sort of shortcomings in community relationships and how we started to correct those during this time.

So a little bit about the Framingham history center, we were established in 1888 as a Framingham natural and historic society and our mission is to preserve and share Framingham's history in order to encourage connection to community.

So based on this mission, our target audience is the people of Framingham, we want to be connecting our community.

But our existing audience, in reality, is largely white, largely native born, wealthy and older.

The population is definitely older.

And most of our major donors tellingly actually no longer live in Framingham so we do have long standing family ties to the community, but I think this says more than anything else about the audience that we have been serving and sort of the version of Framingham that we were serving, version of ex pats, people remember Framingham of being a specific community during a specific time.

And unfortunately, we don't actually have detailed demographic data on our membership.

But we do know from a 2018 member survey actually that nearly 77% of respondents to that survey were over 51 years old which is very different from the demographics of Framingham itself.

So here's a little intro to the demographics of Framingham.

I'm not going to read all of them and let you absorb them a little bit.

The demographic data for Framingham, racial and ethnic data is challenging to break down because a large proportion of Framingham residents are categorized as some other race.

What's telling here is the foreign born population and language data that we have.

This is in large part because Framingham's large community of immigrants from Latin America and especially from Brazil who are themselves of incredibly diverse -- they're incredibly diverse racially and ethnically and Brazilian immigrants have been an integral part of our city for decades since the 80's.

But there's really still no accurate count of that community in Framingham or in the United States in general which is partly because so many are undocumented but it's actually a lot of it has to do with the fact that Brazilians' racial and ethnic identities are very different and far more nuanced than American demographers have cared to represent.

The population data is more helpful for us in tracking the diversity of our community than sort of the race data.

And you'll also see that Framingham is a young community.

Median age is 35.1 years which is much younger than our 51 plus largely membership.

So when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit in early 2020, we sort of jumped into overdrive.

So our initial pandemic response involved a lot of public health messaging so we partnered with the public health nurse who was a long time volunteer of ours and the public health museum in Massachusetts to create a series of programs, blog posts and outreach materials communicating the latest information regarding the novel Coronavirus, latest recommendations by public health officials and the history of Framingham's past pandemics.

We had just done a World War I exhibit.

I had done a huge highlight on the flu pandemic so we were sort of channelling that already, that information that we had already gathered.

We also established virtual resources for parents at home for home schooling purposes so our live exhibition which has been in person was very quickly put on line and that was accessed by like 10,000 viewers in the first month alone, primarily because schools -- the schools in Framingham were using it as a teaching tool, they were doing their new virtual schooling.

We offered virtual field trips.

We had home school assignments and lesson plans for parents who were home schooling their own children.

And we also launched a pandemic journal project encouraging people to record their thoughts, submit photos to us, and the primary goal of this project was not actually to collect material for ourselves.

But to give people an outlet and let them know that they weren't alone and we were a community facing collective trauma.

So we were feeling pretty good about what we were doing and how we were meeting the challenges of the pandemic.

But there was a little bit of we were brought back down to earth as the information about the disparities and the effects of COVID on Framingham's population was being widely publicized and studied.

You can see here there are clear health disparities in Framingham during the first year of the pandemic.

On right, we have data by race and ethnicity and that data is probably a little hard to read but also not particularly helpful for the reasons that I said before.

But on the left, we have data broken down by primary language.

And this dark blue is Portuguese speaking people and the yellow is Spanish speaking people and then the green is English speaking people and then there are sort of unknown and other categories.

We'll see that Spanish and Portuguese speaking residents contracted COVID-19 at a higher rate than any other group.

About 20% of Framingham's population identifies as Hispanic or Latino.

But Spanish speakers and Portuguese speakers accounted for about 66% of the COVID cases in the first year in the city.

By comparison, white residents English speaking account for about 60% of Framingham's population but they were only 23% of it was Coronavirus infections so you can see Spanish and Portuguese speakers together accounted for 2/3 of those infected in Framingham during the first year of the pandemic.

So this data was being publicized at a time that we were already really reckoning with our own failure to reach an audience that's actually representative of today's Framingham.

And we had a sense of responsibility to offer our resources.

And we felt like we had good resources to offer.

To a wider Framingham community and over the years, you know, multiple attempts had been made to reach out to a broader range of audiences and not just the foreign born population.

But wider audiences by age and economic strata as well.

We hadn't had much success.

This is largely because those programs were not developed in conjunction with the communities we were trying to reach.

We realized that if we wanted to be a truly reliable resource for our community in times of crisis, we needed to engage with them more deeply.

And so we secured a grant to develop a plan to basically work successful and meaningful community engagement really collaborative community engagement into the fabric of our organization.

And here you can see just some of the benefits of community engagement that we sort of spelled out as we were working on this plan.

Creating a space in which all members feel empowered.

Better community understanding of the resources that we could make available to them.

