>> Jennifer: We have a learner guide we created for today's session as a follow-up for you to extend your learning on the topic. 

There's specific steps to work through that co-creation thinking. This is an opportunity to extend your learning on the topic, bring it to colleagues if you have specific questions that you'd like to explore as a team, that dapt that guide and makes it yours. It's customizable. 

Know that resource is available as well. Our presenters, Dr. Audrey Barbakoff is the CEO of Co/Lab Capacity and the coauthor of "The Twelve Steps to a Community-Led Library," Angel Jewel Tucker is the program manager at Johnson County Library in Kansas and Beck Tench comes to us as the senior designer and Researcher at the center for digital shthis thriving. Welcome, Audrey. 

>> Audrey: This is a vital and exciting topic, I'm thrilled to share it all with you and give you the treat of getting to your Angel and Beck conversation about co-creation. I am going to kick us off by talking a lit about what we mean when we say co-creating library services and introduce some of the mindsets and theories and principles that underlie this work and approach and we're going to have a great conversation. So I want to start with what to me is the heart of codesign. If you ask me to sort of sum up codough sign while standing on one foot, this is what I would say to you. Nothing about us without us is for us. 

This obviously is not a slogan that I came up with. This comes out of the disability justice movement originally. I've never been able to find who it was attributed to specifically. But at its core, codesign is about the idea that the people who are going to use something or be impacted by something should be part of making it. That's it. So there's a lot of sort of complex thinking and a lot of models and theories and we'll go through some of that, but really at its heart, codesign is saying that the people who are going to be the end recipients or users or the people touched by something should have a meaningful say in shaping it. So codesign really lives at kind of the, for libraries at the center of three spheres. We have community aspirations, so we want to take a turned outward approach here that we're really thinking about what does the community care about? What are their dreams, their hopes, their goals? Notice I don't say community needs and we'll talk about that in a little bit, but taking an aspiration strength-based focus that we start with what does the community care? These aren't necessarily library things. 

They're generally not library "things" and not necessarily about books or even education, but the big stuff that the community wants. Then this also intersects with the library resources. What is the library's role, what is the role the library can meaningfully play bringing our strengths and goals to support what's happening in the community. And sustainable equitable solutions. So programs and services and actions done together that have equity at their heart and that can be sustained. When these things come together, the aspirations of the community, the resources at the library and the pursuit of doing things together that can last and make an impact, amazing stuff happens. We don't want to live in just one of these spheres. We bring them all together, incredible, creative, exciting work, just explodes out of this. How does that happen? 

When I talk about co-creation, the action that we're really taking, the actions that we're really taking are sharing power.

So what I've put up here, and if you've seen a presentation from me pretty much ever, you've probably seen a version of this graphic, but so this may be a recap for some of you, but this is the spectrum of public participation. It's not the only spectrum of its type. This one is created by an organization called the International Association of Public Participation or IAPP. It is not a library-specific model. There are other models. I like this for the sake of presentation because it's just simple and clear. But be aware that there are some others out there that have different nuances that are also really important. When we look at this, when we say something like co-create or even fuzzier like outreach or community engagement, we can mean so many different things by these terms, that what I'm saying and what you're hearing may be two completely different things. And when you're in conversation with your colleagues or with community partners, what one of you is saying and what the other is hearing may be very different. I like this peck strum in it helps us disambiguate the big fuzzy terms like co-create. What you're seeing on the spectrum is on the left, the least amount of power sharing and on the right, the greatest amount of power sharing. This does not mean left bad, right good. There are times and places for all of these. 

What's important is that we are matching the level of power sharing to what we intend to do.

So inform, this is one-way communication. The program is happening at 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday. This is important and valid, right? If you have a program happening at 3:00 p.m. 

on Tuesday and you don't tell anyone, no one's showing up, so again, this is not a bad thing but it's entirely one way. Then we move into the consult and involve spaces and this is where I see a lot of libraries working with their community and when they say they're doing things like codesign or co-creation or community engagement and outreach, this is often what they're actually doing. And spoiler alert, it's not really co-creation. So consulting and see involving, these are getting input and feedback. And so we ask members of our community what they want or we wait for them to tell us. We put out a survey, or collect comment cards and thinking about doing this program or creating this service, what do you think? Do you want to participate in this way? While we are genuinely engaging people and genuinely authentically asking for their input here, we in libraries continue to hold onto all of the power to make final decisions. 

