We are at the top of the hour.

My name is Jennifer Peterson.

I'm excited to be here today to host today's session.

We created a learner guide for this series.

It will help lead you through the learning, apply it to your work.

Extra details in there for your reflection or discussion as a team.

It's an excellent tool for you to bring this learning to your team.

The guide can be customized if you have specific steps or actions you would like our team to take.

Make it your own.

But this is a really great resource that Rebekkah has created for to us extend our learning on the topic.

Don't miss out on that as well.

I'm so excited to welcome back Rebekkah Smith Aldrich.

She comes to us as the executive director of the Mid-HUDson Library System.

And she is the cofounder and current president of the sustainable libraries nrvet.

Welcome, Rebekkah.

We're so glad to have you here.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: JP, thank you so much.

So excited to have JP here.

And taking a leading role on the topic of climate change.

As we discussed in the first instance of this series, we've got a lot of work to do.

We've got to do it fast.

Today's program is designed to help accelerate that work.

If you didn't join us for the first program, that's okay.

Something tells me you'll be able to keep up.

We really want to acknowledge the headlines we've been seeing over the past few weeks since we last month for this series.

When you think about the headlines just in the past week, wildfires in Maui, the record-setting heat in July.

You can see what the climate scientists have been telling us.

That we will look back on 2023 as the good old days.

It's kind of hard to comprehend.

And definitely makes you think somebody better change here or this is going to get untenable in the next few years.

Which I think everyone is concerned about.

Today's event is designed to help accelerate the work that needs to get done.

By everyone in our communities, of course.

But what we can control as libraries.

How are we going to move forward in the face of what's been called the greatest had you been health crisis of our generation.

And, honestly, the grandest challenge in our generation, which we discussed in the first session.

This is our opportunity to step up in this space and embrace what we can do.

There's hopelessness when you look at the predictions that are coming.

Hopefully other headlines gave you hope.

Like the young people in Montana that won their court case that the State of Montana does have to provide a healthy environment for them to thrive in.

Part of our job is to contribute to those signs of hope that they can manage the world in the face of what is predicted.

We can maybe not turn the tide completely.

But we can make our communities more liveable so people can thrive in the future.

We did cover the four characteristics of sustainable libraries in our first session.

I want to put them in front of you again.

They can be used, to some degree, as a framework for climate action planning.

You're going to see that in the next 90 minutes.

This is the way we think is actually working for libraries.

We're seeing things change.

People are thinking and doing things differently, and choosing different priorities thanks to the work we're doing in the Sustainable Libraries Initiative.

We're taking a look at the second, third, and fourth items, the characteristics.

This will create the outline for climate action, hopefully, for those who decide to follow this path.

I developed a new tool for you.

It's totally a draft.

You can give me feedback on it.

I'll introduce that a little later today.

Something that can help take what you're hearing in this series and put pen to paper.

And, again, maybe move a little quicker in this work than we would have without some of these resources.

Today's plan is to focus on basics.

Basic definitions to make sure we're all talking the same language.

Then take a deeper dive in the three areas that make up climate action that we discussed in the last series.

And also give you resources to pull it all together.

It's not a thought here, something on a post it note over here.

But more comprehensive that teams can work on and buy into, to start actually make progress on.

As JP said, we will stop intermittently throughout the event this afternoon to answer questions that come up.

But I really respect what I saw in the chat during the first session.

You folks are so exciting to watch, whether you're sharing resources and what you're up to.

And I really hope that the continues as well.

It's such good work in the Sustainable Libraries Initiative.

We're finding more and more people joining the tribe.

So again, thank you for being here today.

Just a review.

We talk about climate action.

This is the formula, I guess you could say, to help people wrap their heads around something that's so enormous and really touches the every area of our lives.

This is an almalamation.

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Earth Day talks we've all attended over the years, right?

We want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to slow down global warming, causing all the scary impacts we're seeing here.

The increase in severity of storms, the frequency of storms and all the things that keep us up at night, right?

That's long term something we've been thinking about, how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The need for adaptation is less in the future.

As we discussed last time, unfortunately, adaptation is necessary.

It's here.

It's happening.

We're late to the game on adaptation work.

So, it has to happen concurrently.

And I think that's where folks start getting overwhelmed.

First they thought they had this nice distinct task to work on mitigation.

But now we're talking about adaptation also.

We want to make sure we add in the important ingredient, the key to the whole thing, which is justice to the work as it is happening at all levels.

Whether it's international policy being planned.

We have the sustainable development goals doing their best to infuse justice throughout the work that needs to happen right now.

Even at local levels, like our libraries, where we're making decisions about partnerships, outreach.

Our own planning.

Are we keeping justice at the heart of the choices that we're making?

Sometimes we're talking about basic humankindness, acknowledgement of past ills, how to bring people together in the future.

Empathy, respect and understanding.

Let's make it simple, folks.

I know it's a complicated topic.

Moving forward if we keep these things at the center of our decision making, we could hopefully do a better job moving forward.

So let's get started.

Let's talk about this idea of climate action.

There's very few libraries in the U.S. that have actual climate action plans.

I'm going to show you an example of a library in our program that does have a really strong plan.

You can learn a lot from what they've been doing.

But we need every library in the country to have a climate action.

We all need to own our responsibility and overlay this into the work we're doing to meet the needs of our community.

This is part of meeting the needs of our community.

There's a great framework that was developed a few years ago now, I will admit.

It was a pilot program to help cities, large, metropolitan cities to align with the Paris Agreement.

And how to do climate action work.

We're here to think about a framework that could get us to doing work on a hands-on way faster.

We want to increase our speed, scale and scope of the work we're doing.

That requires a plan.

It requires people to come together around a plan.

The framework they've introduced here makes a lot of sense.

It will match up with a lot of work you've done already in strategic planning in your career.

Very first thing we have to do is bring people together.

And engage them on the topic, what the needs are, and how to move forward together.

We're really talking about inside your organization in this stage.

How do we all agree on the need for a climate action plan?

What are people's thoughts on how to make that happen?

That's great.

Now test that with data.

The second phase is looking at data, benchmarking, and looking at trends that are impacting your organization and the geography within which your organization sits in.

So, understanding what's coming.

What the hazards are, who else is out there doing work in this area.

It's an environmental scan technically of your environment but also your organization and community.

And thinking about the tactics you're going to deploy to address the trends in the data you've seen.

And, number three, how are you going to accelerate that work?

What resources do you need?

What people need to be in the loop?

How are you going to both implement these things but also measure the impact of what you've done?

Evaluate what you're doing.

Report out on what you're doing and iterate, as necessary, if things you've chosen haven't really worked.

This should all sound super familiar to you.

A lot of people in New York are on this call.

We did our trustee handbook book club on strategic planning.

It's the same basic idea.

We're focused on climate action perhaps not library services to the grand scale we do in massive strategic planning undertakings in our libraries.

Climate action planning framework is a big phrase and term.

Should be fairly familiar to us who have been around the block a few times.

C40 actually gave pretty clear steps.

Again, they translate really well.

I tweaked the ones that didn't quite translate really well.

Leadership buy-in.

Whoever is in charge says we need this.

Let's get to it and do this work.

Identifying your stakeholder groups and your community.

We've got a variety of types of libraries online with us today.

That may look different library to library.

Not just waiting to report out once it's done.

But helping folks understand the why behind the what, and the how of what you're doing.

And inviting them to participate in some ways.

That collective wisdom will contribute to identifying strategies and tactics you're going to deploy to be effective.

And then there's the ever-fun job of writing the actual plan, right?

Coming together and writing the plan.

It's a bit of a marketing piece that helps people buy in and understand, and follows through on the work that was identified as most important.

So, some of those things will mean we need to think differently about how we do things in our libraries.

