>> JENNIFER: I will send you a certificate for attending without even asking. But all of our learning in the catalog does provide a certificate to folks there, so keep that in mind. We love to make sure that folks know about Crossroads, our newsletter comes to your inbox twice a month. It's an excellent way to stay up to date on all things WebJunction. And there's a learner guide that we created as a follow-up for today's session. This is a tool for you to use to extend your learning on the topic. It has a few suggestions for questions for discussion or consideration that you are doing maybe with your team. You can customize this guide, make it your own. It's really for your -- to extend your learning on the topic. I'm so excited to welcome today's presenter, Dr. Audrey Barbakoff comes to us from the Co/Lab Capacity where she is founder and C.E.O. We have had the pleasure of working with Audrey on a number of other webinars and have a fantastic time learning from her. Welcome so much and we're so excited that you are here. >> DR. BARBAKOFF: Thanks so much, Jennifer. It's always a joy to be here. I'm so excited to share with you and with our group today on the recording, one of my favorite topics in the whole world, which is community-led planning in libraries because I am a nerd. Hope that by the end of the day you will be too. To give you background on me and where I'm coming from, I spent more than 10 years working from public libraries, different management and leadership sorts of roles, getting to do a little bit of everything. I was so inspired and moved by a lot of the potential of the community-led work I was seeing and the direction libraries were starting to move. I wanted to dive deeper, so I got a doctorate with a focus on community-led planning in public libraries. I'm excited to share with you some of those practical experiences, as well as some of the results of the research. Let's dive in. Just checking the slides are advancing along with me. Jennifer, jump in if you're not seeing the topics. >> JENNIFER: Yes. >> DR. BARBAKOFF: What we're going to talk through is a lot and I'm going to go fairly fast so we can get to most things. You'll have the recording, the slider, the learner guide. So don't worry too much about absorbing every detail at this moment. We're going to talk about why community-led planning first. I know you might be convinced on the why if you're here. It's important to begin there because that gives shared language that we can use both to understand for ourselves how and when and why we might apply these kinds of concepts, but also because it gives us language to talk to other folks to get buy-in for something you might intuitively know is important and meaningful, this is going to give you something a little more concrete, a little language, justifications that you can explain to others and get buy-in for your own work. Then we're going to talk more specifically around what community-led planning really means. We'll dive into my research on 12 ways to build your organization's capacity for community-led planning. We'll talk about a little more specifically concretely what that might look like in your library. Please put questions, comments in Chat as we're going. I'll respond in a moment if I'm seeing them. If I miss anything, hopefully Jennifer will speak up and stop me or we'll catch them at the end. Why community-led planning? Why do you want to sit through this webinar for an hour and learn about this or why would you want to do this in your library? Equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice, or EDISJ. Community-led planning is a way to acknowledge that -- we're starting off heavy here, it's a way to acknowledge that libraries as institutions, as American government, are historically structurally, currently White and patriarch because of the culture they are coming from, the people that have power in formal agencies like libraries come from a narrow spectrum of the communities that we want to serve. And so using community-led planning is a way to decenter ourselves, to decenter a lot of people who look a lot like this, like me, for those of you who may be listening only, you'll be surprised to hear I'm kind of your average middle-aged White lady librarian. But it's a way to say who in our community has not had power, who in our community has been systematically structurally, intentionally denied access to power and how can we put them back in the driver's seat? How can we decenter ourselves, how can we be really radical at looking at our power, at social power, and say let's give some of this back, let's put it back where it belongs, in the hands of the community. Community-led planning is a really concrete way to do this, right, to put some of these concepts and DEI into action and to say let's take concrete steps to take the resources of the library, to take its money, its staff time, its collection, its power, right, its publicity, its visibility in the community, let's put that all in the hands of people who have been structurally denied power and let's see what they do with it, let's help them, right? Let's help them accomplish their own goals. Let's support them in accomplishing their own goals. Let's change the balance of power in our community. This is a really powerful tool to put DEI into action. And I am sure that DEI is somewhere, right, in your organization's mission, values, goal, kind of like the big-picture documents that guide who you are and why you do what you do. It's very likely that there's something somewhere that talks about inclusion or access or other DEI-related concepts, if not DEI directly. So community-led planning is a way that you can live your DEI values. The next reason community-led planning is incredibly powerful and important is relevance. And I don't know about you, but I am pretty tired of the, like, our library is relevant in the age of Google kind of questions that you get at dinner parties back when we had dinner parties. Maybe we're getting there again. Hopefully. I find that kind of question so frustrating because of course we all know that libraries are there to respond to the needs of their communities. Yes, we have books and books are really important and the purpose of those books is to help people in communities accomplish the things that they care about, right? When you do community-led work, you're not out there trying