 Next up, we have the little library that could and did with Erica and Erin from the Red Hook Public Library and the Barnes College Center for Civic Engagement, both in New York. Erica and Erin, welcome to Big Talk, and go ahead and take it away. Well, thanks so much for having us here. We're really excited to be a part of this because little libraries, I think, that's where all the exciting stuff is happening. I know I'm biased. I'm Erica Pointenberger, Director of Red Hook Public Library, and with me today is the lovely and talented Erin Kanan, the Associate Director of Bar Colleges Center for Civic Engagement. So we're here today to talk about kind of what we've been doing here. You know, we like to say libraries, we like to say, are the cornerstones of democracy. But what do we mean when we say that? We pride ourselves on it, but are we genuinely ensuring that democracy flourishes in the communities we serve? This is a question we've been asking ourselves in Red Hook. We're here to share what we've been doing, what we've learned, and how we're positioning ourselves for the future. Libraries are in a funding position, especially small rural libraries. We are told repeatedly by the outside world that thanks to the internet, we're obsolete. No one needs to go to a library to access information anymore, right? Yet our experience tells another story. I'm sure many of you can relate. We're busier than ever with new demands on our services. We're left scrambling not just to meet the traditional needs of our community, but to continually reinvent who we are and what we do. I'm here to tell you, don't worry, be happy, go outside and play. Why? Because change happens and it does not stop. Bob Berman, a local astronomer and Hudson Valley author, wrote in his new book, Zoom, we are embedded in a magical matrix of continual motion. We have embraced that sentiment as our mantra. So we're currently at the end of a historic shift from a post-industrial to a knowledge economy, which is great news for us librarians. Knowledge and information is what we do, right? And without information, there can be no civic engagement. What's even more exciting is that a knowledge economy encourages collaborative consumption, which shifts the needle from ownership to access, something which we as librarians are experts. It's up to us to harness the power of collaborative consumption or the art of sharing to collaboration, community engagement, and our attempts to democratize information sharing. It's about thinking beyond the book and focusing energy more on connections rather than collections. The library is a space, both real and virtual, where conscious discussions can be had about a wide range of civic matters. When you start to think about the possibilities of what libraries can do, it's thrilling. Rethinking and repositioning your place in the community will change you and your organization in ways you couldn't have imagined. I know it has for us. So just a little bit of background. This is a picture of our library. It's a mid-19th century octagonal building, a shape created and promoted by Orson Squire Fowler. He was an architect slash phrenologist who studied the hard science of Victorian art of phrenology, which was a study of the shape of people's heads. And he felt the shape of the building would help people's minds open and be more receptive to new ideas. It was originally built as a private house, but became the library in 1935. Our library was chartered in 1898, and our charter was signed by Melville Dewey, who is somebody you may have heard of. We are chartered to serve the Village of Red Hook, which is 1,961 people, but we have nearly 4,500 card holders, because we in fact serve the entire town. And this is something that is peculiar to New York. We have villages and hamlets within a town. Villages are their own separate municipalities. Aside from Bard College and our school district, the main industry is agriculture. We're nestled between farms and orchards on the beautiful Hudson Valley. I took the home at Red Hook Public Library four and a half years ago after having about nine months of experience as a library director. I had no idea what I didn't know, which turned out to be a blessing. I was eager to connect people with information and empower them, something that is key to adjusting fair democracy. I had a budget of $165,000 a year and an inherited renovation project, which was being financed out of that budget. I had a board of trustees that was willing to advocate for and support two major budget referendums that eventually led to an increase in our budget of 94%. They listened to the community and understood that libraries rely on patronage, not just for home borrowing or for programming. Erica? Hi. We're having a little choppiness with the sound. I think part of it is actually sounding to me like a bandwidth connection issue. Not much anything we can do about that on either side, but could you talk more, it might help if you talk more towards your microphone, or if that can be moved a little closer to you? Oh, yeah. I know you guys are sharing a desktop one there, because you both did there. Hang on a second. The reality is a rural library bandwidth. Here we go. Is that any better? Well, go ahead and talk, continue, and we'll see how it goes. Like I said, a lot of it sounded from our side like there's just a bandwidth thing that neither of us can do anything about, but the recording will catch everything nice and clear. That's not a problem. It will just be at the moment thing, but I think it was a little closer to you that it would help out a bit. Go ahead. Okay. Sorry about that. Go ahead and continue. All right, so I have learned from watching our friends group organize and host a successful big read that the library was part of a larger socio ecosystem, the village in town it served. This sounds like a simple idea, but it's easy to forget that we don't exist in a vacuum. The only way we would survive and eventually thrive was to demonstrate our values are being part of something much larger than the library. If the village in town didn't flourish, neither would we. It wasn't so much about communicating our value as it was being valuable. It meant that I had to leave the safety of our eight walls and venture out. The president of the board took me out and introduced me to various community groups. And at the Chamber of Commerce, I heard an announcement about this group that had poked together a monthly meeting of locals that included folks I thought I should get to know. I emailed the organizer with a request to come to the meeting. And this is where my complete and utter obliviousness worked in my favor. I