It may mean policy changes, changing timelines for things.

Or giving permission to do things a little differently to move forward.

And really bring these goals to life.

Not too much different than regular strategic planning in our libraries.

It's this really intense focus on climate action and making sure that's really evident in the planning work that's going on.

Six, seven and eight, very common planning steps.

What's it look like if it's going well?

What are the metrics we might need?

What are the anecdotes we want to be hearing?

Envisioning success.

If this went the way we imagined, what would success look like?

How have we prioritized the justice access of this work?

Are we actually speaking to our whole staff, our whole community?

Or is it really more of a narrow world view of folks who maybe have dominated some of the planning in the past as well?

Which perhaps is part of the issue of why we don't have bigger buy in on some of the work we need to get done.

And everyone's favorite part in step eight, right?

Monitoring, evaluation, and reporting out what's going on.

It's a real, I think, gap, in planning processes of all types in libraries.

We put all this work into a plan and then almost forget it exists.

Figuring out how to put it in front of people.

Make sure we're reporting on it on a regular basis.

And evaluating if things didn't quite go as planned.

I used the phrase in the first session, we have to fail fast, right?

We picked an idea.

We tried it out.

It's not working.

Let's learn what we can from that experience and move on.

Iterate that item.

Learn how to do something different with the resources you do have available to you.

Really, I encapsulated a mini strategic planning training here in the middle of climate action planning.

But I want to put that in front of you.

It's not something crazy and new Luke we've never done before.

We know how to do planning in libraries.

We need the framework and veneer of climate action as the goal at the end of that plan's production.

So, as you're getting started in your process, there are key things to take a look at first.

These are things you will thank yourself for having gathered or done before you really get into the, I think, meat of the work of climate action planning.

You want to see who else is already doing this work in your environment.

Whether you're an academic library on a campus, or part of a larger higher education institution.

Are you the first to ever think about this side of stuff?

Or are there other bodies available?

People who have been doing good work in this area that you can learn from?

That's the same in a public library setting.

Is there a regional plan?

Libraries will realize no one else is doing this work.

And the library might be the first to be doing this work in a particular setting.

That has been the case in my system where some of the libraries have been doing this work.

As you look for allies in the work, what's been put in writing?

What's been actionized in the plans?

What can you learn from the work they've already done?

That can save you a lot of time.

Particularly in finding partners and aligning activities you identify in the library's plan with things that might already be going on.

You're not the lone ranger trying to do it all by yourself, right?

We already discussed the fact that this is a collective action exercise.

We need as many stakeholders as possible working on the same things to make a difference in our communities and the campuses that we are operating in.

So, part of that work might be your community asset mapping.

WebJunction has great resources on community asset mapping.

But basically we're just looking for who is out there, what are they doing in the areas of climate mitigation, adaptation and justice?

Who can we align ourselves with?

Who can we partner with?

Who can we be part of the good work that's happening in our communities?

We don't always have to re-create things from scratch.

Of course, you need your own data.

It's all well and good to find out what's going on out there.

But we also need to understand our own usage.

I am going to take a little time of the afternoon to talk about greenhouse gas emissions inventories.

And how to do.
 that.

For the sustainable library program, we built our own tool.

Folks enter in some data from their electrical bills, transportation data and can calculate what their emissions are and show they're make being a difference with the choices they're making.

These building blocks of climate action planning is recognizing your situation, what's going on around you.

It's aligning yourself with things that have already been decided in the setting in which you operate in.

Or recognizing you're going to be the first to put yourselves out there and say these are the most important things to work on.

At least for our library at this time.

And benchmarking yourself.

Taking a look at the opportunity to benchmark your own emissions, which we're going to talk about here in the climate mitigation section.

JP, before I move on, have any questions come in yet?

>> Jennifer Peterson:  I haven't seen any -- just things being shared in chat at this point.

No pressing questions.

Just a reminder to folk, slides are already posted.

We post slides for our webinars the day before the webinar.

So you can always get a preview if you want.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: That's a great point, JP.

You can click on some of these slides and go to right to a reference.

Good tip moving forward.

Let's talk about the first of the three areas of climate action we want to see reflected in climate action plans.

I feel kind of like an older person saying, oh, yeah, we've worked on mitigation for years.

When you start to look at traditional climate action plans, they're exclusively about climate change mitigation, which is reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Figure out what your carbon footprint is basically.

And reduce your greenhouse gas emissions.

So you can figure out what to work on to reduce it.

In my experience in my own operation, it ends up saving operational dollars, a very attractive thing to all of us.

Improving efficacies in the organization.

And hopefully build your reputation as an organization that acts based on data not on guessing.

Data is always a good thing.

We're library scientists.

Some of us are less in that world.

But it is a place where data is necessary to really decide what to do.

And also to prove what you're doing is making a durches.

So, this is an area where, you know, again, it's project management.

You have to set a goal for yourself.

You have to decide the scope of the inventory.

I'm going to talk more about that in the next few minutes.

And collecting and compiling data.

Some of you love and some of you don't.

But here we go.

We're going to do it.

Where are we going to measure from?

Where do we measure again to show the Delta of a difference we may have made by choosing to do things differently?

Steps five, six, and seven, calculate your emissions.

There are certification programs out there in the wild that can certify your emissions data.

Some people like to go all the way and do that.

Others of us are trying to get a number and move on.

That's also okay.

But again analyzing and communicating the results.

It's key in my organization.

And we built it into the sustainable libraries program.

We like to see a goal.

We like to understand what it looks like to be successful.

Having that number and starting to chip away at it is a visible thing that starts in sometimes small, sometimes large wins that people get motivated by.

This data is an important first step in this type of work.

To have the data to move forward with.

So, you're thinking to yourself, like, what is the scope of this?

What is the scale of this?

How do I know where my emissions are coming from?

There's a widely accepted definition of scope of where emissions come from.

When you start Googling, you'll see plans that are nonlibrary plans that refer to work in the areas of scope one and scope two.

This is what they're referring to.

This is a chart from the Environmental Protection Agency that defines the scope.

These are things -- let's take a look -- in scope one that you have direct oversight for.

Particularly if you own and operate your own facility as a library.

If you have your own vehicles as a library.

Those are two things you have complete control over, direct influence over the emissions of those two assets.

Scope two, I think, is a little harder to wrap your arms around sometimes.

It's the indirect emissions.

And you can see how this quickly can grow out of hand if you're trying to do an emissions inventory.

All the different things people do, from commuting to work, to purchasing pens for the organization.

To buying technology.

To paying for broadband for our libraries.

They all have indirect emissions.

You can decide how deep into it you want to go.

When doing an inventory, describe the soap of what you ab are going to measure.

This might trigger some thinking that hasn't been part of your organization's thought partners before.

And that's partly built into the sustainable library program.

Help people think about every decision we make and how it ties back to this work.

Scope three less likely to be a big factor of libraries' climate action plans.

We're taking this thread all the way through.

Let's go back to the pen we ordered for the office supply closet.

What were the emissions to create that pen?

What were the emissions to deliver that pen?

What are the emissions when we throw out that pen?

This is a life cycle we are all living and participating in.

Some things you do not see coming in.

Investments are less likely to be a big concern of libraries.

A lot of us aren't even legally allowed to have crypto currency investments.

We think of all the server power going into cryptocurrency.

We get further and further way from things that might be relevant to libraries.

Let's make it super simple.

I can feel people hyperventilating already, looking at that chart.

We want to focus on things we can actually control.

It's hard.

We all think we should be able to control many things in our world that we don't.

We have to get more concise in recognizing what actually matters.

And, of those things, what do I actually have control over?

Whether as an individual professional or as an organization in the particular setting of your facilities and operations?

That might be an actually pretty narrow area of emissions that you can control, right?

