>> Jennifer: We are going to get started here. Today's session is recorded. I will send you an e-mail today once the recording is posted. You will also receive a certificate today automatically. I will send it by the end of the week. I will get those certificates to you as well. All of this learning has been added to our WebJunction course catalog where folks can access library-specific courses and webinars for free, thanks to state libraries across the country. If you are new to WebJunction and finding your way around, we encourage you to subscribe to cross roads.

It comes to our inbox twice a month and I will post a link there for you to support and subscribe. It is an excellent way to stay up to date on all things WebJunction. I also want to mention that we created a Learner Guide for today's session. This is a resource for you to extend your learning on the topic. It can be customized. If you have specific steps or questions that you would like to explore with your team or collaborating, partners, know that this is a resource for you to expand your learning and bring to the field. I am super excited to welcome today's presenters. We have Dr. 

Audrey Barbakoff and Amita Lonial and Mia Henry, the founder and CEO of Freedom Lifted. I am going to get us started and passing it over to Audrey, we are so excited to have you here today. 

Thanks so much for coming. 

>> Audrey: Thank you, Jennifer.

That's fantastic to be here.

I am really excited to be be able to bring a couple of really fantastic panelists to you today. So, I am going to start with just a little by introducing a few key ideas that are going to underoin the conversation that we'll have with Amita. 

These are some media ideas that we can do justice to in a few minutes. I want to provide a framework and something that you can dive into and follow-up later so you have a few theoretical bases on some of the practical things that we'll talk about in our conversations in a few moments.

So, I want to start off just by articulating why it is so important to focus on engaging in relationships, building relationships with excluded communities. You are here in this webinar about doing this. I know this is something that you care about or interested in.

I start here because I think it is important for us to articulate both to ourselves and to others why we invest in doing this work. As you are going to hear throughout this conversation and this work is not always easy and certainly not passed. We need to know to ourselves and keep our energy up and say to ourselves here is why this work really matters. We need to articulate to our partners and communities. We need to clearly articulate why these things matter. So, focusing on relationships rather than going straight to a programmatic transactional partnership. 

That's what we are focusing on today when we work with underserved communities. We start with the really focus on building relationships, and one of the fundamental reasons we do this is this is part of how we walk the talk of EDISJ. You may hear throughout the course of the conversation hear a shorthand of things like EDI as well. Starting with relationships is incredible to equity. It allows us to do things with people rather than at or for them. It is only through building relationships that we can develop deep understanding, share power and when we go right to a programmatic or deliverable kind of focus - that's something very white Colonial sort of world view, right? The thing, the deliverable is more important than the people. We need to take it back with equity and start with human-beings and relationships and start recognizing with the people we want to work with as individuals and members of cultures and people of intersectional identities have different world views and approaches than any one of us might. So important to take that step back to build relationships that allows us to step outside the system that we work in that are inherently biased and allows us to step outside the system and see that and work with people in ways that are relevant and meaningful. 

When we do this, we are building knowledge about our community. We'll talk about this in a moment. Seeing so often when we start to talk about building relationships and libraries, we think about things like I am going to do a community assessment. I need to get to know my communities and when we say that, we often point ourselves directly at data, right? Well, I need to look at the census data. There is nothing wrong with data. 

Data is important. Building knowledge within our communities come from relationships. There are things we can't know in any way except interpersonal human-to-human way. To build that relationship, we have to be in relationships. 

Excluded communities by definition are communities we have not served well in the past or Frankly have done harm. This is a handout. This is a way to hand - a hand extended, a way to reach out to folks who do not have a relationship with a library.

It is very easy often times because a lot of folks love libraries and a lot of institutions where we have relationships already, and it is very easy to work with the people that we know and respond to the people who are coming to us and say hey, we want this or that. 

We could fill all of our time three times over with the people who come to us and ask for things.