We decide what success looks like, how it's measured, what it means. We decide what actions we're going to take to get there and how they happen. We decide how things are going to be communicated. So we've asked for input. We've made a connection but we've held onto all the power. Where codesign lives is in this collaborate and empower space. Collaborate is a true 50/50 partnership, each partner, assuming there's two, it would be 50/50, but whatever, each partner has a perfectly equal share of the responsibility and the authority. Empower is a deferring. This is when we give over, if you read the Aspen Institute report from a few years back on re-imagining libraries they referred to this idea as library as a platform, that the library is a set of resources that the community can use to accomplish its own goals, so we actually step back and defer to the goals of the community. But either way, in these spaces, the community that we are working with, the people that we are hoping will utilize our program or be it for the people impacted by our policy or our strategy or whatever it is that you're determining here, whatever it is that you're creating, and where they have equal or meaningful or more power and authority to make decisions. This is scary. This is not how you're use to you working in your library, this can be really intimidating, because it means that you don't control what the outcome will look like. You cannot know when you go in what is going to come out the other side, and you're not controlling the process, right. If you have sort of specific ways that your library is accustomed to doing things, you plan on a certain timeline, do things in a certain way, have a certain PR process, you are letting go of a lot of that, because now, other people in other organizations have as much or more authority to make decisions about those things. So this can be just things that you do differently may be small but the mindset shift is extremely large. At this point I'll move into talking about sort of a tool basically, an approach to doing codesign work. We talked about what does that mean in theory what, does it look like, what's the approach? Design thinking or human-centered design is sort of a technique or a model for approaching participatory or codesign. So when we use the design thinking lens for our work, it is about responding meaningfully to our community, it is a way that allows us to start with and center community voice especially those of our most marginalized systemically included and impacted communities. Something else that's really powerful about this approach is it lets us act thoughtfully but quickly. We don't want to get stuck in codesign but any design but especially likely in codesign, we don't want to get stuck n getting things perfect to get it start.ed you don't have to have it perfect in order to start. 

You can learn by doing. This gives us a way to move to action but not be rash, to still learn, to still think, to still plan. 

Because it lets us start small and iterate, it's an effective use of our resources, nice especially if you are trying to bring on or convince readership in your organization that you should be able to do something, being able to make that effective use of resources is great, but really the key reason, the big thing here is that using co-creation, codesign allows us to live our values. 

This is a way that we bring our DEI SJ values into reality, and rather than just saying the words, we are identifying communities that are systemically systematically excluded. We are reaching out to them proactively. We are redistributing power back into their hands, where it belongs in the first place, and providing engaged support for them to create the things that they want to experience. That is equity in action. Of course we are learning as we do this, working across and outside of our own culture, and our own identities, working with communities who may have different lived experiences from whatever yours is. We're modeling lifelong learning, not foisting it onto others. We're experience that ourselves. The design thinking cycle is empathize, define, ideaate, prototype, test, this could be shorthanded into your inspiration phase, purple, blue, iteration phase and the orange. 

I'm going to talk through each of these. Before I do that, I'll emphasize and talk about this, this is not linear. This is just the extent of my PowerPoint skill here. You see this as a spiral or a loop and not linear as it looks. Design thinking is user and human-centered. It's about the people who will use or be impacted by the thing you're making. It is collaborative. You do it together. We want to approach with a beginner's mind.

That idea that kind of letting go of this idea of expertise and just coming at things fresh, coming at things like a beginner would, so we can learn. We learn by doing. We move to action quickly. We sort of start small, fail forward and learn from our actions. We want to continually be intentional about centering equity in our process. So I'm going to very briefly talk but these stages and get to our conversation. So empathize. This means starting with people, starting with the folks that you want to reach and that you want to serve. Who are you trying to reach? Who is excluded now from library services and how can you build authentic relationships of trust with them? Then you learn about their strengths and their goals. So I mentioned earlier that we take an asset-based perspective here and that really comes to the for in this phase. 

A previous webinar we talked about building authentic relationships and asset based community development was a key piece so I encourage you to go back and watch that for more. 

Fundamentally we're looking to build authentic relationships of trust based in the belief that everyone has strengths. Everyone has gifts, and everyone wants to contribute, that we are all trying to make a better world. 

As we build on that foundation of relationships, we want to define our meaningful goal or outcome. So in a sort of classic design thinking literature, this is framed as what'swhat's the problem you're trying to solve. That's not an approach I'm a fan of. I like to think of what opportunity are we going on. 

You'll know you're on the right track when you are surprised, when what you come up with, when what you realize you're trying to achieve, not just like let's do a thing together because we do programs. Let's do program together because we do programs but what's the real, what's the impact we're trying to make together, and when we're really working with a community especially one that we have not had a strong relationship with in the past, then the goal or the outcome is going to look really different than what we imagined it might. So we can be really surprised here and the tool that's often used to frame the opportunity in design thinking is the how might we. 