Let's take a look at some things that are pretty standard across all libraries particularly.

Electricity usage.

Decisions you make all the time about leaving lights on, computer, and where the power comes from to operate your building in many cases.

Transportation choices and waste stream choices.

I'm going to go through each of these three things.

Then we'll chill out and ask questions to see if you have questions on this topic.

But electricity usage, right?

Tuckly if you control your own building.

For academic libraries, you feel a little further way from this one than most public libraries might.

School libraries also.

What can you control about your own library's operations?

The building envelope, if you control your own building, have a ventilation audit done.

Making sure the envelope is tight.

And you're not paying and using more electricity than necessary to heat air that's just escaping or to cool air that's just escaping outside.

That has to be balanced with ventilation needs in your building.

It's not necessarily something that we just walk around and calk up everything and hope it goes well.

We also have concern about indoor air quality also.

Some expert help can be very helpful with.

If you oversee your own facility, having an energy audit done, using this phrase, ASHRAE Level 2 audit is what you're looking for.

It's an industry standard.

ASHRAE is an acronym that refers to a body that reviews standards for the industry.

Heating and cooling equipment.

Is it well maintained?

If not, it can take way more electricity to use than necessary.

Your lighting.

All sorts of new choices are out there for lighting to reduce electrical loads.

Teeny tiny parts of electricity loads.

Many of these things are within your scope of influence.

It creates a quick starting spot for things to be evaluated.

Transportation, your mileage may vary, shall we say?

A lot of libraries laugh when it gets to the certification dealing with deeing with the library's fleet, having fleets of vehicles.

Many libraries in the country don't have any of that.

How am I going to influence the transportation emissions of the organizations?

Of course, if you do have vehicles, converting those to electric vehicles is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint.

Having people commute and take responsibility for that.

We're going to talk about electric vehicles.

People need to buy new cars.

What are they buying?

Is there public transportation options underutilized in the area?

Conferences.

Conference travel.

The American Library Association is working to have carbon-neutral conferences by 2025.

And part of the budget is individual travel to the conferences.

Something ALA may or may not be able to influence.

But they're going to give it a good try.

Ethical carbon offsets.

If you heard bad news about carbon offsets that's because you're a consumer that likes to be educated.

That's a good thing.

You can learn from the ALA Council Committee on Sustainability.

And then delivery.

Whether you're delivering items amongst libraries.

Or ordering things to be brought to your library.

Being conscientious.

Let's shrink down the transportation kind of radius we're using in our organization.

All of these things contribute to that emissions inventory.

I want to give a shout-out to the Desmond-Fish Library.

What is an electric vehicle, what do they look like, how do they work?

Working to educate consumers approximate but also where is the infrastructure for charging going to be?

In the first session you heard my dream that every single library has electric vehicles charging stations and you go to the library to charge your car.

Which I think is a very good idea, if I do say so myself.

Electricity, transportation.

This is the third, easiest for us to consider, waste stream.

What are we buy sng do we need it?

If we do need it, are we making smart choices about what we're buying?

After we buy these things, what happens when we don't need them anymore?

End of useful life is a phrase we say a lot.

Is it something we can reuse someplace else?

Can it be recycled?

Of course, depending on the item, the answers may be different.

We all take a look at this in terms of our own personal consumption.

We have to apply that same thinking to professional consumption and things we purchase for our organizations.

Where is the material coming from?

Where they ethically produced?

Were the people making them paid a living wage and treated well?

Where are the natural resources coming from?

Are they being depleted?

There are all sorts of questions.

You can go nuts on this stuff.

That's why you start looking for third-party certification products.

And how to make better purchases.

And asking some key questions.

And training folks in our organizations that make purchases about how to do better, that's part of this work as well.

So, I'll share one of the activities in the certification program is a waste audit.

Some folks on the line today have actually done this, myself included.

Take a snapshot of what you're throwing out right now.

And it can tell you a lot about your organization's consumption style.

In my own organization, we found out that most of our staff had good intentions with recycling.

But they were throwing the wrong stuff in recycling that our carbon company didn't take.

This is a snapshot.

There was a whole video from the center Moriches Library.

They're going through the garbage, sorting it.

And figure out where did that come from?

Should that have been recycled?

They reported out to the staff on what they were doing.

This is another benchmarking activity to help change their thinking in the future.

I can speak from personal experience.

This really changed things for my own staff and own organization.

It caused us to start composting when we hadn't before.

It changed our purchasing habits.

We've all been trained to select products that are less harmful to the environment and have a less carbon footprint.

If you have staff responsible for purchasing or selection, the zero waste hierarchy from Zero Waste International Alliance.

To help people think about rethinking what they're purchasing, maybe reducing how much they're purchasing.

Can you reuse something someone else doesn't need anymore?

And then it's a hierarchy.

Those are the first few things to be thinking about.

And making sure we can recycle.

Follow local rules about recycling.

Not conducting aspirational recycling.

Same thing with composting.

That was a real education, to understand how composting worked.

And what was allowable in my municipality.

That was an education kind of curve there for my organization for sure.

You can see there's a funnel that we're trying to get to.

And this has, again, completely changed the way we think about procurement in my organization and significantly reduced how much we're throwing in solid waste streams.

It's a great training.

I highly recommend it.

This part of the work, where you'ring ifing out what the footprint is.

We've got that data.

Let's set a goal to reduce this by this certain amount by this date.

It's a measurable goal attainable, hopefully, by the organization.

You want to see the tips here.

We're going to benchmark in 2023.

By 2025, in two years, what are we going to do?

We're going to be aggressive about this.

We're going to reduce our carbon footprint by 50%.

Go big, right?

We have to work faster on this stuff.

That's where that call to action is.

We think about big, really big.

The United States.

The president of the United States two years ago declared they want to see a 50 to 52% reduction from 2005 levels to 2030.

Very big work in the timeline.

And economy-wide no later than 2050.

How are we going to do that?

That's the scrunching theation happening now.

This is the work.

This is climate action work.

I gave you a few example actions to get your synapsis firing into what activities you might be putting into a climate action plan in the area of mitigation.

We touched on some of these already.

Conducting that energy audit.

Switching to renewable energy.

Dealing with heat island effects causing your building to have to be cooled more than necessary if you don't have a white roof and more shade on your property.

Electric vehicles, infrastructure to charge them.

All this stuff falls in this area that might help you chip away at the carbon emissions for the organization.

I'm going to leave these examples up here for a second so you can read them.

They're in the slide deck you have access to on the WebJunction page.

I want to say one more thing before we take a small break for questions.

Part of the goal here is that you're going to scale up.

You're going to do this work inside your library.

You're going to tell your patrons about the work you're doing.

Educate them as to why and how you're doing it.

And then parlay the authenticity for having done the work ourselves for the wider community.

So you're not just talking the talk.

You're doing the work and want to do that work with them.

So the public programming side of this can absolutely be built into the climate action plans you're doing.

You've got to start inside.

That's what have learned the past ought years of this work.

JP, I'm going to pause.

Have any questions come up for me?

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Yeah.

Is there an emissions calculator available for free somewhere?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Uh-huh, absolutely.

There's all sorts of stuff out there.

Off the top of my head for building emissions, take a look at the Energy Star program.

Energystar.gov website.

Google emissions calculators.

There's all sorts of stuff pickup may have to marry together a few to do your calculations in all three areas of electricity, transportation, and waste stream.

You can absolutely get that for free.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Excellent.

Someone was wondering if there are examples of organizations who are connecting with their local indigenous communities.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Right now, I don't have examples of that.

Which is why I thought it would be a good reason to do this webinar.

See if we can have more synergy in that work.

The justice section of this workshop, it's part of climate justice.

I'm sorry, no specific examples today.

I hope by next year, we do have some examples for you.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Excellent.