Services that we could offer that better reflect the needs of the wider community.

Of course, organizational sustainability which is really important.

Sort of meaningful collaborative relationship.

So I was put in charge of this process.

And I was very intimidated and thought I was going to have to come up with something all by myself to do this.

And then I found this toolkit that was created by the Ontario museum association called "engaging your community, a toolkit for museums."

And so this is a really -- it's a prescriptive process that we adapted to match our needs and available resources and various restrictions that came and went and all the curveballs that COVID threw us over the past two years, so this process is sort of a -- is a six-step process that involves convening a working group comprised of staff, board members and volunteers who are familiar with the workings of the F.H.C. and this working group participated in an orientation and then a self-assessment that examined our organization's current operations.

And how those operations were helping or hindering developing closer relationships with the community.

So we did a series of meetings around that.

But these actions were really in preparation for the real centerpiece of this process.

Step five, community consultation.

So in these community consultations or community listening sessions, the idea was that community members would come together to help develop a vision of Framingham, a vision of what Framingham and its different constituenties needs and the type of programs they'd like to see from a local history center or any type of organization that has the resources available that we do.

There are lots of times that we could be offering outside to the traditional confines of just history.

So we held two of these sessions.

One was in person as things were starting to wane in October of 2021.

And then our second one actually had to be pivoted to remote because of the sort of rise of Delta at the time that we were planning on having it, and so we had around 50 community members participating.

I think it was a little bit more.

But I only wrote a bullet.

Around 50 which isn't helpful.

These sessions were really energetic.

They brought together people from all walks of life.

We had high school students.

We had local business owners.

We had farmers.

We had government officials.

We had parents.

It was really extensive the different cross section of people that we saw.

And there was a real sense of appreciation that we were asking people what it was that they wanted to see.

And that we were opening our doors and our ears and really listening.

And what really came out of this was the sense that we need to be increasing accessibility across the board.

So accessibility is a really big word.

And we're not just talking about creating accessible spaces for people who need accessible spaces which is part of it.

But it was also accessibility of language.

And accessibility of location and accessibility of time.

The overall consensus was that we need to be getting out from behind our own walls and moving into the community and coming to them, you know, when they're available.

And it's also clear that we need to sort of continue these listening sessions as we go, you know, having done this once, doesn't mean that the process of assessment and engagement is over.

We're becoming an organization that's really centered on community partnerships and collaboration.

But that means constantly checking in, coming back to them and having them help us come up with more programming, having them feel more engaged and more heard.

So we've begun working accessibility into our existing projects and programs so we've developed more multilingual resources although we're really at the beginning there.

That digital exhibit that I mentioned Framingham's top 10 is available in both English and Portuguese.

Our annual third grade program which is currently virtual but will hopefully be in person again next year now includes both Portuguese and Spanish speaking doses so all children that we serve get a meaningful experience.

But the main result of the process was a community engagement plan with both short term recommendations for programs that were actually developed by community members in these community consultation sessions and longer term recommendations for a meaningful shift in the culture and leadership of the Framingham history center.

The board officially adopted this plan in February of this year and it's already taking steps to meet many of the recommendations that are posted there.

So we're very excited about this process and sort of the change in our culture.

We have great hope that the next time we have resources that our community needs in times of crisis, we won't be leaving anyone behind again.

So thank you very much!

I'm sorry, I went a little over my time!

If you need to reach me, my E-Mail is on the slide and you can just check us out at framinghamhistory.org.

We'd be happy to see you.

>> ANNA: Thank you very much.

That tool from the Ontario museum association seems like it has real useful content regardless of whether you're in a library or in a museum through that process.

So that was a great resource.

So we have time for question and answer session.

I did see one question specifically for Cassandra that appeared in the chat.

Asking about Dr. Evans specifically asking where Dr. 

Evans received her medical training in the late 19th century with all the challenges that she faced.

>> CASSANDRA: Yes, 1897, she received her degree from the women's medical college in Philadelphia.

>> ANNA: Thank you.

If anybody else has specific questions, please do post them to the chat.

I know I was listening to everybody talk about these various types of community collaborations a theme that appeared in everybody's talk was this idea of being present where people are which I think with heightened by the pandemic.

We had to close our physical sites so we were forced out into places where other people are.

Cassandra, I wondered if I could start with you and ask if you had any advice for other libraries and museums who are working to build those relationships to where other people are, where they should start with their community.

Maybe what partners helped you move out and be in the places where events were happening and people were present that needed services.

>> CASSANDRA: Yes, I do believe that depending on a number of factors, the cultural make-up, the geography, number of various factors will help determine the exact approach to having the biggest success in reaching the most people.

As I mentioned in Williamsburg county, we have a population that is decreasing every year.

It's down now to about 30,000.

But as I said, 67% of the population is African-American.

Very few other -- very few other races, very few Asians, very few.