How might weigh chief this outcome or goal. The first step is to define what that outcome or goal is and this is really, I mean to me, this is like the most -- they're all important steps but it is so important to have a really meaningful conversation with your partner around what do they actually want? What do they actually care about? Because again success is not looking like how the library has traditionally defined it. We want to ideaate, answer the how might we question. The idea is to gather a lot of ideas really quickly. You want to collect things that are weird and wild and not be too constrained by practicality off the bat. 

Because there's a useful kernel in an off-the-wall idea and you want to get these from a diverse pool of voices. In order to do that, you need to use a variety of techniques. This brings to mind that classic brainstorming session, but I think we all know that that is not equitable accessible to all people. Not everyone feels as welcome or as comfortable sharing in that space. They might not feel safe sharing in that space, that's because of cultural and lived experiences, it's because of identity, and it's also just because of personality. So we want to give people a lot of different ways to express their ideas. From a pool of ideas, we want to create a minimum viable product. Your MVP. This means start small. If it's a program, do it once as stripped down as you possibly can, right. If you're making, you're designing a space, make it out of Legos. 

Designing a web environment do a mockup, wire frame or make it out of Post-its. The guy who invented the Palm Pilot got a block of wood with Post-2 notes and would pretend to do things and any time he didn't make sense he flopped it. Strip it down as low as you can. Make a journey map, writing or drawing out first the patient experience is this and then they experience that and they have this feeling and this thing happens. So what is the simplest way that you can move to action? Then do it together. Do it together. Pilot and learn. So make the thing. 

Try it, make sure that the people again who are actually going to use it have their hands on it in some way and that you learn together from that experience and so go in, knowing with a plan for how you're going to evaluate and again, what success looks like might not be what you would have come up with on your own. Evaluate the right thing and in a way that's meaningful and then be frank with yourself and with your partners what worked, what didn't. What could we do next time and iterate. This is something I was on the advisory board for a design thinking program at a local college that what we do in like eight weeks, I just did in 15 minutes, so I know that you're getting a small bite of this, but I wanted to give you a taste of what acode process could look like in practice. And now I want to come back to the idea it's not linear. You do the steps and you're iterating all the time.in practice. And now I want to come back to the idea it's not linear. You do the steps and you're iterating all the time. 

I've learned something new about the people using this thing that we're making, going back to define. We need to change the way we're framing the goal. The actual solution, okay, we have the goal right but we're not getting there in the way we thought. We need to change what we're doing. And I leaned on -- 

what happened? Okay. So how might you change things for next time and just make changes, try it again, keep going, and keep growing. Codesign is not something you do once. It is fundamentally relational. The idea is you keep things alive. 

You learn from them. You learn from your successes. You learn from your failures. You keep changing and you keep moving forward together with your community. So that is a lot of kind of theory about how codesign works and at this point, I want to take it into the practice by talking to two really fantastic partitioners in different ways, Angel and Beck. 

I want to frame our conversation by getting a sense of your overall approach to this work so you can talk about your background and what you do, but also why you use co-creation in your work? What role does it play and why is it so important to you in what you do. And Beck, I'll hand it to you first. 

>> Beck: Great. I am so excited to have this conversation. Thank you for including me in on this.

So I think that there are some obvious answers, many of which you just covered in reviewing like why do this, answers like you know, balancing power and having a more meaningful thing that you are designing and building skills and giving people agency, but for me personally, when I was thinking about why do I really do this, my answer is about relationships, and that relationality that you just mentioned. There's an Annie Dillard quote that I absolutely love, "How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. What we are doing this hour or that hour is what we are doing," and if we think about our relationship to our jobs and to work, most of the hours of my life are spent working, and when I think back to like my experience of work over many years now, the things that bubble up as the most meaningful are these codesign experiences, the times when I am in relationship in that way. So it's just a really enjoyable way to spend a work life and a life life and that's why I keep coming back. 

>> Audrey: Angel, how about you?

>> Angel: I agree. Codesign for me began in middle school, why it was important and why I think I inherently lean towards it now in the work place. I was in seventh grade and I had a home room class and we had to do a community project, something in the community, we had to volunteer and my teacher, Mrs. Greenwood, she was very much rooted in this area that as students, we should pave the way, that we should go into our community and ask our community what they want, and then we should bring that back to the classroom and discern and decide how to move forward and then before moving forward, she's like you got to go back to the community and what we ended up creating was this amazing mural on the back of a gas station that was really falling apart and we spelled out the word "harmony" and each got our own letter and we were able to create images within the letter that spoke to harmony, based on what the community told us. What should we highlight in this piece, and it stuck with me, and as I thought about preparing for this conversation, that's what really came back to me and when I think about the workplace in terms of what I at least have to advocate for as often as I possibly can is codesign, because I think it connects quickly to three fundamental needs that we all have, autonomy, relatedness and competence, and as human beings, we need to feel that in the workplace and to Beck's point, we spend so much time at work, so codesign allows us to empower and leverage the strengths of the community, whether the community is my colleagues, whether the community is educators or teams and it allows us to tamp into motivation, which is what it means to be alive and feel inherently connected and integrated. It's this bundle of love and joy that has really served me throughout my career as a librarian and to Beck's point, an honor to be here and talk about this today. 