That's great.

There's a question, can you give some specific examples of how your library changed its procurement?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

We did an analysis our -- we host a lot of events here.

I have 66 member libraries over 600 trustees that come to my facility for events.

We do a lot of hospitality, right?

Some of them have driven two hours to get to my stupid workshop.

They want a snack.

We bought a lot of single-use items, disposable plates, plastic forks.

We started looking at the carbon footprint of our hospitality inventory.

We found it would be cheaper, better for the environment, and lower emissions to buy reusable plates and utensils and have a dishwasher.

So we totally changed how we do hospitality.

We also changed procurement for office supplies.

When we took a look -- we actually itemized everything we buy.

We found a bunch of stuff on routine order that didn't need to be anymore.

We did a complete clean out of our office supply closet and did a zero-based budgeting but for office supply can closet.

And reresourced everything we do buy.

Could we find a greener option?

It was a project that took us about six months.

We identified one person to be the central procurement officer in the organization.

They took the lead on the research.

Our sustainability team sent them ideas and things they came across.

We all use reusable pens that can be refillable.

Instead of ditching the whole pen, it's now just the cartridge inside.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Super helpful, thank you.

I know you've worked with a lot of different kinds of library systems.

Can you speak to the challenges of doing this work in a large public library system with, say, 21 different locations?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Yeah.

We've got multiple libraries in the program that are big.

Our biggest is actually the San Diego County Library System.

Very large footprint in terms of facility space and very large footprint in terms of people served.

Talking serving millions of people.

Harris County plieb in Texas serving the county with multiple facilities.

It's about the top, making policy decisions.

Training for staff.

And being consistent.

We've all agreed on the goal.

From the governance aspect.

What we see is if you do things in a certain order in this work, it embids the thinking.

And then the little things become automatic over time.

Because people apply this thinking to almost everything they do.

I think I might have shared this in the first session.

Even in my own organization, when we started doing it and then we were modeling that behavior for our 66 libraries.

And now you see our libraries doing it for their communities.

The systems that have control over those buildings.

I don't control my 66 libraries.

They are each independent and have to make their own choices.

When you can say, this is the way we run these buildings, I have to imagine it goes quicker than it did in my situation.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  I'm curious, too, in terms of getting staff on board.

Because you are bringing up so much personal -- so many things that impact their personal lives as well that being able to pair that this is a benefit both to you personally in your lives and our work in libraries and our communities, it just feels like it is -- it feels overwhelming.

But because it can be broken down to that personal aspect.

And I'm sure in systems like that, you see different advocates pop up in different job r roles.

There may be people in different departments that are involved or working more with that focus.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Yeah.

My sustainability team had a rep from our business office.

Our facilities team.

And each of the other staff teams in the organization.

And that was really key.

Because they all became ambassadors throughout the organization.

And it not only became evident in our operational decisions.

It became evident in our programmatic decisions of topics we chose, books we were advocating for, and design decisions we make.

Little marketing decisions we make.

We're about to launch a new library catalog later this year.

The staff was showing off their work to me yesterday.

I noticed all the carousels of the book they picked, all the titles and topics tied back to the work we did on sustainability.

I could not have been prouder of them for totally kissing up to me in that way.

That was great.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  That's awesome.

Somebody mentioned library journal published an article naming sustainability librarians as the number one job on the rise.

They ask, are there any sustainable librarians here today?

How do you think we can begin to professionalize this part of our field?

You're a great person to ask.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: I'll tell you my biased upon.

We are all now sustainability librarians.

So, every single person's job needs to embrace the idea that climate action is part of your job.

There's that kind of, maybe, I think -- I'm not trying to get out of answering the question.

We are all now sustainability librarians.

The specific work being referred to, what we're seeing primarily in the academic setting.

You're seeing more and more folks specialize in supporting faculty that is doing work in this area.

Or if they're not kind of helping across the facility roster understand they should be integrating it into curriculum across all sectors of academia.

In the public library setting we've seen sustainability librarian up in Vancouver.

I could be wrong about that.

Don't crucify me.

It's more apt to be seen in the academic setting.

The public library setting we can rarely afford to specialize at that level.

We all have to embrace the work, no matter what our role is at the library.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  I think of our sustainability badges.

There's one more question.

And I think we can keep moving on and circle back with the rest of the questions later.

Somebody said how does one balance an EV if the electric is coming from a source such as coal?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Yeah.

It's a good awareness to have, right?

We're buying things.

We're in part of a supply chain to understand, where did it come from?

Where is it going to go?

How is it going to get powered in between those two actions?

It needs to be considered.

If there are options -- for example, in my organization, we do pay a 10% premium to make sure our electricity is coming from renewable resources.

That's something our board authorized to align itself with the goals we had.

It my be an end-run around the truth of where something is coming from.

There needs to be investments in renewable infrastructure.

There was a huge article in "The New York Times" last week about the fact that even the environmentalists in our country, people who have spent their personal, passionate time advocating for a transition to renewable resources are sometimes the very same folks standing in the way of large-scale renewable projects like off-shore wind, large-scale solar fields.

Things that really have intersections with the aesthetics of a place we love and respect.

There's not a lot of easy answers here.

It's great to see we're talking about approximate and we're trying to get there.

See what your options are.

Sometimes your utility has options.

If they don't just by a consumer asking these questions, or a lot of consumers asking these questions, you might help influence the future opportunities they do offer.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  That's really helpful.

One more question really quick that I think fits in this -- when you talk about the collection selection, are you referring to the content of the books or how they were produced?

For example, from recycled paper?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Such a good question.

I was specifically talking about where they're being sourced from.

And perhaps what material you're using to cover them.

We had an amazing conversation that went on for a very long time about mylar covers at a conference I was at.

Thinking about the traditional things we use to process collections.

As well as where did that book come from?

And is it affordable to invest in local book stores maybe rather than other larger places to buy books from?

These are conversations that are sometimes possible and sometimes not, given the scope and scale of our operations.

Certainly in collection development, as we think about, at least in public libraries, what are people interested in?

Are we finding accessible titles in the nonfiction realm that start to tie in with the priorities the organization is setting?

I don't want to mess with how we do community collection development.

It's got to be based on what our communities need most.

There does need to be an eye towards the fact that sometimes we need to push a little further on some of these topics.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  That's super helpful.

Thank you.

A few more questions fit well after this next section.

Let's continue on.

Thank you so much.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Thanks, JP.

All right.

Our second area is climate change adaptation.

I will say, rehave a climate action plan part two coming up next month where we're going to take a much deeper dive with people who know more than I do, one of them is online today, Michele Stricker, in the face of the impacts of climate change.

I want to give a shout out to this fantastic federal resources, the U.S. climate resilience toolkit.

It's a five-step framework to put into a climate action plan.

Next month, our speakers will help us see what it looks like.

And how to do this work more in-depth.

The steps to resilience is a new age of climate action planning that we haven't really seen done in libraries yet.

We have hints of the mitigation planning.

Not so much this adaptation area.

So, again, adaptation, that word is being used because we have to adapt in the face of the impacts of climate change.

Unfortunately, right, we're faced with increases chances of flooding in our communities.

We're going to be dealing with extended heat waves.

We are looking at wildfire seasons.

I can't think of something much more heartbreaking than the news coming out this week in Maui, in Lahaina.

This is not something perhaps on the emergency preparedness checklist for that island.

And not particularly at the scope that was seen in the past week.

And as you see and read about how did this happen?

It's tagged on to all of the news about this.

It was accelerated by winds from a hurricane that were very far offshore.

But were whipped into a much larger event because of the effects of climate change.

We have to understand there's that mitigation side.

We have to deal with what's coming at us right now.

We need to adapt in certain ways that protects human life.

And also protects other community aspects that are important to us.