to convince people, right, pushing that rock uphill being like, but the library, but we also, but it's not only, right? We have all had those conversations, I think. When you do community-led work, you're starting from a place of a goal, an aspiration, an opportunity, a change that the community already wants and cares about. It's already a goal that everyone agrees is meaningful or that the community that you are focusing on agrees is meaningful. What you are doing is coming in and not saying, we're the library, here's a laundry list of the stuff we doing. You're saying, hey, here's the goal you care about, we're going to work with you on achieving that. We're going to put our resources behind the thing that you care about, right? So there's no question of relevance because it's of course, because you are doing the work to help the community achieve its goals. People can see directly how you are using your collection, your staff time, your programs, your website, all of those things, how you're using that. You're doing that work with them, right? You're in the trenches with people in your community to accomplish those goals that they already care about. So the question of relevance goes away really because it's incredibly obvious in those cases, right? It's a clear demonstration of your importance to the community. As that's happening along the way, you're building relationships, right? Because by definition, community-led work, you're not doing it by yourself, right? You're doing it with community. I just said in the trenches getting your hands dirty, doing the work to achieve goals in the community with and for other people, right? In the service of others. So as you do that, you know, you're coming to people with a really asset-based perspective. We'll talk more about what that is and what it means. You're coming to people from a place of humility and interest in helping providing support for the stuff they want to do. That's a really positive way to start a relationship, right, and to continue a relationship, to build it because you have a project that you are doing together with community, right, or with organizations. So this is a really strong relationship builder. Those relationships can then -- they are foundation for a lot of successful work in your library in the future in a lot of ways you might never have foreseen. We'll talk more about that too. The last, this may seem mundane. I'll get off my soap box for a minute here. But very important is capacity. When you're working with people outside of yourself, outside of your agency, in relationship, you're building capacity, right? They have resources that you might not have and the obvious one we think of is money. Sometimes they have funding and we don't. Sometimes we have funding they don't or there's flexibility on whose funding can be spent on what. There's also a lot of other dimensions to capacity. One is time. They have people who can work on things. You have people who can work on things, you can do bigger projects together. You don't have to shoulder everything yourself. Helpful when dealing with rural libraries -- no one has extra time hanging around. That's true no matter what size library you're in. I have never met any librarian who says, we have all the staff and money we need, right? We're always trying to do a lot with what we have. Another form of capacity is expertise, right? This I think is a really important one to think about because as libraries and as library workers, I hear a lot about scope -- a lot of people saying there's this clear need in the community that we want to address, but we're not social workers, our community is really -- people are struggling with housing insecurity and houselessness and we're seeing folks having that experience in the library. They need support. We can't really do that very effectively. That's not what we were trained to do. Those are not the resources at our disposal, right? We're trying to meet a lot of needs where we aren't necessarily the subject matter experts. It's important in those cases to partner with communities and especially communities and organizations with lived experience with the -- as part of the population that you are trying to support or serve. They can bring their expertise and you can bring yours, right? Community-led work allows you to come from a place of strength by using your librarian skills, right? Your library worker skills. What do you do really well? You convene people, you make connections, you manage projects, you navigate complex information and make it meaningful. These are librarian skills you use every day. You can lean into those skills and you can work with someone else who can lean into, say, social service subject matter expertise or content expertise, you know, technical expertise. You don't have to do it all. You don't have to know everything and you don't have to kind of try to pull together half-baked version. You can pull in that expertise from elsewhere so that you can spend your time doing what you're awesome at and still have an effect on communities and community goals. I know that's a lot. That's sort of a heavy way to start. Again, I think it's important because it grounds us in why we do this work and gives us language to talk with others about why they might want support or join in. So you're all convinced, I have completely sold you that community-led planning is the way to do everything. How do we do that exactly and what am I talking about? Let's just take a minute and talk about what community-led planning really means. An issue that I see -- that I perceive sometimes with words like outreach and engagement is they are so big, right? They mean so many different things, they encompass so many different possible types of service and interaction that we can have a conversation and not really be thinking about the same things, right? The picture I might have in my head when I say outreach may be different -- I want to be clear with community-led planning and what that means and what it is and what it isn't. My favorite way of disam big waiting that is spectrum of public participation. The international association of public participation or IAP2. I have seen it integrated nicely into library work in a lot of ways. The example you see here is based on work by the hen pin county library, which took this dry, technical-sounding spectrum and turned the whole