>> Audrey: That's amazing. 

Thanks for sharing that story, Angel. 

>> Beck: It was great. 

>> Audrey: I want to make sure people with a you can away from the webinar with practical examples and tools they might apply and adapt to their own work. I'm going to ask each of you to tell us about how you do this work in practice. Angel, we'll start with you. You're in a public library system with a focus on services and a lot of the folks joining us are probably also in a public library setting. So can you give us a real world example of a codesign project that you've worked on and how did you go about it? What was the impact? 

>> Angel: God, this is such a hard question. I've been in the libraries for 20-plus years. I have' been doing things for a while and rooted in youth sources and learning. Toni Morrison if you want to fly, love, you have to give up things that hold you down, tower hoarding, perfectionism and fear you put aside. What I want to think about sharing, fashion shows and teen literacy magazines we've done with codesign but what I think I want to highlight is outreach definition for my 14th branch library system. You may think what, wait, you had no definition? No, we did not have a shared definition a year ago around what outreach was at Johnson County Library and like many organizations during the pandemic, we began to reflect and establish new visions and strategies for our library, and as we focused on tiering out restructuring at the libraries our staffing models, we realized that outreach existed all across the library, from promotion to school outreach, to branch services, and it became really clear that if we wanted to root ourselves to our aspirations for the future, we needed to have a shared definition and so I was tasked with working with our newly appointed foundation director to develop our definition. First meeting she said google it quick and own it.

No, if we google it and define it ourselves we'll have no buy-in and how can we encourage colleagues to take a definition we googled or wrote ourselves and then talk to the community about it. We drafted two specific questions. What is outreach at Johnson County Library and who is it for? 

Before we could step towards the consult and the involve and the collaboration and the power, we had to provide information, and so we started -- oops, my lights went off. Can you see me? 

There's always a -- 

>> Audrey: You're back. 

>> Beck: You're not moving around enough. 

>> Angel: We started stacking our perspectives, what are the four areas, we do outreach, adult and youth, engagement and promoting the library and we highlighted the work of two specific librarians that amplify the library, justice involved and language learners and pulled out a value statement and we asked all of our colleagues across our 14 branches, what is outreach and what does it mean to you and why should we define it and who's impacted by it and who are we missing based on what we do, and so we were able to convey these opportunities through a couple channels to Audrey's point. Email us, fill out this survey, create a video, talk to your patrons, and have an interview with them and share that information with us, and we were able to engage hundreds and hundreds of pieces of data, and then we were able to consult with some key folks that love the idea of building opportunities for people to collectively decide things and they built a workshop for us to build, bring people in and we involved managers and focus area committees and together, we created this shared definition, and it was quite, I don't know, it was one of the most empowering things that I was a part of, mostly because to Audrey's point, I was tasked with doing it, and I was able to step back and allow the folks that actually do it every single day to define it. Now we have this shared definition that was built by all of us, and now we could take the step into the community to get their input, and we're going to be more open to maybe shift our definition because we understand the iterative process. It was a long-winded answer but I didn't realize what we were embarking on until we were in the middle of it and it's super cool to see these principles and mindsets arrive by surprise. 

>> Audrey: That's wonderful. You highlight such an important thing there. This isn't always work. Did you enter into this with a lot of intention but this isn't always a process that we -- sometimes we fall in, in some ways, into this work. It's sort of unfolds before us into something much bigger than we had envisioned and that's okay. 

So for folks listening, you don't have to have it all planned out perfectly or know exactly what steps you're going to follow to get started. You can just start. Thank you. You shared a lot of very specific things around like working with community. I saw in the chat someone asked, how do you define community and you talked about internal and external communities, I want to highlight that as well. 

>> Angel: Absolutely. 

>> Audrey: Beck, I think we met as part of a participatory research project you were helping to lead at the University of Washington and I've seen you run several other projects that use a lot of human-centered design and participatory design techniques, creating toolkits for youth codesign, creating restorative spaces in libraries. If you haven't seen Beck's work out there publicly, you should check it out, it's amazing. Can you tell us about some of the techniques that you find most successful when you're running one of these sessions and what kind of activities do you actually have people do if our folks listening are going to try just one or two things with a partner, what would you recommend that they do? 

>> Beck: Great question, Audrey.

First I want to just kind of highlight something that Angel, I feel is so important in what you said which is just this layering of the codesign process, that you can start internally and keep going. 