It is important we say whose voice we are not hearing and we reach out to them. This is how we build relevance and accountability. When we start with relationships, we are not out there promoting and a big stack of paper and flyers. We have this and that and a big long list of databases and here are a list of resources. We have been in those sorts of outreach situations. The way that we really show our communities that we are relevant is we show up for them. We show up to support them in the goals they want to achieve to do the things they want to do. And, we are able to demonstrate that we are doing that. By being in relationships, by showing up for people, that's incredibly powerful in terms of letting people know why the libraries matter. That's a lot of yapping, what I want to get out is there are a lot of reasons that relationship-building matters. There is a moral case there is a value-based case, that business case if you need to convince someone reaching new folks. There is an ethical case, there is an engagement case. There are a lot of really intersecting deep meaningful reasons. 

When we say authentic relationship, what do we mean? It means we start with respect. Especially when we are looking to build a relationship to part with underserved or system Matt Tuiasosopo communities -- 

these are set up as a service institution. It is very easy to fall into a deficit mindset. It is very much baked into western social services. We have resources and you have needs. You have problems that and we have solutions. 

That's not a respectful relationship. It is not true. It erases the brilliance and the accomplishments and the richness of the folks we want to work with. It is deeply disrespectful because of that. We can't build a relationship on that kind of deficit mindset. An authentic relationship is the one that starts with respect and perspective, the folks we want to work with. 

We want to work with them because they are amazing and valuable and because they are leading the way towards building a better way, that's a respectful relationship. When we start in that way, we focus on engagement rather than outreach. Instead of coming to people and say here is a list of 75 million things we can do for you, we come with questions. We want to listen. We want to learn. 

What are their strengths and gifts? What are their goals, dreams and aspirations? 

What's the work they have already doing to accomplish that? This results in something really transformational rather than transactional. It is not about I am approaching you because I want to do something. That may come out of it. If we come to someone that we have no preexisting relationships with, hey, you are in the under serve communities and we want to do a program at the library as a partner. That's a transactional relationship and sometimes it works out. 

Sometimes it kicks start a relationship. Sometimes, that can do harm or that goes nowhere, right? We are looking for transformational relationship. Something that's about a process of building together with people rather than creating a thing. The last piece that's really essential that I want to emphasize is sustainsustained. We are building up, rebuilding trust that has been damaged that we have damaged with communities.

So, we need to commit to sustaining the relationship.

We need to show off not just once but continually, otherwise, the next time we approach someone, we'll have broken their trust again.

So, Asset-based Community Development, I am not going to get into the details of how it works. I want to let you know this theory is out there as a framework for thinking of how do we approach people in a respectful and aspirational way. It got really big in the early '90s. It is not a library-rooted thing. It comes more from the social justice world. So, this is something I want to give you to hook into or you can dive in more. If you want to do some reading up, these are the principles that are really deeply underlying that respectful approach. 

Everyone has strengths and gifts. Everyone cares and wants to make a difference. 

Because of that, we want to ask and listen rather than tell. We want to make together. Everyone has agency. Everyone is part of the solution or part of the future. There is no divide between the givers and the takers. There are no givers and takers.

We are all contributing to our own unique strengths and gifts. I am just going to briefly touch on this. I talked about earlier about community knowledge. When we talk about knowing our communities and understanding our communities, I just want to give us a moment to kind of challenge and make an assumption that we may not even know. When we think about knowledge, just the very western posted Enlightenment paradigm that's built in, valid knowledge means relationships. It means data, rather. Knowledge and data are almost synonymous. 

Things that we would not otherwise known. When we try to build knowledge about our communities, instead, we say what we care about and what we need to know in libraries is what do people dream about? What do they care about and what are they passionate about or hope for? What do they bring to the work and the future they want to create? Data can help us find people that we are missing. Can help us provide contexts and edge ourselves so we are not going in and stick a foot in your mouth. When you work with a community that has a lived experience or identity that's different than your own. Data can help us educate ourselves. It means to be in the service of relationships. We want to center relationships even when we think of knowledge. 

Finally, the way we build relationships is through sharing power. This is the participation comes from an organization called the International Association of Public Participation. This is not the only type of spectrum out there. It is just one that I find to be sort of clear and simple for this kind of conversation. 