I think the white population was about 21% or so, if I remember correctly, 60%, 70%, 80%.

Maybe a little higher than that.

We are also a county that has 937 square miles so it will take some time to get from one end of the county to the other to be engaged in services or attend activities.

So for us, it was important to collaborate with others.

Our main goal is to find out what events are going on?

What festivals are going on?

Because we know that people will attend those and we kind of piggy back on those events to get our numbers and to reach as many people as possible.

>> ANNA: That's great.

I wonder if any of our other panelists have observations that they were able to leverage to get out to places like Cassandra was talking about, at festivals or connections that helped you be more aware of where people who needed services might be.

>> CASSANDRA: Something else I wanted to interject before someone else answers, me and my family have a presence, a history and a presence in the community.

We are located in the heritage corridor, for instance, and I guess a term that's used is you could either be a Kumya or a Benya.

A Benya is someone that's lived in the area pretty much all of their lives and has serious personal ownership of the culture, the people and everything that goes on in the neighborhood.

And the Kumyas are those people that were born and lived elsewhere and then decided to come to Kingstreet to live, there's very few people that really do that.

So my family history goes back in that county, you know, for couple hundred years that I've already traced.

So we have a presence, a very, you know, dominant presence in the community.

So that was a big help in getting help to come on board.

>> ANNA: An enviable level of intuitive awareness of what the community needs are.

For folks who have less of that sort of deep rootedness, it is a challenge.

I wonder if any of the other panelists have any observations that they found useful in their collaborations?

>> If I can interject, hopefully you can hear me.

>> ANNA: I can hear you.

>> JULIE: Good.

I think what Cassandra said makes a lot of sense.

I have not always lived in the Baltimore area.

What does that make me a Kumya or Benya?

>> CASSANDRA: Kumya.

>> JULIE: OK.

But there are people that have lived in that area for a long time, and I think what is key is to understand the history of the area in which you're working as much as you can.

And then also identifying who are the key players in the community and sometimes that's looking at who is really engaged and, you know, reading local newspapers but also local social media boards or however places, you know, whatever that area uses for communication.

Baltimore County is an odd shape because we surround the city of Baltimore and so it is people on the west side of the county don't go to places on the east side of the county and people on the west side of the county don't go to the north central part of the county too much.

It's important to know who those key players are in the community.

And looking beyond, looking to local churches, local mosques, local synagogues, all of the local places, the hyper-local area but knowing who those people are and trying to find that information in as many, you know, whether it's, you know, the local a Facebook page that a community association uses somewhere.

I think that's key.

>> ANNA: The suggestions specifically around sort of identifying where the locus of communication is and tapping into that is actionable for people.

Thank you for that.

I also noticed in a lot of the discussions today that people were talking not only about immediate relationships so like one-to-one partnership, but Julie in particular, you mentioned a partner that then connected you to another partner so that you could collaborate.

And I wonder if anybody has advice for other libraries and museums that are looking to build that kind of network, not only the one-to-one relationships but that -- for the next degree of separation of the relationships that are built on the partnership.

Whether you have any suggestions on how to -- how to facilitate those connections or even make partners aware that you're looking for that kind of help to leverage their connections in the community.

>> JULIE: I can say I mean, in my experience, letting people know that you're looking for help and we did a lot of them like finding the person that everyone knows to have someone invite them to our listening sessions because we wanted to talk people that never spent any time with and how do we get them to come to something like a listening session?

We need to build a network but finding other nonprofits specifically in the city that serve the communities we were trying to reach and just asking.

We sent E-Mails, we just asked, and I think, you know, because we're a non-profit in this city, I mean, people know that we're a part of that landscape and so even if we haven't successfully collaborated with your organization before, we're not total strangers.

And I think just not being scared to reach out and say, we realized we're not, you know, we're not reaching the Brazilian community, hey, Brazilian-American resource center, will you please help?

We need to talk to you about this.

This is obviously a problem.

And I think sort of not having that fear is a lot of it.

>> ANNA: That's great.

I know that we are at the top of the hour and we like to finish on time.

So if folks have other commitments they can get off.

Unfortunately, we didn't get to talk about Larry the duck.

So if you want to contact Sherry and find out more about Larry, her contact information is here along with the rest of the panelists.

I just want to thank everybody for spending their time with us.

I think it was a really rich conversation and I feel very lucky to have been a little part of it.

Thank you very much to the panelists for sharing your time and expertise.

And to also our participants.

 

>> Wonderful.

Couple of reminders as we send you off.

I'll send you to a short survey as you leave, that helps collect feedback we'll share with the presenters and helps us guide our ongoing programming and as I said, I'll send you all an E-Mail later today once the recording is posted and I'll send you a certificate automatically for attending today's session.

Thank you again to all of our presenters.

Thank you, Anna, for moderating and to our captioner and her support.

Everyone have a great rest of your week!

Thank you.