Finding that one place to insert a question that is collaborative and gets further along in that spectrum of involvement can then snowball into something that becomes much more significant and powerful and build skills along the way. I have some examples of that in my own work and I just really loved hearing what that looks like for you. I love that you started with an example that started internally.

Okay, so I have so many practical examples. I'm going to give a few and wave your hand, Audrey, when I've spent too much time. So this is going to be like a laundry list of things that worked for me over the years. First off, if you're doing something in-person, you can't go wrong with having fat markers, things that people can see from afar, Post-it notes, 11x17, different form factor piece of paper, plain old paper, dot stickers, painter's tape and good foot. If you have those things you can solve any problem or take any opportunity. 

>> Angel: 100%. So true. 

>> Beck: Number one on your laundry list. If you're online, Google Slides is an incredibly powerful tool. We think of it as PowerPoint, but it's actually a very dynamic, collaborative design environment that everybody knows how to use. So as long as the people that you are working with online aren't on their mobile phones, and if they are, that's a lot harder, but if they are on a device where they have a mouse or has some real estate, Google Slides is a wonderful design tool. You need to think of it is as this is an online whiteboard or change the dimensions. You can go in, like file, page setup, change the dimensions from side dimensions to 8 1/2x1  1 and you have prototyping. 

I've done so much in Google Slides. For a tool that is made for this, for those who are into that, by a mile, Whimsical is the best online virtual whiteboard tool, kind of like one of those salad bars that you go to where it's really small but every single thing in the salad bar is really good. It's that kind of environment, so it's really pared down tool set that's usable. I also want to share what I start with when I am designing a session is this four-part agenda. So every participatory design session I do starts with an outline with four points. The first is open up. The second is build on. The third is dive in, and the fourth is stand back. And so every session starts with an opener. 

We open up a little bit. We build on what came before. It could have been the session before or what people are bringing into the space. We dive in to an actual generative creative activity, and then we stand back and look at what we did and reflect. That four-part process is really rock solid for all sorts of groups, and then the last thing I'll say before I say more from the agenda point of view, if you have a multiple session, there is so much good will you can buy in a session by doing something in between the two sessions and showing that to them. So if they talked to you and you learned something, do a little synthesis and offer that as a gift that you can spend the build-on part of your work, working on. Okay. Last three things I'll say is first, codesign starts before you get in the room codesigning. So one awesome thing, if you are inviting people to a codesign session, about ever they get into that room, make sure they realize how valued they are to you. Tell them something that you want them to bring to that meeting, like Audrey, I was talking to a neighbor yesterday, no, Sunday who is on the planning committee here on Bain Bainbridge Island. Audrey and I live on the same island. He was thinking about doing transit centers. I thought you need to talk to this person who knows commuters. He did fairytales, blah, blah, blah, blah. If I were inviting to you a codesign session to design a transit center, I would say Audrey, I hope you bring your hat of community engagement and especially around what you learned about commuters and I also hope that you feel out of your comfort zone around the dynamics on the island around NIMBYs and that sort of thing. I would see you to your value before you show up. I'd also invite creative agitators, so you may have community members who are totally need to be in the room but people who don't make sense to be in that room, too, because they can help you go to a new place, and then just general tips, kind of like to the awesome like tool kits you have in terms of your office supplies. Use name tags. It freeze up cognitive energy so people don't have to remember each other's names and they can call each other by name. Don't start with the logistics. 

Logistics take down the energy of the room. Start with something that actually helps people get into a creative space. I think drawing, there's so many drawing activities, you go to restorativelibrary.org, there's a bunch of drawing activities that are good for this. Drawing is a great warmup.

Most people are intimidated by it but it's easy to do. Frame discomfort as a norm. Tell people if it's not working, if it doesn't get messy, tell them if they don't feel uncomfortable some of the time, it's not working, and be willing to change gears in the middle of everything, which I'm sure we'll talk about when we talk about the challenges. That moment of realizing, wait, things have shifted, and responding, incredibly important. Okay, I'll stop. Thank you. 

>> Audrey: That was amazing. 

Tons of super practical stuff in there. I was taking notes. I have never seen Whimsical I'll have to look at that. Just really I think these are things that I can see how people in any kind of library or any kind of organization could apply them. 

That's sort of four-point structure to how you engage people, thinking about who you bring in the room and how you invite them to show up. If you're in a small, rural library an it's just you, it's just as valid if you're in a large, urban library or research project. Thank you for bringing those things that are so practical and yet adaptable. You mentioned challenges. Angel, we'll talk with you. Why is codesign so important and vital we talked about, but we know it's not easy especially if you're working in on organization that's not used to to doing things that way. How did you meet the challenges? 