When we talk about outreach or engagement or relationships, these are big fuzzy words. This spectrum helps us to really think more clearly of the ways in which we are trying to connect with people. So, over on the left, you have "inform," this is a book club is Thursday at 3:00 p.m., this is letting people know what we are doing. This is a way of engaging with people. If you don't tell people when things are happening or what's going on, they don't know. They can't participate. That's important. It is very one-way. It is just us telegraphing. I see a lot of libraries go when they try to build relationships or try to build partnerships are these next two phases consult and involve. This is where we ask people for their opinions and input. We in the library retain all the power to make the decisions. So, we may say hey, we are thinking of a program. What would you like for it to look like? Would you like to come on and a play a specific role or give a presentation or like this and that. We ask people what they want. We and the library take that input and decide what the product looks like and what success means and how we are going to get there. Where we get Antonio a powerful space is when we move into "collaborate" and "empower," collaborating being 50/50 relationship and empowering meaning handing over power to the community that we should have in the first place. This is where the library provides a platform or a framework for the community to accomplish their own goals. We put our resources at the disposal, the folks in our communities. This could be really challenging.

When we give back power in this way, we are giving up power to know exactly and control exactly how things will unfold and what our programs and services may look like even if it is really developed from the relationships we are building. This work takes time, courage, it takes a lot of self-reflection and cultural competence. I am going to talk about "Asset Mapping" and we'll get over to Amita today. You can build authentic relationships through Asset Mapping. It is a way of systemically thinking through the groups and individuals in your service area and what strengths and gifts they bring and what relationships they have.

So, the layers of this, in the center, we have the Gifts of Individuals. A trusted elder in the community, for example, or when we talk about positions, the leader of an important organization or an elected official. What are the strengths and gifts within the community that you want to reach or who are the individual people who are leading the way. We have informal communities, these are the groups that many - these are the things that you can't Google or group of informal community leaders who have been getting together for breakfast at 7:00 a.m. at the same group and restaurant for the last 20 years. They have a lot of influences in the community.

We have formal institutions of things that if you Google they will, they'll show up. 

Organizations created by and for communities, led by members of these communities. These are your museums or cultural organizations or non-profits or 501C3s or small local businesses. Then, cultures and stories and history. The narratives have about themselves and their own communities and others may have in the community. What are its strengths? What about its culture and history influencing people's lived experiences day-to-day. I want to give you this tool as a way to say I want to build relationships with the community. I don't know where to start. "Asset mapping" is a tool that you can use to help you systemically think through in a base way. Who are the people doing amazing things and how may I connect with them? So, I am going to sum all of this up. "Nothing about us without us is for us." That's a slogan I found. It comes from the disability Justice Community, members of that community absolutely needs to be part of making it happen. Those who'll use the service or impacted by the decisions you are making. 

They need to be in a cocreative role. When you do that, that's how you get amazing, inspiring relevant things that you would never have thought of that massively expand everyone's picture of what the library can be and how it can serve the community. That's where magic happens. So, I am excited to share some of the people we were in conversations with where I find magic, that's Amita and Mia. Welcome Amita and Mia. 

To kick us off, I want to give you a couple of minutes to start with a little context and tell us about your experience as it relate to libraries and building relationships with underserved communities. And Amita, let's start with you.

>> Amita: Hi, everyone, I am a little nervous so if I am talking too fast, you just got to put it in the chat or maybe Audrey or Mia, you just give me some signals to slow down. I am excited to be here. Yes, I guess as I was getting ready for this webinar, I realized for a long time I have been in public library for ten years. It is longer than ten years. I am well passed 15 years now in public libraries. I worked in non-profits for eight years before that. Mostly in grass root organizations, community organizing on various issues. I feel like doing, reaching communities that have been invisible or marginalized have been my activities for a long time. 

When it comes to libraries, I work in urban and suburban environments. That's where I gravitated to and where I currently live in. I wanted to actually talk about Tacoma where I live right now. I will be talking about some of our work later on. 