The loss of human life in Lahaina is devastating.

You hear the devastation and voices of folks who live in that community because the cultural center also burned down.

They lost artifacts of their history.

That really speaks to the role of librarians in society.

How we retain history, how we house things, and how we protect them for the future.

Human life, absolutely, number one.

We also have to think those unique assets we're often entrusted with.

Whether it's collections or unique things in your library, it all ties into this need for adaptation in this moment.

Let's walk through these five steps that might help inform climate action planning in your organization.

The number one thing that has to happen is to understand your risk.

Understand the hazards that are most likely in your geography that your physical library is set in or any aspect your infrastructure might touch upon.

I had this discussion not too long ago with one of my own staff.

We virtualized our ILS.

It lives in the cloud.

It's awesome for me here in my building.

I have a building on the oldest electrical grid in Poughkeepsie.

It goes down a lot in the summertime.

What about the server center over in Syracuse, New York?

How resilient is that building?

I need to now care about that extra piece of infrastructure on top of my local infrastructure.

Let's understand, where is the risk?

It can't be everything, right?

What are the things that are actually going to impact this geography?

Figuring out what your community is most concerned about.

What are the potential hazards?

Which of your own assets are exposed to weather that could be impacted more violently by climate change?

And what are the actual hazards and plan to that?

A little example there.

Your staff.

How safe are they when these things happen?

Your facility.

What are you going to do when these different things that are likely to happen in the future do happen?

Are there redundancies that can be put in place?

Is there training that's necessary?

Are there facility adjustments that need to be made?

I'm speaking about the library facility.

I'm going to give a shoutout again to Michele Stricker who is on the line today.

We have an event coming up -- JP, I hope you don't mind me doing this.

November 8th, I'll get this information to you, we're having a summit.

All the libraries on the east coast got together and said we need to figure out how to do something faster.

And adapt them for what the most likely hazard would be in your corner of the world.

Number two is to assess how likely is this that it may happen?

How likely are they to happen?

This may take talking to experts in the field.

Or figuring out how likely something is.

And the resilience toolkit gives you a little rating scale here to figure things out.

Is it going to happen in the next five years?

Well, that's a pretty serious thing to start planning towards.

Is it something that's going to happen maybe once every 20 years?

Before, we might be like, I don't know if we even need to plan for that.

Now we do need to think about it.

In our own region in New York, we just saw what they called a thousand-year flood.

And it happened.

And it happened this year.

And our folks, some of them in areas of the Hudson Valley were not prepared for the scale, scope and violence of what happened in that flooding event.

So, I do think we have to take seriously even things that might be a lower probability.

We have to understand there is a probability there.

Have we thought it through?

How do we plan for it?

You may have two or three things on this list.

Which helps to focus down what your tactics are to deploy.

But also have thinking towards those things that seem unlikely.

But in the world we live in today, you just never know.

I do recommend FEMA's tool here.

I love it, actually.

Every conference I go to, I do a snapshot of the city I'm presenting.

This was handed to me on a silver platter going to Atlantic City, New Jersey.

It's below sea level.

It has four major filters that can show, in particular, at the county level what the risks are, how essentially vulnerable people are.

What the risks are based on the data FEMA has.

You can springboard thanks to FEMA.

Step number three is to investigate your options once you identified your probable hazards.

Sometimes these things have happened in the community before.

And we learned from those events in our communities.

What changes need to be made?

Or what have people who survived those events said I would have done X, Y, and Z differently?

Or talking to other communities that suffered through a hazard that may be likely in your area and learning from their stories?

We talked to a lot of libraries in the northeast who dealt with flooding.

When I was at ALA this summer, I got to talk to a librarian in Iowa who had a very scary experience during a derichio, massive wind storm with winds sustained at 140 miles per hour for over an hour.

It wiped three of their library buildings off the face of the earth.

I never even imagined what that would be like, how we would keep our staff safe.

How we would help the patrons be safe.

Hearing that story, it got me to thinking about evacuation plans and practices.

Of course, it's not something that's going to hit my geography.

It's not likely to hit my geography.

If you live in an area that could be vulnerable to that, hearing that story may help you prepare in advance.

The toolkit gives you an idea to think through the contention you may be dealing with.

If you have no money, what would you do?

That's always a fun one, hating life after you do.

But triggering things that aren't as tough as you thought initially.

What steps could you do without spending any money?

A partnership, a policy change, a drill, like an evacuation drill for the staff and patrons.

Sometimes you can get partially there, but not all the way there.

But at least you're closer than you were yesterday.

Investigating options.

How can we manage our risk in this situation and make sure we're protecting the assets we're in charge of?

Step four then -- I translated this for us in library land.

How do you prioritize and plan for what you learned in steps one, two, and three?

You can't do everything.

You have to prioritize.

Last night at our meeting, my copresenter said if you have ten priorities, you've got no priorities.

What are the top three things you could help increase the resilience of your library?

And what can the library contribute in terms of resilience for the community?

What are the top three things you could do in that climate action plan that would make a difference?

That would have an impact?

What can you implement with existing resources?

What might you need additional resources or partners to make that happen?

Who are the partners out there to do that work with?

And five is everyone's favorite, right?

Implement, monitor, iterate, and share your story.

That's part of the kind of platform that we're using with the Sustainable Libraries Initiative, to tell the story of libraries impacted by climate change.

Decisions they're making both because of experiences they've had caused by climate change.

As well as what they're doing to get ahead of what's predicted.

We need to share these stories.

WebJunction is giving us a platform.

ALA is a platform to do that.

Your state association, I bet, would be happy to be a platform to do that.

We have to get these stories out and share knowledge.

Because it's coming.

I don't want to seem like a doomsayer.

But we can't deny we're all facing pretty catastrophic events in the future.

Many of us in the country experience air quality issues because of the wildfires in Canada.

We got a taste of what that might look like in the future.

It's not pleasant.

It certainly made me grateful for the air filter changes I made during COVID.

They worked during the wildfires coming in.

They may be universal vulnerabilities I've deemed them for the purposes of our event here today.

I took one of these born out of a webinar that Michele Stricker and I went to earlier this year with FEMA.

They said the things that look so scary on the news, the flooding, the hurricanes, the wildfires, they are scary.

We do have to protect against them and do our best to to mitigate them.

But stream heat waves.

What can we do?

Share information of how to protect yourself.

Contribute to green infrastructure.

To make more shade in our community.

To reduce urban heat island hot spots and work with others on that work whether we have property or be part of projects like that on kaimp us or community.

Retrofitting our own buildings to make sure they'll be resilient in the face of this.

Do we have backup generators so we don't lose air conditioning in these extreme heat waves that can sometimes crash the electrical grid?

Do we have ourselves listing as cooling centers?

This was a big initiative of ours at Mid-Hudson this year.

Not all of our libraries were listed.

But we certainly bairve in that way.

And air quality warning systems.

Unfortunately, increased heat waves compromise air index.

On the right, one of my libraries has six libraries that participate in a program with Bard College.

They have air quality data collection units on the side of the library that report into this massive database.

That helps people know, is this an air quality warning day?

Do I need to be careful if I'm outside if I have a health condition?

This is one of those universal things.

These are some of the activities that could go into the work that needs to happen.

You may have other ideas.

I see someone posting in the chat.

I can't wait to read it.

These are other examples of the types of things you might build in to a climate action plan under the adaptation section of said plan.

A lot of these we talked about from actually having a disaster preparedness plan.

These are things we'll talk about more next month, these first three things.

Disaster preparedness plan, continuity of operations plan, and preparedness training for staff, to make sure they're prepared at home.

We talk a lot about getting the library up and running to serve the community in these events.

But libraries don't work without library workers.

Let's make sure our library workers are well taken care of and can manage things at home?

