>> All right, I am going to get our recording started. 

Welcome our presenters today. We have Tara Susman-PTara Susman-Pena. The senior technical experts center for applied Learning and Impact.

Shermichael Hallman is with us. And Matt Mclain and Seth Smith at the Boone regional library in Missouri. I am thrilled to welcome you all and excited to hear about the great work you have been doing on bridge building. 

Welcome, Tara. 

>> Tara: All right, I am super excited to be talking with you all of the work that libraries do in building bridges, 91 participants. Welcome everybody. I think so many of you contributed in some way to this work, very, very excited to be sharing this. 

Okay, so just going to review a little bit of what we'll be talking about today and this run of thousand things will go and I will give a little bit of introductions. I will give you an introduction to the project that brought about the resource that we'll introduce you today of what do we talk to and who do we learn from and shermichael is going to walk you through what this resource is and how it can be helpful and what different things that you can find on there. 

Shermichael is going to talk with Seth and Matt of their experiences and what it means on the ground. I am going to provide a few recommendations of things will be learned from talking to libraries and library associations and bridging organizations. We'll have some time for discussions and questions a the end. 

Okay, so, so I am going to give you an overview of the project. IREX came to the project in the context that we are all too well aware of. United States in 2023, we are in a difficult time of what you may call fractured social landscape where there are divisions across any type of line you can think of whether it is geographic, political, racial, and age. 

Unfortunately, we are living in an age of polarization and disagreements. That's the context in which we did this work. I want to share this quote that came out of our interview with the Spokane Public Library that sums it up in a nice way. 

"Everybody is aware that we are very divided, that there is a lot of distrust and polarization. One thing I have noticed even the people who I see very extreme and polarizing figures will point to the problem that we are very polarized. A lot of groups and projects are starting to emerge and we are trying to learn from each other and we are asking." This is the introduction of this context of why we dig into this work. We are experiencing it in our everyday lives, we feel that it is - it is a vital threat. It is a threat to our democracy. It is a system's level problem. It really needs system's level solutions. That sounds a little scary but we have some practical things that we learn that we are going to recommend. So, we really feel that there is an opportunity to address the social divisions that we are all living and ultimately provide some strengths to our democracy by getting to the route of the problem. We believe that increase levels of social capital as well as a strong Civic infrastructure has to be really important part of the solutions. What does it mean exactly? These are not phrases that you use everyday. They are definitely not ones that I do. Although, we found this is a good way of describing what we are trying to work on here. So, by Civic in structure, I am going the read this, a system of relationships with the explicit goal of maximizeng public Civic engagement. 

Civic infrastructure, of course, includes important spaces like libraries. So, how, how do we take on this enormous, scary system level problem? Well, probably a lot of solutions are not needed but certainly bridging, we hypehesize is one solution. So, this idea of bridging or bridge building is increasingly an activity or initiative that's proposed as one answer to this problem, right? What do we mean by bridging or bridge uilding? 

We call bridging as engaged in across difference in ways that respect identities, foster mutual relationships, seek a common good, and promote a commitment to Civic engagement, and ultimately, a stronger democracy. So, this is what we are looking at. It is sounding very abstract at the moment  but we'll get into the concrete of it. We hypothesize that public libraries offer a unique space and serving a critical role in the environment that's fostering a lot of mixing across different lines. As being advocates and stewards of community future, right? The space in the library that allowed people to act their Civic norms and construct to traditions that support positive social cohesion and democracy. We thought we would look at the extent of what public libraries are already practicing these bridging approaches as well as ways in which we can help support and provide more resources for that. I do want to acknowledge that public libraries, of course, right now are under going of this threat. The people that we talk to seems to be galvanizing to contribute to the Civic well-being. Public libraries are always a place of peace for people to come together and it is more and more important in the world we are living in today. This is what we are looking at right here. To the next one - what was the project exactly? This program called library bridgebuilding was nine months program implemented by IREX. I will say what it is in case it is not familiar for anybody. It is a Global nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. We have been around more than 50 years and we do education, international education and development. Occasionally, we had the great fortune to do projects in the U.S. IREX implemented this project and we were funded by more perfect. What do we do? We work with our partners known as Shermichael Hallman who's in the panel with me. We talked to libraries across the U.S. and bridging organizations. These are organizations dedicated to this practice of building bridges across people. And, we analyze tools that we can get our hands-on, resources, and different models and programs and approaches. We look for gaps and challenges, and resources that public libraries may need if they want to get into bridgebuilding or increase what they are already doing. Including the tools that may be used to measure the impact of bridgebuilding. You can imagine this is a challenge in more ways than one. That was our initial and landscape analysis. The whole idea is meant to be a resource for you, and I hope that you find it useful to give it inspiration and practical tools to do some Bridge Building activities in your community. Lastly, I just want to acknowledge the generosity of the libraries, library associations and the bridging organizations that we learned from. We did not up with these ideas in a vacuum or on our own. This was thanks to the generosity of these different libraries that either spoke with us or sent us written input as to their experience and bridging and resources and tools they have used. All right - I will hand it over to Shermichael. 