felt a need to be at the table and so I reached out to the organizer. I think too often we wait for an invitation or assume that we're being deliberately excluded when really people don't necessarily know who we are or just didn't think we would be interested in what they were doing. So I just showed up and I met Erin Kamman and began a great adventure. And now I'm going to let Erin tell you her side of the story. Hi everybody. This is Erin. Let me tell you a little bit about where I work because it's a kind of unique place, I think. Bard College is a small liberal arts and sciences college located in upstate New York. It's a little bit older than the library. It was founded in 1860. We sit on a bucolic 600 acre campus right on the Hudson River that you can see there in the background. We're sort of located in the middle of nowhere. We're not in town or either village. We've been chronically under-resourced from the get-go. We really don't have any endowment to speak of and recently our Moody's rating was downgraded. This is our college president who is both a president and a conductor for a number of symphony orchestras. He was at one time known for being the youngest president in the country. And now he's known as being one of the longest standing and was recently featured in The New Yorker about his career. Our students are artistic. They're super smart. They're hyper-critical and intellectual. Their former geeks turned hipsters. They did piercings and tattoos before it was cool. And they have very liberal, sometimes radical notions. A real Occupy Wall Street crowd and it's plopped right down here in Upstate New York. We call it a little bit of Brooklyn. So there's always been in our community room for tension around the differences between our rural background and the college. I arrived in 1995 when we had just over 1,000 students. Now in 2015 we have close to 2,000 and we have over 10 national and international degree granting partnerships. And these are the different places where Bard has degree granting programs. We have both high school early college programs in New York City, New Orleans. A new one started in Cleveland and another starting in Baltimore. And we have the largest degree granting prison education program in the country. All from Upstate New York. With this growth we have asked ourselves what are the college's responsibilities to our surrounding communities. Locally here in the Hudson Valley and also local to our other institutional partners. In places like New York City, Kyrgyzstan and Palestine. So this is where we are in the United States. So these questions are not unlike the questions libraries are asking. Democracy was built on the foundation of our educational institutions, both libraries and universities. And we believe that we need to consider even as a private institution how we can democratize access to information. I started at Bard Center for Civic Engagement, which we'll now refer to as CCE because it's shorter. Five years ago when we made an institutional effort to grow student opportunities locally. And this was based on, we believe, an imperative that a lot of institutions are feeling as indicated by the American Association for Colleges and Universities Task Force called Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. They issued a report called A Crucible Moment, College Learning in Democracy's Future. And it includes in that report a national call to action which is designed to make civic and democratic learning an expected outcome for not just college students. Every college student I think should have this. But also integrating further into educating students from preschool to professional schools. So to that end, Bard has retooled itself as a private college acting in the public interest where a student's community engagement reflects institutional commitments we have developed outside their commitments. And we have centered civic engagement as an institutional and individual cornerstone much like the library here. And I joke that CCE is like Bard's football team. We don't have football like in Nebraska. So we don't have a football team at Bard too many hipsters. But so instead we have civic engagement where students take the same kind of institutional pride and in which hundreds participate. So in this fast growth over the last 15 years, this is a picture of our campus which you can see is really in the middle of nowhere. And in an environment in which there's a lot of potential for natural tensions with our local community. We came to the year 2008 where we saw the economic downturn, the death of all of our local newspapers, the voting down of a bond for a performing arts center in our local school district, lots of empty storefronts and a reduction in student applications. So this all kind of came to a head in 2008. And then suddenly we seem to have a lot more in common between our own needs at Bard and the needs of our local community. So 2009 rolls around and we called lunch. A mayor, a school superintendent, librarian, a public access cable director, photographers, painters, a college dean, our Chamber of Commerce director and historian all walked into a room and we ordered lunch. The initial invitation came just from making a list of people that I had met when I ran and lost for office for our local town board in 2006. But we reached out to people that we knew in all of the stakeholder leadership in our community, the schools, the government, business, nonprofits, and then basically any individual, any citizen who wanted to come. And we just kept having lunch. The meetings were open to anyone who wanted to come and we really wrestled with figuring out what we were and what we needed. And we felt like it was for some reason we felt like there was a community imperative that we all get into the room together and talk to each other and tell each other what we were doing with our time. We eventually gave ourselves a name which Erica referred to called Red Hook Together and we eventually developed a mission. We tried to formalize the group at one point. We talked about grant writing. We talked about getting a logo. You know all the regular things that you do once you've been in a room and you want to make a to-do list for yourself. But it turns out that it wasn't the creation of a new group we needed. It was really finding our intersections, the points of connections that represented places of growth for our organizations. And then it also represented for us the importance of information sharing and developing this collective knowledge base, not just about books but about what kinds of resources were available in our communities and how we could access