thing into an example of making a decision about what to have for dessert. I'm going to walk you through this a little bit. I want to start with there's no -- this is a spectrum going from the least amount of engagements to the highest amount of engagement. That is not a value judgment, right? There is a place for each of these types of engagement, right? There are times when each one is appropriate. The important thing is to be intentional about when you're applying which one and to understand the differences. I think this gives us important language to kind of piece apart some things we often lump together. On the left we have inform. We're having cherry pie for dessert. The club meets on Tuesday 4:00 p.m. Again, important. If you don't tell people that book club is happening on Tuesday at 4:00, you're not going to have a lot of people at book club, right? Informing is necessary. It's very important in a lot of cases. And it's very one-way, right? You put up a flyer in the window, there's no feedback loop here, right, necessarily built in. You're just putting information out. That's a form of engagement but a very low level. The next two stages are consult and involve. And these are the places where we get input from community. I'm thinking about bringing chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Is that OK? An idea that's already put together, we go to community and say, what do you think? Or a little more deeply engaged at involved level. Do you want a healthy dessert or decadent dessert? You can decadent? Should it be sweet? Let's go with sweet. So you're having a little bit more of a dialogue. But what's key about consulting and involving is that the library still holds all the power to make the decisions, right? You're asking community what they want, but then you're taking input and you are making the decisions about what kinds of programs to offer and what it means for them to be successful and how they are going to run and when they are going to be, right? Libraries are pretty good at this generally. We tend to spend a lot of time in this space, right? We want to hear from our communities. We care what our communities are thinking. We go to lengths to ask people for their input. Sometimes we wonder why they are not that excited to give it. In part it's because we're not really authentically sharing power here, right? We're giving people some input, but we decide the extent to which that input is valued, the extent to which it's used, and we sort of -- how much we want to mingle it with our own perceptions. Again, there are times when this is the right thing to do, right? When input is the right level of engagement. When talking about community-led planning, we're really getting into these last two stages of collaborate and empower. This is where the shift happens. This is where the magic really lies. In these stages the partners that you are working with have as much power as the library or more power than the library to make key decisions. Collaborate is 50/50. We're going to decide together what to have for dessert. We're going to decide together what programs to offer, right? Maybe we'll make it together too. We'll shop and bake together. Maybe we'll codesign this program, 50/50 kind of true partnership. Empower shifts the balance of power towards the community. We're going to have what you want for dessert, right? We'll give you the money to get it or to bake it. Maybe it's just your responsibility to bring dessert. What's important is this is not a throwing up of your hands and walking away. This isn't like, well, it's up to you. This is supported. This is saying, you have the power, you're making the decisions, and I'm helping to make that possible. In the case of libraries, I'm providing structure around maybe what a successful program looks like, how it can work, I'm making sure it gets in the programming calendar, right, I'm making sure that it has the funding and resources, making sure people are aware of considerations or things that might cause a snag down the road, right? I'm providing a lot of support, but I have let go of what's the topic of the program? What activities are people going to do in that program? Not up to me, right? How do we know if this program is working? Counting attendance number, right, coming from a public library background. There might be a certain impact they want to accomplish or certain community of people they want to reach. So they are defining what really matters and what really happens. The power is in their hands. That can be a little scary for us, right? For several reasons. One is that you're putting your stamp, your personal stamp and your library stamp on a program or an initiative or strategy before you really know what it is, right? You're not going to have total control of the final result. So you don't necessarily know exactly what you are getting yourself into from a content standpoint. So that's a real shift. It's a real mindset shift, right, as well. It can feel risky. Conversations about the why, have those why conversations with people in your organization before you start. So this is a shift in terms of how we think about success, right, because as you can imagine, doing work in this way isn't quick and you don't always know what the final outcome will be. You might not -- might go in thinking you'll have a program and what you come out with isn't a program at all. If you're trying to reach numbers in terms of I'm going to do X number of programs in Y amount of time, you know, I have this sort of process to be very efficient about kind of cranking out a certain amount of content or book list or whatever it is, this is a really different way of thinking about what it means for you to be successful in your work. That's a mindset shift and it's a big one, even though the actual changes you will make to your work aren't really all that huge and the mindset shift is the big part. So how do you actually do this work? How do you build the capacity of yourself and your organization to be in a collaborate and empower space? So that's what I looked into in my doctoral dissertation. Jennifer can pop a link to the dissertation into the Chat if you want to be -- help you fall asleep tonight and you want to read a really long book about what I'm about to tell you in the next 10 minutes or so. But I conducted a study to ask the question of, like, what helps