>> Shermichael: Thank you, Tara. I am excited to be with you all. I am going to share with you a little bit about the resource of, and before I do that, I quickly want to acknowledge Tara, mentioning me the escort partner, I am a practitioner much like each of you. I want to recognize a few people who are on this call who have been thought partners with me and others.

Jimmy Garmon and Tillman who's on this call. These are folks doing the work each and everyday. I want to make sure that I acknowledge them and as well as all of you who are doing some of this work in any sort of way. A little bit about the resource that we develop and even as we are doing this work, we always knew that a goal for us was to create a hub that was filled with resources, all sorts of resources that could equip and empower librarians and library systems to think about this work and engage in more meaningful way. One of the things we have done is Bridge Building resource hubhub. On the hub, you will see a couple of things. We got some really cool things and one of them is a three-minute video that we'll walk you through the hub. Even today, we won't get to all of these things but you can go through the video and see how to navigate this hub. This hub, we hope will be a living resource. Each of you are doing the tremendous amount of work in your communities, whether it is a program or a market initiative, collection of development process, and we hope that you will add to this hub of the things that you are doing or things that you see that are working and those also - even testimonies. I see Tara mentioned some of the people who were apart and we interviewed and shoutout to all of you and those libraries who are here, Columbus county, public library system and so many others that are here, thank you so much for showing up. The first thing that you will see on the light bulb is landscape landscape his huis landscape  hub is landscape analysis. We have four reports here that's much robust. We recognize that we could not tackle the entire report over the length of this call. We invite you to take a look at the full report when you have some time. 

What you will see here beyond what Tara already shared are some things that I think will be helpful for you to understand our approach. One of those is essentially our psychology. 

There are other things that's happening below the radar and laying the ground work for us to be able to bring people together. 

Sometimes it is the power of shared experiences of a weekly sewing class or a monthly book club. These are things bringing people in close proximity to each other and setting stage for these conversations to be able to exist. We want to recognize that there are all sorts of things that libraries are doing that sort of contribute to this work. You will be able to see and read some of the topology that's there. The other thing that we are careful to talk about are the challenges, right? This work is not easy. It is very fulfilling and very important. There are a lot of challenges to that, and so, we have highlighted a number of those challenges. 

One of the challenges that we consistently came across was of language. Language as we start talking about and the idea of bridging and Bridge Building that while many libraries would not use that particular language, the actual activity and the substance of that they were absolutely doing. We know that's the opportunity for us as we go ahead to actually get more clear on the language. Another challenge which I am sure Tara will mention later is around measurements. How do we talk about this work in a way that we can understand internally and also folks understand I externally. How do we talk to those who we report to. So, you will see some of those things there. 

Lastly, we'll talk about recommendations which Tara will get into the meat of those. These are far-reaching and everything from individual libraries to library systems, and to even foundations and ways that we can fund the work forward. 