They might be able to come in and help out when we have these issues happen community-wide.

Those will be talked about more in-depth next month.

You can see a host of things that can speak to these issues from cooling infrastructure to food security issues.

That is another big adaptation area.

Big shoutout to the Curtis Memorial Library in Maine.

What a good job they do with food security issues in their community.

In my own system I have a growing number of libraries with refrigerators on the front porch and working together with community-supported agriculture to make sure there's access to fresh food.

We learned during COVID how vulnerable that system was.

It will continue to be stressed in the coming decades.

Sometimes libraries can bridge those gaps.

Other great ideas for you.

The climate resilience hub.

We met a woman from that program.

What good work they're doing.

Find out more at climatecrew.org.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  I'll jump in quick.

Somebody said can we portable Energy Star air conditioners part of our Library of Things?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: That's a big -- I don't think you'll want to be in charge of refrigerant.

I am excited when I see libraries with portable air conditioning that someone could borrow to charge their phones or run a little mini system.

Getting creative about what the Library of Things can contribute.

I have a funder right now who is very excited about putting walkie talkies in every Library of Things collections in my system.

Cool ideas that people have about what will be necessary.

I encourage you to be creative.

Explore those ideas.

Don't let me be a naysayer about the AC unit.

I don't know.

I haven't done it.

Look into it.

Report out how it goes.

Through the interest of time I'll go through the next section and wrap up and then go through the next set of questions if that's okay.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Perfect.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: I find this area, climate justice, the most overwhelming of the three.

I bet you do, too.

Climate action touches on almost everything in life as does equity inclusion and diversity work.

We recognize how much work there is to do to both repair issues that have been caused over time to help people be heard in these moments today.

And also project future plans that protect everyone in our communities, not just those involved in policy making.

That's a massive ask of people.

So, this is definitely work, again, that you cannot do in isolation.

We have to connect with others in our community doing good work in this area.

We actually have a whole workshop devoted to the topic of climate justice coming up in this series.

So, for anyone who thinks I'm really surfacing this one, you might be right.

But we're also going to take a deeper dive later on in the series.

I hope you check that out once we get that one recorded.

So, just to get you into a framework for this, because I do think it's a biggie.

There's a lot of intersections here.

I really do like the six pillars out of the University of California Center for Climate Justice.

You can click on that logo and go into their website which blows out each of these six pillars and helps you understand them better.

You can see that indigenous climate action is in here.

It's very broad for good, good reason.

There are many injustices we are dealing with today that have impacted all sorts of things.

From how real estate was sold in this country.

To how environmental policy has ignored scientific data about certain cultural and ethnic groups in our country.

These are widespread issues tied to equity, diversity and inclusion that are just being exacerbated by climate change and what's happening today.

It's good.

It gives us a framework of categories to think through from social, racial and environmental justice.

To a lot of other areas that build on that.

But also are a little segregated from that.

And things we might not realize tie into the work of climate justice.

From climate education and engagement.

How accessible are -- is information about this stuff?

Are the plans that our municipalities creating to help ourselves?

When you think about access to technology.

Just like we do with PCs and broadband connectist.

You think about the Library of Things.

You may have disenfranchised communities that could never afford before the recent inflation reduction act.

They might have only seen it at the library or been exposed to what the heck is an electric vehicles and how do I get one of those?

For information-seeking needs, we'll have to start stepping up our game on this front as well.

Indigenous climate action, we'll learn more about that over the next few months.

Just transition.

That is one of the most impactful things we can be participating in, in the more traditional roles in terms of education.

There's intersections with EDI in all pieces of this pie.

We start to hyperventilate when we start to think about all the things we could be doing.

Again, you need to center it on what is needed in your community.

Thinking about how structural racism and inequality, people that will thrive in the face of climate change and those that will be most harmed by what's happening with climate change.

I don't think anyone on this call is surprised by anything on this slide.

The housing and land use policies and how it restricted many communities of color in lower desirable areas, which are usually lower lying and more likely to flood or suffer from the heat island effect, which negatively impacts people's health.

These are things that are baked into some of our communities and the policies that have shaped the way our communities look today.

That means extra attention and planning is necessary for certain areas of our communities and our populations.

Just one example of many things on that chart.

So, a just transition, this phrase -- one of my participants in the e-course we did for ALA told me this was old school.

And people don't talk about this anymore.

But I'm bringing it back.

I think it's important for us to talk about.

Just transition at the core of it -- you see a great article cited here from Carter, Pastor and Wander.

Transitioning way from a fossil-fuel economy.

People aren't wrong who work in that industry that it threatens their economic viability.

That needs to be acknowledged and they need to be cared for in transition work.

If you are in a state that's highly dependent on a fossil fuel industry, I'm thinking of coal country, oil country.

I got this question when I was in Alaska, right?

This is not a popular topic.

How could we build workforce development?

How could we contribute to viable economic paths to join in.

How can it undo traditional wisdom about how the world works?

And how do we get back to using traditional wisdom of how the world works.

Just transition asks to us think, who lives in this community?

How have they been impacted in the past?

What considerations need to be brought to the table today?

My first book for ALA when I wrote "Sustainable Thinking" to think about how libraries could be catalysts for climate justice.

And really think locally.

How do you focus locally on if you have an indigenous group in your local circle?

How do you help connect with them, their wisdom, and have that work be held up in the work that'sing done by a municipality perhaps?

How do we find more ways to work together?

That's one of the most challenging things of our time today, finding ways to work together.

Respecting diversity.

And understanding it enhances problem solving.

People have different life experiences, different cultural understandings of how things work, that enhances problem solving in a community.

How can libraries create environments to convene people and catalyze conversations across the divide that exists in our society and communities?

We've always done good work and have had good intentions to making sure all are heard.

The climate change to the United Nations of the things they feel will most affect our viability in the future of climate change.

Of all the things I said about mitigation work, adaptation work, at the end of the day, one of the most important things for us to work on is social cohesion.

Is actually building that respect, empathy, and understanding we have for each other.

If we can get that right, we're creating a condition where more people are willing to work together to solve problems.

Maybe throw out that whole template and focus on that, that would be climate action work.

That's really important work that has to happen.

So, you pick your speed.

You pick what works for you.

Part of the work here is to transition our thinking about the economy.

That is not a popular topic.

I guarantee you, it is not.

A couple of friends and I wrote an article that ended up being in a book called "Libraries & Sustainability" in the doughnut economy.

To what an economic model could look like to create a healthier world for all of us in the future.

These are some of the tenets of this.

Particularly being agnostic about growth, where this becomes very unpopular very fast in the United States.

I'm biased.

I think it's a good read.

It helps you frame things a little differently as we think about spending money and building economies for the future.

So, I gave you example actions here again.

Again, we could do a whole workshop just on this.

So, we are.

So, we're going to have that climate justice session later on in this series.

But I just gave a few things here to get you thinking about what it does it actually look like in libraries?

Obviously -- and I know so many libraries have been working on staff education in the area of equity, diversity and inclusion.

I think that's climate work, too.

That speaks to climate justice work as well.

We have to think about the impacts of our history on folks in our community.

And making sure everyone is being thought of as we create those adaptation plans.

But I also want to point out the fourth thing on this list.

Prioritizing open access to scientific research.

This is our jam, right?

Ensuring access to information that helps people make better decisions.

Particularly in the academic community, I think of them as climate justice warriors, as they are fighting to make sure that publicly funded research is publicly and freely available.

And unleashed from paywalls.

And unleashed from journals that might be seen as predatory in some cases.

As we think about the calling of our profession and what we're contributing in this global effort to climate action, we have to recognize a lot of the traditional work we do is actually climate action work.

And this is a great example of it.