>> Angel: Great question. I want to speak to what Beck was talking about in terms of drawing. We created these opportunities in meetings that I lead. One of the activities is awesome, where you have two people that have to have a piece of paper, pin down and draw each other. They can't look down at the pin and can't pick up their pen while doing it and you get the amazing drawings and the point of the activity is that sometimes our inner voice, our inner critic sort of disallows us to show up creatively, and so I use that activity whenever I can. To get people thinking outside the box, et cetera, which is a big piece and part of the challenges that you face when you are prioritizing this type of work. We are in the middle of a very huge codesign project at the library. We run an initiative called raise Project KC an annual student social justice initiative 9th through 12th. We've been in operation since 2018, we build diverse student cohorts across our city and bring students together to learn about the history of red lining, blockbusting and racially restrictive covenants along with other of representative inequities we face from health equity to representation in the arts and we offer students the opportunity to sort of demonstrate leadership skills through dialogue, talking about inclusion and storytelling. The community loves it. During the pandemic, we were able to continue for two years online and we created such a huge additional network that we've been getting requests left and right to grow this program, and so together as a team, we proposed that the library stop operationally working on race project and instead turn towards the community. What is Race Project, who is it for and how can they help sustain and grow it? We've received resistance every step of the way because of what Audrey spoke to earlier, the fear of what it means to give up power, to say this work the library has stewarded and grown, we're going to give that to the community and we're going to amplify representative voices where we've built a 25-person community advisory board that has met for the last year trying to help us understand how to grow this work, and when you bring people together from different backgrounds, A, it's a challenge in and of itself, when we form, we tend to storm, and in order to storm, we can push ourselves towards norming and only when we are normed we begin to perform and we can go back and forth between all of these things. How we've managed it is to, AA low ourselves to be uncomfortable by the fact that we are potentially embarking on a totally new trajectory toward this work. We've built community agreements where they are radioed the in who are we hoping to center, who are we not representing and how can we ensure that we're able to manage this uncomfortable feeling and reach toward something that is new, and so even our library administration was like we can't possibly give this up and stop doing this. It's more seen as a privilege for us to pause and hand it over, and we had to push against that. We had to step into brave spaces and say no, it's actually a privilege for us to continue doing something that maybe we're not equipped to do. 

So it's been quite the journey and we've literally just begun. 

We're in our second year with our advisory committee and they're just turning towards implementation and shifting from implementation, strategy to implementation has been challenging. People are afraid to take agency. You're the authority. You have to tell me what to do and I have to keep saying, we hear your goals and we want to be here to support you but we really want you to engage with the community and go through that process exactly what Audrey has talked about, go into spaces, into schools, into community centers, into parks, into churches, into people's homes to think about how this program can change and grow for the betterment of our community.

>> Audrey: Something I'm hearing you say, Angel, just the persistence that's needed. The kinds of challenges that come up aren't a one-time, big hurdle, but it's just that constant support, that constant engagement with people to encourage them to be brave and to make the shift. 

>> Angel: And to adjust course. 

It becomes very clear that you do have to shift and you have to be open to that. But again, we're right at the beginning of it. We're in year two of a three-year project so we do not know what it is going to produce. That just makes some people crazy. And it's exciting, though, to think about what the future can bring, because we aren't the ones that are holding onto it. We're allowing the community to tell us what they want. 

>> Audrey: It's really exciting.

I can't wait to see what it will look like in a few years. Beck, how about you? Do you have any response to that, anything you want to add to what Angel has said and are there other challenges you want to talk about? 

>> Beck: Thank you. I do. Your example, Angel, is so beautiful.

It hits on all the things that I think are really challenging about doing this work, and in particular, I kind of want to elevate the fact that like as we all go forward from this webinar, any kinds of work you do to share the power, or even hand over the power of your institutions will be scary, and that is a sign that you're doing the work. So like the hardship that you're experiencing means that it's actually working. Like when I hear you describe this, I'm like you're doing it. You're actually doing it. It's not pretend. It's actually happening because people are having these emotional responses, so I just think that's such a beautiful example. For my own challenges, I think the number one -- like when I think back, I think I started codesigning maybe in 2012 or something like that, I think back of how many times in every single organization I have done this with, I have had to overcome a challenge of getting people to trust me on this, and it's just a part of it, so I think that like take that away first off, is that people are going -- you're going to evoke a fear response in most people when you tell them you're doing this kind of work but it is really important because if you compromise, like if someone says I don't think that's going to work and you're like what about this, and you minimize the actual offering of the institution, it's not going to work, because people, once they gather, are going to be able to tell that you are not legitimately, you know, valuing their time, and they're not going to give you what you're wanting in order to do this work. One piece of evidence that they're giving you what you're wanting are these emotions. The hard emotions mean that people are truly invested. So I think one of my strategies for overcoming the lack of trust is to instead of shift what I'm trying to do, I try to shift the framing of what I'm trying to do, so I'll give you an example.