>> I definitely want to encourage you to check it out. Now, I want to introduce you to you all two amazing folks. Oh, I forgot, one other things that I missed - let me share it one more time and I just remember that I forgot to share the resource hub. In addition to and I am going to do this quickly, in addition to the landscape analysis, there is a resource list here. This resource list is comprehensive. This is everything from programs that you may do at your library or organizations that you may decide you want to partner with, even ways to new ways to sort of measure the work that you are doing. So, we pulled in everything from and folks like the braver angles and other initiatives, you will find a lot of intercept surveys which kind of help you to think about how do we as it comes to measurements, how do we work this into day-to-day of everyday work.

We have tagged these by courses and resource banks and fillation guides and we tag these by the size of library and the type of activities. You can go through and search these tags and find the resources.

There are a whole bunch of resources that's available.

I definitely encourage you to do that. We are thankful today that two of the individuals who are apart of the landscape analysis to join us on this call. I am excited to bring these folks up. They have already been introduced. I want to start off with Seth. We thank you for being with us today, and, man, I justice really enjoyed reading about the work that's happening at your library. Can you quickly introduce yourself and talk about the work you are doing right now? 

>> Seth: Everybody hear me okay? My name is Seth Smith, and I am a public service librarian here in the Columbia, Missouri. I want to give a shoutout to all my fellow Missouri librarians who are on this library. 

Yeah, I am involved in a lot of different projects here. 

The one that's going on right now is our one-week, one-read program. That's a community wide reading program that's coordinated by our library, involves cities and counties, and schools, communites of organizers encouragng adults of all ages to read in a particular book and participate in activities, films, art exhibits and presentations. Our one-read actually is "when two feathers fell from the sky" which is a fantastic book. 

We already had some programs about it this month. That's been really - I think this book is rich with a lot of community conversations. One of my duties here is I also run our technology programs for the library system and put together or really great tech. What I have tried to do when we start - we really restarted this in February full force. I try to bridge the divide. I think that's a profound issue right now in America and especially after the pandemic. What we have tried to emphasize with a lot of our classes is getting classes for people, we started our drop-in tech help, so we are engaged with people who have informer seen a keyboard before. 

Then, a further program satisfied with people of intermediate technology skills and up. Our mission is to engage with our community with all these different programs. 

>> Shermichael: Fantastic. 

In addition to one read as we were interviewing you. 

You also talked about the human library. I know that is going to be familiar to some folks on the call but maybe not all folks. Can you talk about program you are doing? 

>> Seth: Yes, the human library is a conversation of that where real people volunteer to read books. 

Basically, they're unload to individuals or small groups of readers. They give the readers the opportunity to listen to their story first-hand. This program is exciting to me in terms of the divide we see right now engages in every different part of society. The book titles could be "Native American" or "a blind person," "non binary," so it is really a broad spectrum of books who are people. I think that's - people will get out of their comfort zone and think about who these people are as human beings because we are all -- we are all humans, you know? 

>> It was seen that both of those programs, the human library and the one read have really been design to bring the community together in some sorts of way. I know we are always open to hear about a great program as library folks. Can you talk about the strategic thinking behind those programs and why you are offering programs such as those? 

>> Seth: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think, our programming goes back to our mission. It fulfills our strategic plan and mission of connecting our communities to ideas, information, and other community life and with each other. So, like businesses and organizations that serve the public, you know, we have seen a huge uptick in stability, the public arenas become really toxic, and I think strategically we -- this very much has to do with our media literacy program that we work closely with IREX on. We really wanted to try to facilitate civil conversations between individuals and that, you know, the human library is a great example of that. It is a safe space for a dialogue between people who may be sort of not encouraged in real life to even communicate with each other.

So, these are safe space, breaking down to social barriers that we see everyday. Every day here, unfortunately, the public library, you see more in-civility across the board. One-read, I am so excited to be in the one-read community because it is a way the community could connect. Everybody can connect to each other about one particular book they are reading and all these great topics have been off from it. So, you may be at a restaurant or your kid's soccer game and you will end up talking about - hopefully, "when two feathers fell from the sky" and talking about the aspect of the book that may be meaningful to you. It brings together community over one particular good piece of literature which to me, may be in one step of healing the world, right? 

>> Shermichael: You talked about how elements of this are embedded.

Leadership are thinking of this and ensure that communication is happening between the folks on the ground who are running the program and the people who's setting the overall strategy. That's very important and probably another topic and conversation. 