To give you a little context of Tacoma and the state of relationship as they existed when I started here and moved here in 2019, we are a what's considered a mid-size city, we have a population around 300,000 people located outside of Seattle, Seattle gets all the attention and we are sort of like the little sibling that everyone forgets about sometimes. Our community has super working class roots. 

That's a hallmark of our community for sure. We also have been subjected to heavy genderification which accelerated in my ways. This is happening to industrial cities across the country. I think similarly to many cities like us, homelessness and a lack of house and a lack of affordable housing is the biggest issues that's happening for our libraries.

For years and years that I have lived here, that's the first thing people talk about as far as there is a real crisis and we all see it. I think when I came here, our libraries, we had so many structural challenges in reaching who we consider our underserved communities. Where he not funded at the level we should be for a city this size. We are only open five days a week which is awful. 

Our city has a lot of needs.

We are facing real structural capacity kind of issues. Other things that kind of were simmering into Tacoma as far as communities we were not reaching. The last economic downturn, I have not lived here yet around 2008 or 2009. We were forced the close two libraries because of budget cuts our city was facing. 

Those two libraries, surprise, surprise, were in working class, predominantly black and brown neighborhoods. It was very harmful and in fact, the presence of that harm and present of community's anger for us was present a decade later when I came here in 2019. So, we have been opened for the last few years to repair, restore sort of those relationships and return services to those neighborhoods, Frankly. One of the things and we didn't do an administration when we started. We started with a strategic planning process and wanted that to be completely community-driven process which is sort of humble libraries do strategic planning these days. We use a lot of different ways to engage from the communities from meetings and surveys and different things. Our community survey really revealed sort of where our relationships were because the predominant group that we heard from in our surveys was predominantly white, middle to upper class. 

Predominantly females. We heard from that narrow sector of our community that we knew it was not quite representatives and to me that was - that was information we needed to know, right? Who was or was not showing up. We did, however, think that was not good enough so we did take our time to go out and reach out to voices and perspectives that were missing before we finish our plans. We slowed down because we didn't want to sort of be like okay, this tells us who like we are in relationship with. I would say the other thing that I noticed when I got here and again for a particularly urban libraries and other areas, too. I can see the lack of relationships we had with some patrons who are spending the day with us, predominantly folks who seem to be housing unstable, homeless, and etc. It was one of those dynamics where either folks were unseen until they interact with the policies that get them in trouble. Whether that's no sleeping in the library or not allowed to have baggage in the bathroom. All of those were different things and seeing how we were treating people who wanted to spend the day needed to spend the day with us. Then, also I would say a way that I saw how we were not serving our community, again, this is a nuance systematic issue which is thinking of our collections.

That's our regular circulating collection which is tied to all the problematic issues of the publishing industry. We are being preserved as well as easily sort of available. 

So, I don't want to say there was not good work happening before I got here.

There was tremendous good work happening before I got here. The staff here are amazing.

There were relationships under way. There were partnerships under way, too.

These things exist in complex ways. People were trying to do the work and we had more work to do. Even today, we have more work to do and could stand to think about doing it. I want to talk about Tacoma because I will be talking about that live. Sorry, did I take up too much time? 

>> Audrey: That's perfect. 

We'll dig into that community's archive a little bit more. I see what you are saying in the chat and resonating with a lot of folks coming from different types and sizes and locations of libraries. 

Things like not having enough resources or hours, having patrons and policies that treat people as a problem rather than looking for ways to engage. So, I am seeing a lot of that echoing in the chat. Now, Mia, you are coming from a some what different perspective as you are coming outside the traditional library perspective so. I am really excited to hear from you about your contact and experience as it relates to library and building relationships with our systematic marginalized communities. 

>> Mia: Yes, thank you for having me here. This is great. It is wonderful to be with Audrey and Amita and all the people on the call. 

My name is Mia Henry, and I use she/her pronoun. I work as a trainer and a consultant with public libraries and nonprofit organizations that are really trying to root themselves in social justice values and really put their equity goals into action. My view is much more a bird's eye because I get a chance to work with so many public libraries. I started the work in 2017 through invitation from Amita and others who are working to get the equity and social justice off the ground. 