us do this work, what allows some libraries or some librarians, library workers to make the shift from the sort of traditional model -- I studied programming in particular. But I'm going to talk about how this can be applied in other types of planning. The model itself is very applicable to really any type of planning. What are the factors that, like, help people be successful? What makes this possible? And what gets in the way? What can we do about those things? What I found is that there are really three phases essentially, sort of 12 steps that -- 12 factors that influence a library organization's -- doesn't have to be your whole library, your department -- even just your own work. What influences your capacity to do community-led work? In the first phase inspiration, this is -- these are the steps that plant the seeds for success. These are the pieces that are going to help the rest of the steps go smoothly. Next up is transformation. This transformation transaction and framework is loosely adopted from the model of organizational change and development. If you want to bookmark that. These are the deeply embedded characteristics of the organization. The final phase is transaction, the day-to-day operations. I'll give you the spoiler lesson, which is where you need to be spending your time is in transformation. Oned of reasons that community-led planning, with many other kinds of shifts in library, one of the key reasons that might not take is that we tend to jump straight to transaction. You want to be like, OK, we want to have our library be more community-led, we want to do more community-led programming, a community-led strategic plan, let's change our procedures for our program, let's change our time allocation to get people off the desk more so they can go out and do relationship building. When we try to make those changes without first doing the deep cultural work that shifts our perspectives and our systems to be able to support those changes, they feel really unsupported, right? They kind of feel like they are an extra piece of work, one more expectation that doesn't really align with the overall direction of the organization and they -- so they wind up being a struggle to maintain and then eventually everyone kind of abandons the effort and goes back to the old way of doing things, right? So transformation is really the focus of this, doing the -- addressing the deeply embedded characteristics and assumptions in the organization to make community-led work possible. I'm going to break that down into some pretty concrete steps, in case that sounds too lofty right now. Inspirational change. What I found in talking to librarians from libraries of all sizes from across the country who had done this kind of work successfully, important underlying factors that set the stage for success, first that leaders prioritize and are accountable for DEI, right? That ideally the leadership of your whole organization, I recognize that's not always possible depending on where you are and what your position is, but it's -- are there others? If not your senior leadership, your organization, your manager, you, right, find these leaders where you can, even if they are thought leaders from my position, any level of formal authority. But when you have leadership that's requiretizing DEI and actively wants to be accountable for it, meaning you don't -- well, you have the statements, right, your values, your mission, your vision, you have made a DEI statement somewhere and that you don't stop there, that your leadership is actually invested in turning into concrete action, into setting goals and targets and committing to action steps that will actually make a difference, right, that keeps them accountable to doing that work because I started off with why community-led work. If you have leadership who made a commitment to DEI in any way, even statements that might -- even if they feel performative in the beginning, you can go them and say, you've said this is a core value or this is really essential to our organization and the work we're going to do here is now central to how we do work at the library, it's central to everything we do at the library because of how strongly it influences DEI. So find those DEI champions in your organization. I'm sorry, I am seeing a question in the Chat, what is DEI. That is diversity, equity, and inclusion. You might also hear that as -- public library does EDISJ, equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Your organization may use a different acronym. Let's sort of use inclusion as our umbrella word. Find those leaders in your organization and help them see the connection because if they see the connection between the value of inclusion and the action of community-led work, that's going to win you a lot more support, right, when people really see how it ties to their -- relatedly, if you are in a position to provide training or education to others, great in terms of like if you have a training budget that you control. But this can also be a way just to inform how you think and talk about this topic with other people, even if you don't have any kind of formal role in training. It's to focus on concepts rather than procedures. When I talk to people about doing community-led work, anecdotally what I would hear is we need someone to tell us how to do it. We haven't done it before, we need training on how. What I found in my research is that is 100% not true. So many of the people -- really all of the people that I talked to essentially, almost all of them doing it successfully didn't really know how to do it procedurally when they started, right? What they did know was the conceptual underpinning of this work. They knew why it mattered and they knew what the end state was they were trying to reach, right? They could see a future of a community, of a library where the services and strategies and programs are authentically truly shaped by their communities. So they dove in with that end in mind and kind of learned how along the way. So we thought it was important -- understanding the relationship between community-led work and DEI. Understanding things that relate to, like aces, like trauma -- that's another acronym. Adverse childhood experiences. Like trauma-informed library service, that understanding the concept like asset-based community development. Another huge one. Understanding concepts of