>> Seth: Absolutely. It is a very, very much supported by our administration. The last strategic plan, some of the wording was basically, it was about getting outside our physical walls into the actual community and both of these programs really do it well. 

>> Shermichael: Absolutely. 

We have a few questions for you. If you have questions for Seth, definitely put it in the chat. Seth, specifically, as you think of the human library, it is such an amazing program, and I have seen it myself. You mentioned a couple of books I imagine are very touchy topics right now. How do you keep your book safe, free from harassment as you are doing programming? 

>> Seth: Yeah, that's a great question. Basically, there is a licensing fee that you -- you pay the license fee of using the human library name and methodology. So, volunteers go through these extensive training and preparations for being involved in this of The Human Library Organization which started in Copenhagen. Volunteer books need help during the reading or someone getting aggressive. They are instructed to raise their hand for a library staff for help. Basically, they want to challenge themselves and they're not coming to really - it would be very rare that they're coming to harass one of the books. 

Questions can run, there can be really difficult questions. These participants basically are asked to take a deep breath and hold back and just say to rephrase the question or maybe on a more respectful way. So, it is really on our end is always quite civil, open-minded.

That's a great question. I think that through the training and the deescalation training the human library does, I think a lot of people who participate in books feel pretty comfortable. 

>> Shermichael: Fantastic, this is the last question for you. Again, if you have questions for Seth, please put it in the chat. The other thing looking at your case study was your care for trying to see the impact of the things that you are doing. I know you are doing a lot of qualitative surveying around your programming.

Are there any lessons learned or best practices that you can share with folks, maybe folks who are not doing a lot of survey right now or maybe are and trying to get better at it? 

>> Seth: Yeah, I am involved in putting together a couple of grants coming up this fall. In our assessment, I think a couple of good, short open-ended questions are really valuable. Such as, do this program benefit your community? If yes, how so? If no, can you tell us how we may improve with this program? We learn the hard way and Tara knows a little bit about the story through our media literacy grant that we needed to ask some assessment questions that may be we didn't like the answers. A lot of the negative feedback that we get on the short open ended questions really helped us improve our programming and also for the human library, one of the questions is, which experience impacted you the most during today's reading, and just share a moment or an insight that you may gather from that. 

For me, these open-ended questions, we really try to call a lot of the antidotal analysis that people has to offer that's really invaluainvaluable to our program. 

>> Shermichael:Seth, thank you so much. This is just amazing. Even when you talk about the surveys you do, often we talk about our surveys and kind of our ears go up around privacy. I hope there will be opportunities for us to keep the conversations going of how you engage in qualitative and quantitative surveys and also protecting privacies. 

Again, thank you. 

>> Seth: Yeah. 

>> Shermichael: Thank you, if you have questions for Seth, please put it in the chat. Also, I want to bring up Matt right now. Matt, introduce yourself to everyone. 

>> Matt: Hi, I am Matt McClain. I am in the program team, basically. I have worked here for ten years now. I have been in libraries about 25 and, yeah, I also want to add, shoutout to the person who is really the runner of the program we are talking about. Heather, she's actually here. If you have a question for Heather, please put it in the chat. She would love to answer it. 

>> Shermichael: That's a great question. When people look at the case study and as we look at the library and the program you lifted up was the program called "let's be neighbors," can you give us more information. 

>> Matt: "Let's be neighbors" is current event that'll be taken place and the public will be interested in and concerned about. Something that we can invite experts. So far, we have been lucky to have our local experts to talk about these topics with are looking at. We'll have three different presenters and they'll do a little presentation like this one, 15 or 20 minutes and together they'll answer questions from our patrons who are watching as well. 

You know we'll often try to have a panelist who are impacted. For example, we have a homelessness," let's be neighbors," we are fortunate to find people like that who are willing to talk to their experiences and bring us to this process that we are working through and help people understand what their experience is like. This will program is meant to be a perspective for community but also to build bridges. We are trying to keep things positive, fact-based rather than divisive. It is virtual so we can really work on that inclusive piece, sometimes you get people in a room and heckles can go up or whatever. The virtualness gives people the opportunity to watch and participate but in the safety of their own space. A lot of people will come to the library for a program like this so they'll come in, so they'll come to the virtual one and be great and after work, they can take a deep breath and relax. 