Gunpoint a chance to do a lot of work at PLA, at the conference just again with a lot of different libraries, small and large. I have seen a lot of growth from just individuals who have passionate about trying to do this work in their libraries to full libraries being committed and through times. Several things I have noted that I see in libraries who are on a good journey towards sharing power, and I am so glad you brought that term in the opening, Audrey, you know that's what I talk about all the time is power, power, power and sharing power.

One of the things I see some of the more successful libraries, the one who is are more grounded and able to build those relationships with communities and retain staff - that are from those communities is that they first actually acknowledge the power that they have. 

They acknowledge the history, the history not just the communities which they are in but the relationships the libraries have had with those communities, right? And, they recognize their own possible complicitness, right? In oppressing not the community rights right now but the parents of those people, the grandparents of those people. I have been talking to my mom and grandmother, what did you know about libraries? I am from the deep south, Alabama, what was your relationship with libraries as a black person? The fact the matter is, some of them don't have a relationship with the library because they were not allowed to go into the library, right? A book mobile was viewed as yeah, we are going to go in the community. So, this truth that libraries have to face is really important. I have seen Sonoma County Library have done a great job where they created their own timeline of a racial oppression in the county. 

They're looking both anti-blackness as well as theft of indigenous land as well. So, I think that's really important, just acknowledging that history and when we say underserved - recognizing that is a passive term, and we need to unpack it because underserved - what happened?

Why are they underserved? 

What got us here? It also recognizing bias can go both ways. We can have, if you have underserved, that means there is Oversierved folks. 

It is easy for us to name all folks that are over-served. Who always gets what they need from the library. How do they look and how do they identify? 

They have identities, too, right? And, I also see libraries who really - they understand equity and relationship to power. Just really quick, I want to see in the chat and this is a question I always ask - what do you have when you have social power? What is power?

So, beyond and is there a definition of power, the ability to do, what do you you have? You have power if you are empowering communities using that term that was in the slides, what are you giving communities or what do you have when you have it? 

>> Audrey: Some of the things I am seeing in the chat, influence, voice, access, space, control, protection, making decisions, space to do what you need to do, opportunities, and privilege. Kind of the summary. 

>> Mia: Yes. Opportunities. 

These are great responses. A lot of time I got people thinking of what they do with power.

If you have power, you get to hord it over to people and all of that.

These are great examples. 

These are just what we have when we have power, not how we feel or how we do with it. All of those things put in the chat is what we want for our communities. That's it. When you are talking about what are we trying - we want our communities to have all these things put in the chat. Not all of them are going to have privilege in their identities. We define privilege and our work as unearned benefit. It is a source of power but power can come from other ways where people come together to build power. It can come from the positional power, the positions you have in your library, right? 

Positions of people in the communities. So, power can come from different places. 

I want us to step back. What is it that we are talking about when we want traditionally oppress communities, systemically oppressed communities. What has been kept from them which is possible of all the things in the chat. What are we working to give them and share with them? Honestly, the libraries have all of these things. Libraries have influence and voice. The libraries have abilities to make decisions and protection to a certain extent, all of those things, abilities. That's what we are talking about when we are talking about sharing power in the community. The libraries I see really understand power. The last thing I will say is libraries that are able to articulate these values and anywhere on the organizational chart knows what's up around equity and power and the ways of being.

Those are the ones who are able to do a lot of things. 

They are able to contract with the public about what they believe and not believe. They are able to be resilient in the face of constitutional challenges and all of those things that are happening to undermine that power that public libraries have. They're able to put boundaries on asks of people who over-served even if that's, you know, the friends group or just people who have power, they're mange able to say no to those folks. Look - we are making decisions about how we are sharing our resources of power. We can't give you everything you want right now, right, or maybe ever because we are asking you to be apart of this, acknowledge your own power and be part of a sharing in our community. Being able toll say no to those folks of entitlement who are constantly at every program and they check out all the books at the same time, you know, all those folks, right? They want to sponsor things. The libraries that have values that are clearly articulated are able to contact with those folks. I am so glad you want to show up. This is what you are showing up to and supporting with your resources. They have the strengths to stand up to bullies leaders stand in the gap who are dealing with difficult situations. 