why we approach community in the way that we do, that's essential. That's really important. If you are in a position to advocate for or to set up any kind of education or training around community-led concepts, you want to focus on the conceptual link, not the procedures. If you'll notice, that's how we have run this webinar. I started off with a a why and I brought you to the spectrum of public participation, which is a theoretical framework, a concept for what it means for how the different ways we can engage community. I didn't start with in a community-led program, you do this step and this step. That information is out there. I'll have links at the end. There are tool kits that take you through that kind of work. What we have found is that how, again, doesn't stick if people don't have that conceptual understanding of why, right, that leads them to value this kind of work. Similarly, you want to draw connections community-led work that you are doing or want to do and the core values and goals of the community, right? The community cares about this. Here's how our work is going to help align with that. The library says it cares about these big ideas, here's how this work aligns with them. Sometimes those around us don't necessarily see the connection, right? Community-led work can sound like this is one more way to plan a program and it takes longer than the normal way, so why don't I just -- I like to knit, why don't I hold a knitting circle, right? So really helping people make the connection between the action that you want to take, the programming method or the planning method that you want to use and the core meaningful values of the organization and essential goals of the community. If you can draw that connection, then the work you want to do is seen as central, right, rather than kind of appendage hanging off there. So by the end of this phase, what this is really doing is kind of building a ground swell of support. A question that's come up is how can we found out are communities using goals -- I talk about that more specifically when I give practical examples of how you might apply some of this information. But some easy ways possibly to get started are to look for what's written. Does your community have a comprehensive plan? It's likely that your city or your county or whatever your municipality is puts something out. It's very likely nonprofits in your area have put out or coalitions like economic development coalitions have put out vision documents, right, for the next 20 or 30 years. There are probably actually a lot of written statements out there. Wow, what does accountability look like is a question in the Chat. That's an hour right there. [Laughter] >> DR. BARBAKOFF: Shorthand, short-term I guess to say what I mean in particular when I say prioritize and be accountable for DEI, it means that the organization is willing to try to put its values into action and willing to do so in a way that is measurable, right, that there are concrete goals, concrete steps, measurable targets that the organization doesn't only say we're committed to DEI, but then there's some concrete commitments to change that back that up. Another question, if you ask 100 community members you'll get 100 different answers. That's a great question too. The intention here is to look for kind of big picture things. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone everywhere agrees with a goal. You can run a strategic planning process based in community-led principles where you do ask 100 community members what they wanted and then look for the themes that come up over and over again, right? That's my approach to strategic planning essentially. But there are other things out there. To go back to our purpose, our focus here is really to shift power towards marginalized and systematically excluded -- systematically excluded groups. We want to listen to their viewpoints. So I'll give you an example. I was the community engagement economic development manager at King County library system in the Seattle area. Part of that means responsible for economic services. So small business, job seekers. When I wanted to learn about community, and community goals, I found an organization -- a local nonprofit had produced a report called Voicing Rising that specifically focused on the unique history and current needs of the African-American population in Seattle, the Black population in Seattle and noted specifics like tangible disparities that existed and why and proposed things that could be done to address them. So that is the kind of thing that I would like for in your community as well, right? Who are the groups that have been denied access to the same opportunities as everyone else and what are their goals. Again, no group is homogenous. But what are the big initiatives that people are working on? What are the projects in your community right now? Excuse me. All right. As I said, we're going through this pretty fast. So know there's a lot we're not going to be able to get into in one hour. Transformational change. Step one, faster growth mindset. Again, what I learned from talking to librarians doing this work successfully is that we don't go in knowing how to do community-led work, we don't go in necessarily being that great at it. It takes cultural humility. You're going into spaces of other cultures whose lived experience and assumptions how we work together might not be like yours, right? We mess up. And the people who persisted in this work were those who said to themselves, OK, I messed up, I learned from that, now I can do better next time, right? The people who are like, whoa, that was terrible and I'm out, this isn't a good way to go forward, you know, didn't continue and succeed. So really having that growth mindset here of -- if you want to learn more about growth mindset, the concept was pioneered by Carol. She I don't a book called MindsetMindset. Being able to learn, basically. Being able to say I'm not going to get this right all the time, right? This is a lot of working in relationships, working across cultural differences. That means I won't always get it right. My job is to learn and improve. So that was really essential, saying, like, I can learn to be better at this. Develop psychological safety for inclusion and innovation. This is one of those things that's an hour in itself. For more on the concept of psychological safety