>> Shermichael: This is fantastic. I love that dynamic of being able to host some of these virtually and what it does for openness. That's interesting and something to explore later in the path. Since the program's inception, you all have covered quite a few topics. What's your process or selecting topics 

>> Matt: We are paying attention of the community and looking at news articles and surveys and getting through from our own. We reason to patrons as they are talking to us across the reference desk or service desk, you know, they may say something where we want to listen to and dive further into it more. We have a lot of strong community partnerships that we created and so we listen to them and other organizations in the community. We pick out those things that we think we'll be able to address in a - I don't want to say fact-based way so people can come in. 

If they have questions, they feel like a vocal topic people hearing about or if something that's been misunderstood or if there are more nuance details that we need to get to, we can talk about those things without being a specific perspective. We had homelessness and human trafficking and we had up-cycling and legislative affairs kind of thing. It is not every session or quarter is really -- it is really deep and difficult issues. 

We try to have a little bit of everything for people to participate in. Some of the ones, sometimes we'll choose a topic that's based on like a monthly designation. Human trafficking has awareness day and a month and we have our legislative session and helping people to get involved rather than hey, I am this or that, I want to be involved and so we can talk about that at a high level. 

>> Shermichael: Please finish. 

>> Matt: No, that's it. 

>> Shermichael: You are trying to and maybe there is heavy and a little lighter. 

It is appreciated by your staff. Surely, the community more open just to come in as well.

That's great. One of the things that struck me in your interview, you had this beautiful quote where you say, "the library is not trying get you to think in a particular topic but rather than it provides an array of information." Can you share of how you arrive at that place. That sounds easy to do but I imagine in practice could be difficult. Do you have any framework or process of how you are able to do that consistently? 

>> So, I thinkMatt: There are so many things that we can talk about but in bringing people together, we want to find those commonalities that people have. The homeless one, for example, everybody talks about homelessness but we can talk about their experience and what you are elected officials are doing.

We are focusing on the work that people are doing as opposed to, you know, diving into what caused homelessness or opinions of homelessness. We are trying to keep it positive and fact-based, you know, without getting fact-based. 

It is a strong desire to want to do what most librarians do, providing information to the audience and let them make their decisions based on the information they are given. 

Let's see we -- we also focus on panelists and rather trying to create deby the ways of one person verses the other, we have the panelists aspect where people are really hearing. 

If you pry to provide opinion based, it gets to be a different situation and thing. Now, we are trying to focus getting people to talk to each other as opposed to argue with each other. 

>> Shermichael: Absolutely. 

I want to invite the audience, if you have questions for either Matt or Seth, please fill it in the chat and we'll get it to them. Matt, one question for you. These programs you are doing are obviously providing a tremendous value to the community, how do you communicate that value back to the community? I guess what I am trying to ask you is, you know, how do you go back into the community whether that's individual neighborhoods or funders or to maybe even upward communications? 

>> Matt: I think we are still figuring that out a little bit. The number of people who watched it and we where fortunate to be able to record and host it on our website. So, we have and you can go to our website and hopefully, we'll put the link in the chat here in a second. You can see all of the ones we put up and please watch them and get your own ideas from that. 

This is a great democratic program that we are offering and they'll consider the awards. I love to talk about the programs that we do. 

When we talked initially, this is one of the ones that Rose to the top of the list of things we are doing and share it with everybody. I think there are a lot more that we can be doing. It is great to circle back to some of the providers and people that who are been presenters with us and previously. I think of the conversations that we are having here and the research that you and Tara have done. I am learning a lot from what everybody said. I am learning of the comments here.

You know, I don't think - well, I think the libraries always have a challenge of sharing their values like we want to be humble and oh, it is not that big of a deal. It is. 

It is a great program, and I think with homelessness that we had with the state, homeless coordinator his name -- his familiar of the program we are doing and with e are able to step into the community as well and through those connections. 