They made sure that staff have the support they need because they know that happy staff means a happy community, right? A staff that feels seen and heard is going to be ready to make sure that their communities are seeing heard and resourceresourced and have choices. 

So, I think that's all I will say now. This is only an hour. 

>> Audrey: You blew people's minds talking about that and especially over-served that really resonates in the chat - you are like that's all, I am going to drop some huge truths. 

>> Mia: Alana thompson who was the first one I heard say that, we have to talk about the over-served. I appreciate that frame she introduced to me. 

>> Audrey: You are introducing powerful ideas, and it can be helpful to have real world examples to help people understand sharing power and build relationships and the active roles that libraries need to play to repair and excluding and marginalizing folks. 

Amita, I am going to come back to you to share an example, can you talk about a specific way you or your library has put some of these ideas into action. 

>> Amita: I want to talk about our community archives center. I will say we have like the most brilliant and wonderful archivists and special collection manager, her name is Anna T., she's brilliant. If you Google her, she was recently on a podcast called "Archives and Contacts", I got the privilege hearing her talking about this work in the last few years. I would have invited her to speak with us but she's not available. I am going to do my best to represent it. We have a large archives here, something we are fortunate to have. It is a beloved aspect of our institution, The Northwest Room, in 2020, we were able to get a grant.

It was the largest grant we were able to receive as an organization. It was $250,000 to launch this archives center. The goal is simply to begin address the silences and the gaps that exists in our sector. To do that is community-driven, over the course of the last few years, we have been partnering with our community on ways to digitalize and capture oral history and great story-telling events by the community all aimed towards our city to have an inclusive historical record that does capture the stories and narratives of our communities and our neighborhoods. So, this has been a massive project and we have a website, someone put it in the chat. You can read all about it. I can't do it justice in two minutes. At its core, this project has been driven by this desire to give people power back to be able to tell their own stories and also to be able to access their own stories the their own history exclusively on their terms.

Really sort of disrupting the idea of an archive which I think even though our archives is nestled in the public library and it is free and open to the public but that does not mean there are not barriers. People seeing themselves in it which is as barrier in of itself. The key of this project was how much time they release center relationship-building. In the beginning, it is the first phase of the project focused on the relationship-building and using the engagement and the feedback to actually drive the project, which is a hard thing to do. Again, that is large grant, oftentimes we are be-hold into timelines and deliverables as Audrey were talking about before. 

The key is our staff had that grounding in equity like Mia who were talking about. That knowledge and commitment was sort of realized and there. The second piece was sort of being willing to surrender decisions to the communities. You listen to the podcast that I mentioned earlier, and it does sort of talk about in the beginning when they were doing outreach with groups on sort of the project and sort of what the vision or the goal was, I think she talks about being sort of surprised by how important world history were to the folks who she was talking to. There is always been sort of a plan to capture some oral history. I think the level to which they heard that was crucial to communities caused them to sort of change the trajectory of the project and how it is that they sort of designed and codesigned the work. Another thing that they heard from communities was we were thinking about it again, whose stories are not in here and sort of community groups based on identities or different things. A piece of identity that came forward was neighborhood based identity. That's a big thing for Tacoma even though we are a small city. Again, taking that time to not only build a relationship, establish a report and listen but actually being willing to read and pivot how you are imagining a project to be in order to be sort of like accountable to, I think the desires of the group was a really huge part of the project. So, I think those are some of the lessons - this is a huge grant and not everyone - it was our first time getting it, too and I know what it is to be like oh, we don't have that kind of resource. 

We sit with people and meet them in their spaces and listen to them and hold back on what our agenda is a little bit. I think we can share what our dreams are, certainly. I think to hold back on our agenda or your usual tools to really sort of be like what is important to you? Why does this matter? How can we make this archive something that you and your family will access?