I was working with the library director several years ago about doing a restorative workshop for their employees, and this was actually during the pandemic, so their employees were super burnt out, and I remember they came to me with all of this excitement, and then once they started to realize what it really meant, that like for example maybe an outcome of this would be that the library workers would need to actually do less work, it became very scary, and in particular, it became scary in a specific way, not so much this director's capacity to dial back but the board's capacity to continue to support the library, when that is something that they were doing. And so what we had to do in those moments, I kind of took two approaches. One approach was to reframe and say, alright, let's frame this more as experiment instead of policy change. Let's just experiment so that you adjust the expectations of the staff that are participating and you also make a little less riskier for the board, and two, I became that particular director's advocate, and partner in figuring out how to create buy-in in the board. 

Buy-in is such an important skill to be able to have, and I remember walking away from a board meeting with this director reflecting on the conversations that they had with board members with a lot of pride and the fact that they were able to have conversations that were disagreeing and actually listen and still be able to move forward. So reframing can be very powerful, and also we have this phrase, sometimes we use, it's not a hill I want to die on. Like this is kind of a hill I will die on. I spend my social capital advocating for codesign work, but the fact of the matter is that I have looked back on where I have really taken a leap of faith and said really, just trust me on this, the return on that has been really great, because as all three of us know and I'm sure plenty of people who are here know what you actually get when you trust and listen and value people in your community is amazing. If you can get to the point where you can get in a room and actually enable some of that stuff, you've got a lot of great stuff to work with. So yes, those are a few strategies, but it is I think as a takeaway, it creates fear, a fear response in a lot of people, and that's just sort of a statement of its power. 

>> Audrey: Yes. And that's such a good point. Thank you. Someone sent me a message reflecting on how in the chat reflecting on how difficult some of this work can feel especially for small and rural libraries. I want to highlight things that both of you have said that relate I think specifically to that. 

Angel, the way you talked about bringing the work out to the community, and while that is a big lift in the beginning, right, that's scary, as Beck was saying, it's hard for people to make that shift. There's a lot of feelings. Once do you it, you are no longer constrained by just the number of hours and number of ideas, right, that you have within your staff. You are, you will be and to some extent are sharing that work with the whole community. So if you are, in a small and rural library, where it's just a couple of you, and being able to mobilize, leverage the brilliance and the effort and the passion that is in your communities can be an enormous capacity builder for you. And then Beck, you mentioned doing less, right, and sort of reframing the work you're doing, rather than just like piling on more and more and more, and I think that is also so powerful, especially in small and rural libraries but really for all of them. We're trying hard to do more and be everything for everyone all the time but giving ourselves that permission to slow down, to focus, to say this is where I need to be spending my time and energy. This is where equity happens in the community, and I'm going to focus on that. That can be really powerful for our small and rurals. I don't know if either of you have anything you want to add on specific to the small and rural community. 

>> Beck: I'll start with just a reflection that in my work with small and rural libraries, one of the real benefits is that you have like the very nature of the work is super relational. You know everybody, and so that is I think really powerful, and also you know, depending on your governance, blah, blah, blah, you could sometimes really get a lot done. Because you're kind of out there isolated on your own, but you can get a lot done because of that as well. I think that it's a very powerful place, when I look at some of the work that small and rural libraries are doing that are using community engagement strategies and participatory design. 

There's a lot of leverage and traction that you can get because you don't have so much bureaucracy to get through. So generally. So I think there's a ton of opportunity in this space. 

>> Angel: I second that. I think in a large system, where we may have the resources and the funding, there is a lot, tends to be more red tape and so I think in small you are communities to your point, Beck, relationships can be the guiding principle to get people engaged and to connect build bridges to other spaces and places in the community. 

>> Audrey: Thank you. We have a few minutes remaining. I want to take more questions from the audience. J.P.? 

>> Jennifer: One thing you to touch on, somebody mentioned scope and in terms of like a question, one of the questions that came up when it comes to sharing power and co-creating, are there suggestions when power is not shared and not actually held by libraries. I'm wondering if terms of the process of like thinking about the what, getting to the community, getting to that trust place where then maybe there's something that happens around the scoping that touches on power. I guess in terms of, you know, somebody else mentioned what do you do when the community is die metric metrically opposed to your mission and success. I'm wondering if there's something in there that maybe like the 101 of this work for the community, you know, how do you bring the community into this work if there are those barriers and does it relate to the scoping? 

Do you start small? What does that look like? 

>> Angel: I feel, Audrey, you talked about this in a different webinar that I was just, that's when I first was so like impressed and wanted to learn everything about the work that you were doing and it really was about go to where the relationship can start. If it's NAACP, go to monthly meetings for an entire year. Show up in spaces and be there to build relationship, not to transactionulely find that baseline. In the 20 years I've been at the library, every person I collaborated with, it's because we'd gone to coffee for three months or someone introduced me. Make yourself available in spaces so you become a familiar face and the conversation becomes welcomed and expected and excited. And I think I learned that from you, Audrey. 