that was developed by Amy Edmondson, I think at least the book I have read most recent -- I can't remember if it's where she termed it's called fearless organizations. But for inclusion and innovation. Very broadly, what this comes down to is a lot of the people in your organization who have preexisting connections to the communities that you want to reach may not be the people in positions of authority in your organization, or they might not feel safe bringing their full selves to work and feel they need to kind of edit. In order for people to take the risk, right, of doing this work that is different where you are not assured of what the result will be, where success might look different from what you used to imagine it to be, you know, and others might not necessarily -- you might not automatically have their understanding or support, that's scary. That's the risk. You know, to bring your personal connections to say, you know, I'm a member of this community that we want to reach or that's my church or that's -- you know, that's my faith group or that's who I have dinner with on Thursdays, in order for people to bring that, to bring themselves and to be willing to try new things that might fail, you have to have a space where people feel their individual contributions are welcomed, regardless of their job, their positions, their ideas, their relationships are valued, so they have to feel included and they have got to feel like the organization has their back, right? If something doesn't work out, that they are still going to have support for their work and support for them as humans. Number 3, make time for reflection. Self-reflection is important when it comes to leadership work, cross-cultural work, all of these mushy human things. In order to learn from our experiences, in order to say how did I show up in this space, you know, what did I do that was successful, that was valuable, what did I do that I wish I had done differently, what can I do next time, taking the time to think through that is going to make you a much stronger practitioner of community-led work and it's going to build your relationships much more effectively. So it's really important to do. We just don't always make time for that anywhere but in libraries, right? We're busy. We have a lot to do. There are 30 more things on the agenda for that day that you are trying to take off your to-do list. It's hard to actually schedule time to sit and reflect. But it's important. I hope you will give yourself permission, if you're a manager, give your teams permission to do this. Next up, hire and train for interpersonal skills and cultural humility. A focus rather than on hiring only for technical knowledge of the job is really looking to build an organization where interpersonal and intercultural skills are valued and those are prioritized because you can learn the technical pieces of the job. This stuff is harder to learn. Next up, connect prior experience. This is a new way of working, right? Community-led work is a new way of doing things or a slightly different way of doing things, a different way of thinking about what we do. So people can feel like -- it can feel intimidating, right? I haven't done this, I don't know how to do this. But there's a pretty good chance that you have done this and you do know how to do this. Maybe just not from the library sphere. Can you think of a time that you were on a sports team or people in my research gave examples of when they were an RA in college or when they worked on developing projects in their faith community, right, as a volunteer, that a lot of times you actually do have a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge that you can bring to this kind of work. It's just not something that we think about valuing in our formal place of employment. I want to empower you to think about all you bring as a person, all of the richness of your experiences and your background and give yourself permission to see that as valuable in your work. You can help others do that too, right, to think through the experiences that they have that are valuable and that show them that they do know more than they think. The last is build community knowledge through relationships. So a question that came up earlier, right, was how do we know what our communities want. A related question might be, who's even in our communities? We need a lot of knowledge of our communities to do our work, right? Really any kind of work, much less community-led work. The best way to build community knowledge is through relationships. There's a certain amount of reading that you can do, right, to get a basic understanding, right? You can look at census demographics, you know, for your community. You can look at school district data to see especially what language diversity is starting to look like in your community or how demographics are shifting because you often see in schools first. You can look at reports from your city or your county or analyses from nonprofits that are about the future of the community. But really the best way -- you should do that work anyway, but really the best way is to build on that by learning about community through relationships, through being in the places where people are doing the work. Are there community coalitions working on a project or exploring an issue? That's sort of rhetorical because almost certainly there are. There are people who are coming together, right, to accomplish things that they care about in the community. Find them and join them, right? If you really can't find anything, like who are the people who are the formal or informal community leaders in communities you want to reach, take them out to coffee, right? Say -- don't ask what do you want the library to do for you, because people think of the library as books and space. So they will tell you more books, more hours. Instead, you want to ask people, what are your aspirations? A lot of you can use language, a great tool for this is the libraries transforming communities institute put together attorney outward tool kit I think they call it. Had really great tools for having conversations. What do they care about? What's getting in their way as they are trying to do this work? Who do they trust to work with them? Learn about them, come from this asset-based, strength-based perspective, saying the communities I want to work with -- we're going