That'll be the thing that you dream of it to be and to start there was very important. I will share two other really quick things because I know Mia has all the wisdom to share. She's the most brilliant of this webinar. As I mention when I got here, tensions with still high in those communities and there was not a whole lot in trust in those neighborhoods priethfully so. Even as we embarked on feasibility studies, one of the things we did was include members by the community at literally every stage. When we were working with our city to create an RFP, it is such a bureaucratic and helping us to craft our team of what it should say and inviting communes to be on the panel and make a decision on the consultant. 

Sometimes it is little thing like that and that was sort of the beginning of a turn around of the relationship that the library could have because they could see that we were willing to slow things down, do things not at the pace we wanted to but in a way that was intentionally inclusive and allow for some repair to begin happening. The last thing we are going down the road with this summer is there is as group calleded building equity based summerSummer. They did some work with our Washington state Library. We are trying out a community advisory board to help with our summer Reading Program, creating a framework and a clear set of asks of our communities to give them decisions to make power and how our reading program operates so where we can best serve our communities where we are aiming to serve. Those are some examples from us. Does that answer the question, Audrey? 

>> Audrey: Just some. No big deal. You are doing this amazing work. Something I want to tease out from what you just said that I think is really important is you are not just talking about doing more. It is not like here is more stuff we have to do with the already really limited resources that we have. What you are doing is approaching your work in a different way. 

Approaching it in a slower way and you are talking about summer reading, community archives and thing that is libraries already do. This is not where we are dumping more expectations on our staff, it is let's think about what we are doing and slow it down and invest in relationships and make it happen in a different and more meaningful way. So, I am going to ask one more question and I am going to open it up to the group because I am already seeing a lot of questions coming in the chat. I want to ask for each of you, Mia, we'll start with you. What is one piece of advice you would give to someone who's getting started with this kind of work? How can people here who are listening, how can they show up for this work and show up for their community? 

>> Mia: Sorry, I had to get off mute. I am an educator, I am going to be like get training. Learn what you can. I think there are also going back to the power piece because I see some thingthings in the chat, people get concerned of where they lie in that organizational chart because that question that you have for like what should a library director or leadership team do is different than what should a person who's on the front lines staff or someone shoving books do, right? So, I always like to talk to the folks who feel like they may not have a lot of power in their libraries, in thinking about their day-to-day intersections with the community. I love that. I saw something in the chat about taking note of the recognition. How can people - you have so much power if you are in that desk in front of the library. You have so much power. Ru the library to the community. So, how are you making sure everyone who walks in that door regardless of their identity, their housing status, their way of being. 

How can you make sure if they have the resources they are looking for, they're seen by you and heard by you, and you are ensuring their safety in the library.

That's where I think of the power piece, how do we make sure people are resourced, seen, heard, and have choices. Everyone regardless of your roles in the library, thinking about what you do - how can you do those five things with the community that you know have been denied. That to me is the lens question for everything that we do. I have seen people take out their phones and use a translation APP so that they can understand what people are saying, immediately. 

They don't change their facial expression or anything. How can I hear you and what you need when you walk in? There is that. I have seen library directors who sat down with proud boys for three hours to talk to them about what they were trying to get from the library by challenging. 

Standing in the gap and not letting their staff to do that. As the white male library director were in the best position to be able to to have that conversation and make sure that there were safety, psychological safety at the least for both staff and the community. So, being able to acknowledge your own power and how we share it, that's the one thing that I would love to talk to people about. 

>> Audrey: I love that phrasing, standing in the gap. Something we can all do for each other and our communities and people. How about you Amita? What's your tip? 

>> Amita: How does one follow that? 

>> Audrey: That's what I think every time when I hear Mia talks. 