There's a whole chapter in the book I promoted at the last session, "Doughnut Economics" she has a whole section on the knowledge commons.

And how important that is to the success of our economy and environment in the future.

It's seriously like an ode to the things libraries have already told you are important.

Owning that work and promoting it as part of our contribution to climate action across the globe is the selling point of what we're doing here.

You have other brainstormed ideas that are here.

Some may match your situation, some may not.

I do think it's important to not just itemize what you already do and check a box.

But we also have to start thinking about what to do differently.

If we all keep doing what we've been doing, nothing is going to change.

The idea here, the keyword is action.

We're taking action in new directions that speak to the predictions of what's happening in our world today.

So, pulling it all together.

We'll go through this section.

We'll try to deal with as many questions we can that have come up so far this afternoon.

Really, the idea of the planning process is not just to talk a lot.

It's to put pen to paper and prioritize things.

And create an action plan that you can work from as an organization.

As I said, it's not something that we've seen across the profession.

I think that you guys are kind of early adapters by being here and thinking through what would a climate action plan for my library look like?

Kudos to you to be here.

Please give me some grace if I'm steering us in a direction we haven't been before.

Maybe I'm learning along with you.

That's why the Sustainable Libraries Initiative with WebJunction partner to accelerate this work.

I'm bringing to you today information from industries that have gone quicker on this topic than our profession have.

Second Nature, you may be familiar with them.

A lot of higher education institutions have used Second Nature's resources to organize their thinking and get plans on paper.

They provide great resources to help with planning.

What are the general themes you need to address in a climate action plan?

So, now we're getting down to, like, what does this document look like?

Now that you've done all this work, research, all this ideation, you have to get it into writing.

What's a structure?

What's an outline that might work for you?

This is a potential framework for organizing your thoughts and the actual document that would be produced in climate action planning.

Talking about why you're doing what you're doing.

What you learned through your benchmarking work.

Where you see opportunities to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions.

How you're going to be contributing to adaptation strategies on your campus or in your community.

What are some of those educational, research and outreach efforts that you think would make a difference?

And that's the collective impact area, right?

That's your justice work.

That's where you're finding partners, ally, and doing things together to help educate more people and help bring more people together to work together on things.

Where is money coming from to do this work?

A lot of times, you're doing things that would have been done anyway.

But you're doing them in a new way.

Other times you're going to need new resources or found resources to do this work that has to be acknowledged.

How are you going to implement things in how are you going to track things?

I mentioned earlier that there is a really good example out there.

And it's one of the few.

I hate to say it.

But what a good job.

The Concord public library did in Massachusetts.

We're learning a lot from them.

I hope they're learning from us, too.

I thought it would be cool for you to see what outline they used for their report.

You can click on it here.

They've done a lot of work.

They also had a very supportive municipality who is modeling this behavior.

They had a real on-ramp.

How did they get ahead of me on this?

That was part of the acceleration of their work.

When you take a look at what they've done, it's helpful.

You can learn from it, model some of it.

Take what you want, leave what you don't.

Letters of support from key stakeholders.

That's that buy-in piece we talked about at the top of the webinar today.

There's a quick executive summary for folks who aren't going to read the whole thing.

Summary again for folks who won't read the whole thing.

Defining terms.

So we're all speaking the same language.

I tried to model that at the beginning of the webinar today.

And current State of Sustainability efforts.

We're not starting at zero.

We do important stuff already.

Sometimes people don't think about it in this construct or acknowledge the value we bring to the table of those things.

Open access, broadband connectist, meeting people's needs as a cooling center.

Where's the actual work to be done that this plan is outlining?

We have two focus areas, being the built environment, their facility and how they operate it.

And the other focus area is outreach and education.

How will they use their platform as a public library to help people learn about these topics and change behaviors?

And then they're so good, they have their implementation and tracking progress and acknowledge their partners who are in alignment with what they're doing.

This is a nice model.

So please say thank you to Concord Free Library.

Here is an example of one of the pages you can see online.

They broke out the topic, the goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And here are the strategies for us to do that.

And nice graphics.

We don't all have that capability.

What a pleasant document to read through.

I've read through it seven times now, I like it so much.

I do believe they're blazing a trail for many of us doing this work as well.

I gave you a couple of links to case studies for folks doing work in all the areas we talked about today, from the sustainable library certification program.

100 libraries are working there.

As they finalize their certifications, they post their final presentations.

You can learn all about what they did.

There are so many gems to give you ideas, strategies, and figure out how someone in a similar geographyed something.

ALA's resilient community guide if you're looking for that outreach component to the plan and U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit where I used the five steps to instruct the adaptation area.

They have a ton of case studies to see what's been done across the country.

Another lesser-known resource is urban sustainability directors network, their resilience hubs.

The model they use and stories that come out of that program are also worthy in checking out for ideas.

I'll put this slide in front of you again from the first one, reminding us what we are doing here.

We need to create this sense of urgency.

That's how action happens.

Think differently and do differently.

You into ed that coalition.

Thinking from the inside out in your organization.

Who are likely partners from this work?

Who on the campus in an academic library, who are your likely partners in this work?

In the community, who are your likely partners in this work?

And what does change look like?

And how are we going to get there?

And write down the action steps to do this work.

And address the obstacles that need to be removed.

Our procurement policy and our bidding policy for larger construction projects had to be changed.

But celebrate the wins, the things you do.

And how you accomplished them.

Make sure people know.

Generate short-term wins is really your storytelling.

How you're getting across the story of what you're doing, why you're doing it, and making it doable for other people.

Either in your community, on your campus, or in our poaftion.

Sustainable Libraries Initiative, we're here to help.

Lots of resources on our website.

The new resource that I developed.

And I almost put draft all over this thing.

It's a place to start organizing your thinking.

It's posted as a Word doc on the WebJunction page that JP just posted into the chat box for you.

You could take it, delete the whole thing and start over.

Or all your notes that you took today, pop them in this Word document.

Answer the questions and prompts in this short document.

Maybe something starts to emerge.

Maybe it starts to bring to life the vision you have of what you could be doing differently to do your part in climate action through your professional role at your library.

I would love feedback on it.

If you want to contact me, hopefully you know how to touch base with me.

If you were exhausted after the 90 minutes we're spending this afternoon, I get it.

I hear that a lot.

Seriously, if you could do one thing, this is what I would put in front of you.

Start practicing making decisions using the triple bottom line.

Start thinking about a purchase that's going to be made personally or professionally.

A program you're designing.

How you're going to implement it.

And applying some of this thinking.

Can you find balance amongst environmental stewardship, social equity, and economic feasibility?

If you could do that one thing and practice it, that would be doing a lot actually as an individual.

I'll point out that's what the whole sustainable library certification resources are built on.

Download the roadmap to sustainability right now.

If you're ready for the certification program, come on over.

That helps you practice that thinking in 140 actions.

And those actions can be sorted into your climate action plan.

If you need structure or methodology to do what we discussed today, the certification program is one possible path for you to get there.

As you can see, the categories you do work in, they follow, to some degree, that framework we presented at the top of the webinar.

To get that buy-in, that organizational commitment.

Doing your benchmarking work in different areas.

Then figuring out what tactics will help you move forward from there.

That's where you'll get a lot of examples and ideas.

You can learn from folks in the certification program.

You can come to our webinars.

All sorts of good resources for free for you today.

This is what's coming up next.

Part two of this climate action planning is disaster preparedness and community resilience.

Much deeper dive on that topic with experts who are in our field and doing this work from other angles in the disaster preparedness world both from FEMA and VOAD, which is pretty exciting.

And in October we're doing climate justice, if you want to take a deeper dive on that.

This is contact info.

I love talking to you.

I need to update my Twitter icon now.

I guess we're calling it X'ing now, not tweeting.

Thank you, JP.