>> Shermichael: I want you to know that both of you are getting a lot of love in the chat here. They're stealing your ideas, man. 

>> Matt: Hello, only borrowing. 

>> Shermichael: Before we get to the questions in the chat. I want to ask you more questions here. This sorts of bubble up as we are doing our work. We know this work can be hard and it seems like for each of you, and your staff are doing the book of the work you mention right now, how do you decide, now e, orou know, come to the stage that say this is something that our staff could do. 

>> Matt: I don't know if you want me to start? 

>> Seth: Sorry, I didn't unmute myself. I think that's a great question. 

There is always a sphere that staff will be overloadeoverloaded and also more of these types of programs. 

Especially with "one read," we have a huge number of program partners. Many of these programs outside the library walls in one of our local independent theaters will show the movies and we'll have the author reception at Columbia College, which is a local college here, and we could not actually do it without our partners. I just don't think it would be possible, just too large of a project.

As for speaking to data -- the human library, to my knowledge, I think the infrastructure provided by the human library organization. I don't know if we really worked with community partners on it. I know we are looking to expand the program.

>> Shermichael: Okay, cool.

We are going to - man, so many questions that are here. We'll get to some of those questions in the chat here. Matt and Seth, feel free to hop in and also tackle some of those questions as well. We'll tackle one question and turn it over to Tara and let her sort out the questions. The issue of measurement.

How do we capture and understand the real impact we are having and the program that we were doing. 

There was a question posted here in the chat by wendy. 

Matt and Steve, are either of you attempting to measure change in civility or other aspects of your community. 

Are you doing this sort of baseline of where we are before a program and where we are after a program, are you doing anything like that right now? 

>> Seth: Matt go ahead. 

>> Matt: We started off with that same question. We feel that people are facing literacy question -- I think we wanted to start with let's get moving forward with something first. Let's come up wp a great idea that we can bring people together. I would say we have not tackled that idea yet but, wendy, that's a great question to start asking people of how to measure that. I will say antidotally that the library is everybody's haven. We want people to feel inclusive and feel like the library is part of something that they can come and be apart of.

We have not answered this question but we do give a lot of antidotally how much of the services we have. 

>> Shermichael: Great. Do you face challenges from governing bodies from talking about controversial topics. 

>> Seth: I am going to speak to this. Yeah, it is pretty extreme. Columbia, Missouri is a college town. I am not sure that people know about us. It is college town and we are progressive and so we don't get push back from the government. Our state very much engaged in some censorship initiatives and, you know, it is pushed back against all libraries from Missouri right now. Yeah, you have to tread - it is scary times. You have to tread slightly in some way. 

We encounter that with our media literacy initiative. 

We did get some pushback from people in our community, actually saying the term media literacy by itself is biased, and there was no objective truths or things like that. So, I would say in my situation, in our situation in Missouri, the library is an uphill battle right now. 

>> Shermichael: Sure. Matt, did you want to answer that or you are good? 

>> Matt: I think my answer is a lot the same. We have a lot of divisions in our community. We are definitely from a conservative state, Salt Lake County is a more liberal area of a conservative state. It is - we are seeing the book betting things. I think because we kept it relatively fact-based and has not gotten to the point where it is controversial and people wanted us - have have not gotten upset of the things we talked about at all. And I think even the admin thing that Heather was addressing in the chat here, we do want these topics to be discussed and things out in the open. We don't want to shy away from something just because it is controversial. We want to be thoughtful of how we present it and of course, we don't want to take a side. We want everybody to collect data from the community. 

>> Shermichael: There is a question about age here. I am geeking out on the way that libraries are designed prohibits of generational interactions. I am wondering -- do you allow 18 and under attend your program as well? 

>> Matt: We don't have a prohibition on it. Kids are less likely to log ton a virtual chat but we would not -- we try hard to not limit based on age. We have a couple of teen programs that are teens because we have a thousand people and so we have to limit based on capacity verses age. But, no, we really try to make all of our programs open to everybody. 

>> Shermichael: Well, I am going to turn it back to Tara. She's going to share a few closing things for us and if there is time, we can get back to some of the other questions. Tara, it is on you. 