>> Amita: I think it is easy to underestimate the power of listening. Genuinely listening and active listening, that kind of listening is not listening for what it is that you want to hear or where is it that you fit in or see yourselves. That's something you literally have to practice doing. I used to have to practice with another manager where we did sessions together to practice that ability to have someone talk and repeat back to them what they have said in their own words. You know, I think leaning into that is - I think it is really important. I also think like even hearing Mia talk like not everything has to be me. When we talk about power - oh, we have to do collective decision-making or we can't make decisions without someone voices at the table. Someone asked about policies earlier, bringing your community into policy decisions, folks who are most at-risk for being harmed by policies. With our library with our homeless population, like we could see that when folks who are leaving at night, they were leaving empty handed. There is no shelter system available. We knew they were going to sleep on the streets or their car, just seeing how upsetting that was, we created more warming stations so anything people can leave with. It was not a lot but I think like you can listen in so many ways and start to witness and validate the dignity of people around you and the small ways often going into more meaningful way, you know? 

>> Audrey: I love that, Amita. That can help us from feeling so overwhelming. Oh, it is so big and I don't know what to do. That recognition that we can start small and it can make a big difference. Wonderful.

We have a few minutes left. 

Jennifer or Zoey, did you have a question or two in the chat? 

>> Jennifer: Really fantastic in - engagement in chat. I know you touched on this a little bit. But, in terms of how do we bring folks that are sort of old-school, this is what the library does and nothing else, in terms of creating and maintaining privacy and professionalism but looking for authentic connections with patrons and communities. Do you have suggestions for how to - I posted in chat to encourage folks to bring WebJunction webinars to their leadership to say wow, this webinar has some great ideas we could use. Don't hesitate to use our work to bring that conversation. Use the learner guide to bring some of that discussion to your team. Let's hear from Amita, what do you think? How do we address that sort of disconnect between the old-school or resisters. 

>> Amita: Are we talking about old-school resisters within our organizations? 

>> Jennifer: Yes. Or old school libraries. 

>> Amita: I don't think one size fits all. I think that oftentimes leadership like admin leadership and I appreciate it when people bring a sound business case like Audrey was saying at the beginning of this. I think if your leadership is oriented like the Colonial mindset around data, then play into that and present it to them on some terms that they can sort of see the value that would sort of bring to the community. I also think that just being creative and being clear on what your asks are. If your asks don't require a tremendous amount of funding or staff time but just some things you can embed into what you are doing. For example, in our library, we realize it was really easy. 

We have donation drives that have been throughout the year. We partner with different organizations whether collecting food or clothes and one stipulation is that our patrons not to be able to take from it so we don't have to wait for the organization to come and distribute it. That's sort of a free bin that folks have that need to take from without judgment. Again, reach for something small that maybe does not have a whole lot of cost to it and/or leg-building that business case or pilots. 

Most administrations, just present something as a pilot and be able to build that data. I would say also, well, we don't have enough time. Go ahead, Mia. 

>> Jennifer: Mia, let's have you wrap it up for us. 

>> Mia: With anyone resisting ideas around change, I ask them to go back to their own memories of feeling the way we want patrons want to feel. When did they feel heard? What did it feel like? Engage and invite them into creating the same conditions for others, right? So much to me is also about helping them reflect on when it was - when someone sits in the gap for them or shared power with them and having them tap into part of building that now. 

>> Jennifer:you are sharing power with them for doing that, you are modelling for them. 

>> Audrey: Thank you so much to both of you. I saw in the chat, oh gosh, someone said you can do a whole webinar on this topic. I heard that about 40 things I have heard today. Thank you all so much. The time has gone really quickly. I know that your information has gone into the chat and will be in Learner Guide. Reach out and we'll be happy to talk with you. Jennifer, is there anything you need to say? 

>> Jennifer: I think you forgot one important thing is that Audrey will be back at the end of February with other amazing speakers.

Please sign up. She has your questions that we didn't get to here. Audrey, thank you so much for this great work for bringing these fantastic folks to the conversation.

We look forward to the end of February for sure. And a reminder to folks that I will send you an e-mail later today once the recording is posted and I will automatically send you a certificate for attending.

I am going to send you to a short survey as you leave. 

If you need to leave, I will send the link in the e-mail.

If you can please provide some feedback, it will help us. Thank you again to Audrey, Mia and Amita. 

Everyone have a great rest of your week. 

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