to get into this -- asset-based perspective really means the community that we want to help, we need to stop seeing them as old of need, as deficits that we are there as usually White middle class, able-bodied cisgendered, etc., people to fill -- it's important we approach this work by saying, communities that have been historically continuously currently, disempowered and excluded, they are amazing. They are doing amazing stuff. They are brilliant. They don't need someone to come in and solve their problem. They know what they want to achieve and they are the best ones to know how to get there. When the library comes with humility, with saying, like, I think you're great, I want to learn about what you care about and what you are trying to do, then let me offer ways I might be able to support you, right, or resources I might be able to put at your disposal. That is an incredibly relationship-building way to approach people. If we sort come to them and say, give us your input, but we're not going to let you make decisions, people get tired of us and people tend to assume that governmental organizations are going to approach them in that way because they are used to it. People from marginalized backgrounds often have default assumptions the library or any agency is going to come in a extractive way or tokenizing way. Being to go in as you're fantastic and I'm not trying to get anything from you, I just want to know you, I want the privilege of being able to contribute to your effort, that's really powerful. When you do that, you're going to know your community in a whole different way than you would than if you were just reading about it. All right. I saw a question. There was a question about evidence success from Paul. I'm going to talk about that now. Transactional change. Once talking about trying to establish psychological safety and inclusion, these big things, here are the day-to-day operational changes you can make. One, provide time, autonomy, flexibility for relationship building. A lot of times you're like, but we let our staff off the desk, you're scheduled to be off the desk from 10:00 to noon on alternate Fridays, but the community does not happen to have their coalition meeting from 10:00 to noon on alternate Fridays. You want to be available to people where they are, where they gather, which is not necessarily in your building, and when they gather, which is not necessarily when it's convenient for your service schedule or when you're open. Once staff are there, once people are there, they need to have the authority, the autonomy to be able to speak on behalf of the library. So people have to be able to make choices. They have to be able to make choices about how to engage with the meme that they are building relationships with and how the library as a whole can commit to those folks. I don't care what your job title is, right, it doesn't matter how much kind of power you have in the organization in a technical, you know, formal way. It is really important that the person who is that liaison, whose doing the relationship building is given a lot of authority and autonomy to do their work, which gets to the second point, which is if you want to do this work effectively, it is -- you're shooting yourself in the foot if you only focus on your librarians, right, or your professional staff or depending on the kind of library you're in, but like you're sort of -- your degreed staff or higher paid staff. Everyone has community. Everyone has connections. Everyone has relationships. Everyone has a perspective. They are all valuable and the diversity in our organizations is often not at the managerial and leadership level, which should change. In the meantime, it's really important that everyone is empowered to participate in this work and to bring what they have. The success of the whole organization, the whole community. So I personally could not care less what your title is. You are just as qualified as anyone to do this work. The last is policy matters. Paul, this goes to your question earlier in the Chat. You mentioned the success for community-led projects can't always be measured in traditional ways. How do we convince the powers that be are having a good impact. What can we use as evidence of success? Someone in the Chat I think -- yeah. Rochelle mentioned the director shares stories of impact with the library board. Anecdotal stories of impact. That is definitely one way. So we don't have necessarily a single metric, like attendance, right, that we can use at a large scale. This is an area where I'm interested in doing more research. I would say two things. One is everyone -- generally pretty much everyone that I talked to in my research felt what matters is the relationship, that we tend to see relationships in a traditional sort of planning model. We tend to see relationships as a means to an end. We have this relationship so that we can form a formal partnership, so that we can do this program, or so that we can run this initiative. And people who are doing this work successfully thought of it the other way around, that the relationship is what matters and that the purpose of doing a program together or running a project together is that it deepens the relationship. So the relationship is the result. What that gives is a cycle. It's not a line of relationship, partnership, program, right? It's relationship, initiative, relationship, new initiative, relationship, different thing, right, that keeps rolling. One is try to focus -- when you're trying to convince others, focus on relationship, right, and what you can quantify about relationship rather than necessarily just about the program. The other thing is that you can have your partners define what matters from the get-go. You can develop metrics together from the beginning. So, like, you're working with -- I'm going to hold off on that because I'm going to give you a concrete example on that in a minute. But you can work with your partners so they define what success looks like, then you measure that. You can tell your leaders from the beginning, here's what this community cares about that I'm working with, right? Here's how they define success. So we're going to measure this and then I'm going to be able to show you results about that. OK. So what do you do when you don't have the support, don't have the time, don't have the money? I'll talk about this