I'm happy to hang out and answer any other questions that came up.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Thank you so much.

There were lots of great discussions.

You mentioned you heard a lot of conversation about book covers at a conference.

There are definitely folks wondering about alternatives to mylar.

And why can't we influence our book vendors to return to more sustainable practices.

I don't know if you want to touch on that a little bit.

Or if there are places to send folks for ideas about more sustainable book covers.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Yeah.

I don't want to have the same conversation.

I thought I was going to fall asleep.

But part of the problem is that there aren't a lot of affordable options.

So, the risk that I think some libraries are taking are not to cover their books.

Because it might be more environmentally sustainable.

It comes to that triple bottom line.

What's better for the environment?

We have to cross reference that with what's affordable for the library?

If you think the book is sturdy enough to hold up for the lifespan you want to have it for, go for it.

But if you know your books need that extra life-extending cover on it, when you start to look for options, there's not a lot out there.

Part of the discussion, which I thought was fantastic, is how do we organize ourselves to influence the marketplace?

And that's a really exciting thing to think about.

We did this mini kind of experiment with this in ALA a number of years ago on the exhibit floor.

I'm sorry for all of you who have heard me tell this story before.

I was looking for library cards for my system and I asked them if they had something made from renewable or recyclable content.

And the person at the booth laughed at me.

And I was like, oh, I guess I don't know my stuff.

I walked way.

I was kind of embarrassed.

And then I got really pissed off.

I was telling my friends at conference, could you believe this happened?

We decided to all go up to that booth and ask the same question.

The second person went up and asked and got a Lukewarm like, no.

The third person went up and the third person was like, well, no.

But, you know, we're look into it.

And the fourth person went up and said we're working on that.

And you saw over the course of the two days at this conference, the vendor get that the market wanted something different than what they had.

That's a super small example of us being passive aggressive about something.

But what if we organized on this topic?

There has to be some special interest groups that want to take this on.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  That's interesting.

And ties into another question.

Somebody asked can you give an example of community dialogue about sustainable?

Having the conversation more.

Have you seen how libraries are creating opportunities for that dialogue?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: I'm so glad you asked.

At the last session, if you were there, you might have heard me talk about our program.

It's called the library of local.

We partnered with the community partners of the Hudson Valley to produce these very visible collections of books, seeds, and gardening tools.

The other thing we did was co--located these collections in communities that are aligned with our state's program called climate smart communities.

And then we connected with those climate smart committees in each of those communities.

And noted we are happy to host the work you want to do.

We offered up the meeting space.

We gave them priority access.

Now work they want to do to convene those conversations can happen.

We weren't the experts that, you know, were going to facilitate those conversations.

Other people in the community were better suited for that.

We did our part by helping to amplify their work by giving them a platform and space in our community, aligning with the strategic goals of that library in terms of how they're helping the community.

That's one example.

I encourage you to check out ALA's library transforming resources.

They have a lot of fantastic resources on convening and facilitating.

Someone you'll hear from later on in the cities, Enginey Garmin.

So big plug for the session she's speaking at.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Excellent.

Are there techniques and policies libraries are using to ensure that sustainability goals are being measured and accountable for follow-through?

You kind of touched on that.

With these goals being ambitious, they are wondering if the accountability process, since there's little policy regulations in the country overall, how can we create more accountability?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: I think that's a great question.

And something that earlier this year I had an awesome opportunity to speak to the sustainability team at OCLC.

That was some of the first questions they were asking.

How do we measure?

How are we evaluating?

None of us really enjoy that work.

I think the fact that we haven't seen many libraries with climate action climate action plans -- I mean, we don't have a lot of ways to show accountability in the work.

I think we can extrapolate methods we see being used in other industries.

For example, you notice I'm a lead AP, environmental design accredited professional that speaks to the U.S. green building council's rating system for buildings.

They've built in accountability in that system that we could extrapolate to our work.

Yes, you did everything on the checklist to be certified.

Then you have to do commissioning.

An engineer comes in and says did this work that you hoped it would?

Is it having the outcomes that you hoped it would?

We'll have to build commissioning committees or roles in our libraries and our structures to help hold us accountable to our own goals.

Whoever asked that question, you might be the person that's going to figure that out for all of us.

So thanks so much.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Yeah.

True, true, true.

One more question and thought.

Somebody brought up the heaviness of this topic and the challenge of staff.

And their burnout.

Knowing these topics can be heavy leave staff overwhelmed when considering sustainability, how have you sort of -- they're asking for resource.

WebJunction, I would say, is committed to talking about low morale and staff burnout.

We had a really great webinar earlier this summer.

We're going to do follow-up with the same presenters.

Know that's coming.

Can you talk, Rebekkah, in terms of the emotional toll it's taken?

And how you've seen folks address that with your initiative?

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: 100%.

It's such an important question.

Given what we are dealing with in our profession.

Our profession is under attack in America today.

We're defending our core values of access and intellectual freedom.

It's exhausting.

A lot of this work that got started, in New York at least, actually began during the recession.

When a lot of our staff were at extremely low morale.

They were very worried about being laid off.

They were very worried about massive cuts coming through from the state.

My organization lost 40% of its funding in that moment.

We lost staff in that moment.

I've never seen morale so low in my organization.

The subsequent years just in our country of what's happening politically and environmentally, there's so much heavy stuff going on.

The frame in which you start and present this work must be from a place of hope.

We're doing this because we believe.

We believe we have the power to influence things in a powerful way.

And if we're going to spend our time at work on something, it might be as well be something that's meaningful.

I'll speak personally.

I certainly can't speak for others.

The stories I here from other libraries in the certification program is that this has been a team-building experience.

It's brought new energy into staff who did feel powerless.

They see those small wins and can affect change in the face of massive challenges in our world today.

Maybe interest just having a little garden at the library and growing things.

To seeing a kid who understands where food comes from.

These little wins add up in our professional experiences.

I found engaging in this work during a low morale point in my own organization actually helped bring us together.

We had a common goal.

We saw small wins right way.

We saw the board supporting the work we wanted to do.

We found new people who wanted to be part of what we were doing.

New money flowed to our organization because of this work.

I'm in the saying that experience will be the same for everyone.

If you do approach something as a leader or manager, you set the tone.

Right?

You set the tone.

The person who speaks first in that experience will set the tone for the work.

If you come in and you're doom and gloom, oh, my God, things are horrible.

We better figure out how to build the bunker.

Right?

That's not really going to be helpful.

If you're in there and are like, I saw this amazing thing happen at this library down the road or the next state.

Can you imagine?

What if we helped to do something like that in our community?

Where do we need to let go of to do that capacity in our work?

Acknowledging capacity has to be part of it to help staff feel not only are they being heard but respected in asking to participate in work like this.

I will say again, a lot of the work, it's stuff you would have been doing anyway.

It's education to think about how to do it in a new way so we all go in a better direction.

>> Jennifer Peterson:  Fantastic.

Thank you so much, Rebekkah.

Thank you for being here today.

As Rebekkah says, we're continuing this learning through the end of the year.

All the information for -- if you haven't registered for the rest of this series, you can still do that.

So, thank you, thank you for being here today.

A reminder, I'll send you a certificate -- I'll send you all certificates for attending.

Those will come to you next week.

I'll send an email later today once the recording is posted.

And I definitely look forward to seeing you all at our next session.

Thank you, again, so much, Rebekkah.

A reminder, there is a survey I will send you, toork as you leave.

The link will also be in the email.

If you have to rush off, know that we really appreciate your feedback on this session.

We'll definitely share it with Rebekkah.

It helps us guide our ongoing programming.

Thank you all so much.

Thank you, Rebekkah.

>> REBEKKAH SMITH ALDRICH: Thanks, JP.

And thanks to everyone who came today.