>> Tara: Thanks for such a great conversationconversation -- really, entrust incredibly inspiring. Shermichael when he was doing the walk through, took you through the longer version of our report. It is a report but it is in a PowerPoint format. I am going to go through a few of the recommendations that we thought is most relevant to folks. This is interesting, our donor when he heard some of the challenges that our libraries are facing and stories and difficulties and threats of censorships and intellectual freedom and the realities that you all know very well are under-funding and understaffed and etc. 

Asking us to even consider these potential harms. 

Should we encourage public libraries to do the bridging work and based on our analysis, we believe that absolutely yes. Really, you are doing it already. The question is how to help support you to do more and better able to measure and have more of a community connections and resources to be able to do this. 

Libraries are well in position to be doing this work. Considering these potential harms exist, we know there are some funding to help support libraries in reducing risks but probably, there should be more and I will get into that. Just a few of the recommendations that we want to share here. 

We thought to throw out the idea of forming a community practice, around this idea of bridging. So, I think there is a lot of learning to be done and it can be kind of hard even with as beautifully well organizationed resource WebJunction created for us of the resources that we found. How did you do age mixing or did you try this or what happened? How did you measure? We believe it is useful and helpful for folks who are interested in bridging. Providing learning and support and share challenges and different experimental approaches and things like question of language like Shermichael mentioned earlier. There are a lot of issues. This is one way to work together on learning about these issues.

Here is a few more recommendations. Creating more knowledge and sharing opportunities of the next step from the community of practice, both for public libraries but also for bridging associations. As we mention, there are a lot of these, braver angels was one of the ones that's mentioned. They have a lot to offer and great methods and resources. We feel that in addition to libraries, learning from The Bridging Association, they have a lot they could learn from libraries in terms of creating safe and open Civic spaces that create a great atmosphere for this kind of work to take place. We have already mentioned this idea of measurement and the community need assessment in those areas. How do you pick the topic or the need in your community could be addressed by bridging and practical assessments that you could do. We have some suggestions for that in the resources. Thinking of implementing a change process and what it all means is mapping out the change that you want to see.

So, we are here now and we want to get here and what would be the different steps along the way from assessment design, implementation, and evaluations. Think about how we do learning all the way through that. So, here we come to the end. I want to leave you another quote. 

Another beautiful quote that I want to share, "reflecting on closing down divides, or helping with understanding, I really like the idea that libraries are a place for everyone, and the idea differences should not matter in terms of what our programming offers and what we try to establish here. It is getting people in the room, not only for people volunteering but also people coming to a reading. You are being vulnerable and you are showing I am complete ignorant for this and so it takes an active read." We saw a lot of examples of this act of bravery today. 

We have even more in a case studies that are offered on WebJunction. I hope that you will all benefit from that. 

I want to leave you here - oh, look that. One minute. Here is the link of resource and this is my e-mail and in case you are interested in practice and if you want to tell me something that should be included in the report. 

Thanks so much for the panelists and to WebJunction for hosting this and to all of you for the work that you are doing. 

>> Host: Thank you so much to all of you. You talk about these great resources and playing a part in our Bridge Building hub together. I really want to encourage folks to explore it. That resource list is really robust. Some of the other organizations that were mentioned in chat, I know those resources from those organizations on there. Be sure to spend some time exploring there and definitely reach out, we are encouraging folks, if they have their own bridging stories to share those. We can post your case studies to the site. Don't hesitate to reach out. I will send you an e-mail today once the recording is posted. I will also send you a certificate for attending today. You don't need to request that. 

I am also going to send you to a short survey. We love to gather your feedback on our programming. We'll share it with the presenters and it will help us guide our ongoing programming. That link is in the e-mail. If you need to head back to cover the desk, you can return to the survey in the e-mail as well. Thank you so much to IREX, Tara, all of you, shermichael and Seth, and Matt for your great work. We look forward to seeing this work grow. I really think we are at a point where our communities are hungry for more social connection and connecting on deeper topics as well. Thank you so much and everyone have a great rest of your week and a wonderful weekend. Thank you so much. 

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