>> Audrey: Definitely that focus on transformational relationships, rather than the transactional piece, yes, going to connect people for the sake of connecting with them is so powerful. Beck, did you have thoughts? 

>> Beck: Yes, I just wanted to point out a tool that I use sometimes when I have a group of people who don't agree. It's from a book called "facility Tater's Guide to Participatory Decision-making" full of really great today. Gradients or agreement is one tool where, oh, look at there, very nice. Very nice. Perfect. So that's it. 

There's a tool in there that allows a group of people to feel like their disagreement has been seen and heard but they'll still be willing to move forward. So it also allows you the ability to kind of see where group is so if you are suggesting -- so it's a gradient of like I think one through eight and people, one is like I'm totally in, down for this, I love it, four, five is like I'm not so sure but I'll do it anyway or I don't like this but I'll play along, and then seven or eight is like no, I do not want to do this. And so you get kind of a curve, a shape of where the space is, so if you have a thing that you're doing and looks like a normal curve where most people are in the middle, that's not that great. 

Everybody is just sort of meh about it. That means you need to go. If you have a bimodal, people who love it and people who hate it, that's really good information. I think that the thing about participatory design, if we have time for our last piece of advice, I'll touch on this, but it's essentially the skill to facilitate a group in the moment when they have a disagreement is a skill to build, in order to do this work, but it's possible and that skill mostly involves listening, and letting people feel heard and seen. That's incredibly important. So it's not easy work when you've got diametrically opposed people but there are ways that a lot of people have done work to figure that out. 

Peacemakers are a great place to read about that stuff. I have more thoughts and ideas but I'll stop there since we are short on time. 

>> Audrey: Absolutely. We have a lot of attendees today. We won't go tote answer all the questions. I'll move into the final tip, since you mentioned it, to close us out, if you have one tip for someone who is getting started, who is just doing this for the first time, who is maybe operating in a structure that isn't totally supportive, what's your tip for that person getting started? 

Beck, since you teased yours, I'll let you follow up and then we'll hear from Angel. 

>> Beck: This is my tip. Find a skill that you want to build and start building it immediately. 

If that skill is facilitatcilitating, if that still is drawing, if that skill is making community partnerships, whatever it S take someone that you admire who does a skill really well and pretend to be that person an ask yourself, what would, if I wanted to be a better community engagement, what would Audrey be reading right now? What would she be thinking about in this situation? What would she wear to the grocery store? Seriously, go through and think about this person you admire and how to be more like them, and practice it, until you start to be yourself in that skill set, and this could be done with anything, but I think it's a wonderful way to start with a lot of the skills that codesign requires. Angel, what do you think? 

>> Angel: I love that. I think I've dubbed it myself. I learn about someone that is so exceptional about something and I want to know more about them and connect with them and apply what they can do in my own space and venue, but what I would say, my tip is, make it practice to read about these things. Every week read something related to this. I'll be in a meeting or a workshop or a webinar and something will spark me and I'll go, we have to do it because of these particular things I just read two days ago, and so to align myself as a librarian at heart, read about T learn about it, inquire about it, make it your practice, as important as walking, jogging, meditatng to allow your brain the space and time Pip somebody put in The Slow Librarianship, I'll look at that, allowing yourself to slow down and be a learner. 

>> Audrey: I'll add on that, start where you are. People in the chat, what if I don't have power or control? We all have more power than we think. There is something in your sphere of control, however small it is. 

Start there, start small, let yourself see your success and let others around you see your success and build. That is all from us. Thank you so much for your time today. You can see that there's contact information, I believe, for us yep own the slide if you want to reach out and J.P., anything you want to say to close us out? 

>> Jennifer: So wonderful. 

Somebody just said they work in a medical library. All of this is applicable. I just feel this has been like a therapy session, all of the advice you've given is applicable to so much of our lives, not just the work we're doing at our libraries, so thank you, thank you so much. Really, really wonderful. Just a reminder to everyone, I'll send you an email later on today when the recording is posted and I'll add any of the gems that came through chat to that page and automatically send you a certificate next week or probably by the end of the week for attending, and I'll also be sending you to a short survey as you leave. If you don't have time to take the survey now, it will be in the email I send you, but we really, really appreciate your feedback. I'll share that with the presenters and it helps us guide our ongoing programming, so thank you for taking the time to do that. And thank you again to everyone who was here today and especially to Angel, Beck and Audrey. Thank you so much. 

>> Audrey: Thank you. 

>> Angel: Thank you. 

>> Beck: Thank you, bye.