briefly. When you do this work, you build your capacity. You actually give yourself more time, more resources, and you can build support by showing success. So I'm going to skip over this in favor of time. But this is in the dissertation and it will be in my forthcoming book "Twelve Steps to a Community-Led Library," which is coming out early next year. But the big lesson here is that doing this work is actually going to give you more capacity over time and small successes can buy you support for big successes and for bigger initiatives. Start small and size up. What does this look like in the real world? We start with relationships. We learn about the people we are hoping to serve. We go out and we listen to them. Not just learn about them, but listen to them. Hear what they want to say about themselves, not about the library, about their aspirations, their hopes, their needs. Then we think about where does that align with what the library can offer. You know, a great example of this from long ago in the initial sort of library transforming communities there was an organization where they did community listening sessions and they found the town wanted to fix the stoplight. That's not a library thing, right? What does the library -- library can't do anything about the streetlight. Or can they? Because then we think how does that align? We have this issue of the community stoplight. How does that align with the library? Well, the library can help people understand about civic engagement, right? The library can help people figure out what agency or what legislator is in charge of fixing the stoplights. The library can organize a public meeting that brings people together to learn about how to advocate with their local government. The library can get related stakeholders in a room together to make plans, library can provide unbiased information, right, about how to navigate city systems. There's this stuff the library can do that aligns. All of a sudden there's a plan. The library can support this community goal. Really important next step is to go back to the people that you listened to and tell them what you heard and what you -- make the offer of what you can do about it, right? I heard you say this, here's how that aligns with what the library can offer, here's what we're thinking, right? So often we go right to action. OK, now let's hold that public meeting, right? Let's invite that legislator and open them up to the community. And we assume that people will make the connection themselves. They will not because they are not watching us that closely. Because we didn't tell them that we heard them. Actually, I see this happen internally in organizations all the time where upper management listens to someone at the front line but never tells them that they did that. Never says, we heard your feedback and here's what we did and didn't do. That sharing is essential. And then cocreating. You have said here's what we have heard, here's what we think we can do in a big-picture level, and work with them to make the result, to cocreate the program, the project, the strategy. I don't have enough time to talk through all three examples. I will try to quickly walk through one. I talked about programming. I'm going to give an example of strategic plan. What do the steps look like if you're trying to make a community have a strategic plan? First, build relationships. Go to community meetings, go to city council meetings, join coalitions and join the rotary, just show up. Find where the people are in your community and show up. Learn about them. Demographics. Published information. Asset mapping is a tool I like that we don't have time to talk about in detail. But I encourage you to look that up. Then listen. Have community conversations, do surveys, right? Listen to people with an asset-based perspective. Then you have asked people about -- had community conversations. Think about how that intersects with your mission, values, resources and you come up with strategic pillars. Here's what the library is going to focus on. The community cares about this, so the library is going to focus on this. That alignment. The library intersects with it in this way, so we're going to do this kind of thing. Then you go back to your partners and you say, here's what we heard from you, you told us you care about this, we think we should focus on that, right? Then you can cocreate with them. So ask them what success looks like. Ask them what you should measure and then work with them to actually define the specific action steps you'll take. You've got four strategic pillars. How do you define and measure success in each of the strategic pillars? Let the community help you decide that. Let them decide. Then actually involve them in making the responses, right? Designing and implementing the program that you are going to create. So bring the community in to cocreate those with you. That's the 30-second version of a process that I generally do with a library over a course of six to eight months. I know that's a lot. All right. So we have just a minute left. In the slides you have some further reading. Someone asked for more specific examples, so this is a place to go in the slides to find more. Here is my contact information if you want to learn more about any of this. Feel free to follow up with me. I know we jammed a lot into a short hour. >> JENNIFER: Fantastic, Audrey. My mind is racing, I'm thinking about this is a whole shift for our communities as well. So learning about this to start with ourselves is great. But what a wonderful model. As Audrey said, there are lots of resources on the event page that can help you look at tools she did her research on. We're excited about your book. We'll definitely let folks know on the events page once that's posted. Thank you, Audrey. Fantastic work. Thank you everyone here who was attending. I'm going to go ahead and released you that I will send you an e-mail once the recording is posted later today. I'll also automatically send you an e-mail -- or a certificate once I have got those ready to send out. So you don't need to request those. I'm going to send you to a short survey as you leave. If you don't have time to complete it now, it will be in the e-mail I send. But we really appreciate your feedback. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a fantastic day and we look forward to reading your book, Audrey.