them and help the community access them. So we grew a lot after 9-11. Our school district grew and because people moved up from New York City, we were two hours outside of the city. And we realized that because of that, because of the changing community around us, that we needed to get out from our storefronts, each of our individual organizations. And we needed to make room for simply getting together as citizens who cared. I'll read you the mission of Red Hook Together. The mission of Red Hook Together is to blend cultural, agricultural, educational, business and tourism endeavors to create a sustainable community. Bard College, the Red Hook Chamber of Commerce, school district and the towns of Red Hook and Tivoli work together and share a vision that enhances the lives of those who live, work and study in Red Hook. Our goal is to strengthen the relationships among people involved in this community, striving to preserve our resources and continue to develop our businesses. So we've been meeting now since 2009. And aside from keeping an informal agenda, we decided to not take a problem-based discussion approach to our conversation. We didn't approach each other from a deficiency model. We didn't talk about the things we didn't have. Instead, we talked about the things we had in common and we found ways to work together. We realized that a good village center makes for happier students, young people and families. People tend to then spend money and find productive ways to spend their time, which then makes them perceive the community as a welcoming place with opportunity. Businesses emerge from that demand. Our tax bases go up. Then we can have more programs and events, etc. And when we realized whenever our conversations drifted into a problem-based direction, like if students cause noise in one of the villages, we just got stuck. It just reinforced our old paradigms and emphasized the ways we couldn't work together. So we really approach every conversation with a solution-based approach. And we focus on our connections and our intersections, which has led to underscoring our mission, which now means that we've helped support one another's goals. So I imagine what we're talking about probably sounds familiar to many of you, because I'm sure many of you are doing a lot out in the community and working with different organizations. This picture is three-fifths of our amazing team. When we got lucky, we were one of the 10 libraries chosen nationwide to be part of the American Library Association's Library of Transforming Communities Grant. And so you see from left to right my head of circulation, our deputy mayor, and the former regional head of New York State Parks and Recreation. And cleverly, neither Aaron nor myself is in this picture. And this is when we were in the big city of Denver for our training. So it was a bunch of country mice got to go to the big city. And the interesting thing, one of the reasons why we were told we were chosen is because our cohort was so diverse and that it wasn't just made of library people. And the reason why it wasn't just made of library people was in fact because of the necessity, because of the limitations that we had. And limitations are often tremendous gifts. There's no way I could have pulled five people from the library. The library would have closed down to do this. So I had to look outside and find other people to do this project with us. And we were lucky to find people that were willing to be engaged and take part. The grant for us has been a tremendous opportunity. It's raised the profile of the library. It's validated the work we've been doing in the community for the past four and a half years. And it's given us tools to connect with the community, identify its aspirations, and help shape a roadmap for the future. It's taught us how to engage with our community. And so it's a collaboration. While we thought it was kind of the end product, it's actually just the first step in a much larger journey. So I don't know if we can do this or not. We were hoping to be able to get a kind of a sense of where people were in their journey. I didn't know if we could see if the brace or the hands are not. But I'm guessing that most of you meet regularly with different types of organizations in the community. And one of the things that we've been learning through this grant is the kinds of questions to ask. And we're going to share some of those questions with you now. And if you want, if it's possible, you can jot down your answers or put them in the chat if that's a possibility. So the first question that we ask when we go out to talk to people is, what kind of a community do you want to live in? And that seems really simple. But it opens up a whole new conversation about things. So once people have answered that, then we ask, why is that important to you? And how is that different from how you see things now? And what are some of the things that need to happen to create that kind of change? We've actually gone door to door in our village to ask people these questions. We're doing this because we're trying to figure out what the aspirations of our community are and determine kind of what our North Star is. The first time I asked some of these questions, it happened to be the superintendent of our school district. When I was done, he said, why didn't you ask any questions about the library? And that's exactly the point. Because what's important to me is not what he thinks about the library, but what he wants to see happen in our community. And not only helps me calibrate how we think about what we're doing, but who we need to reach out to and work with. So for those of you who are not working with community partners, you may ask yourself who in the community can be an ally to what we're doing. And for those of you who are already actively engaged with many organizations, always stop to ask, who are you missing? So we'd like to challenge you to make a list of three organizations that you haven't yet reached out to and invite them for a copy in the next couple of months. And here's the hard part. Don't talk about your library. Ask them what they're working on. And feel free to use the questions we did in this exercise. And chances are you'll learn about plenty of opportunities to get involved and come away with a better understanding of what your community really cares about. What are we doing that's harvesting information about your community? Too often we spend time pushing out our message, right? Because we're always, we're marketing, that's our hot bit thing. And we're earnestly trying to convey the value of the library. But what we really need to be doing, I think, is gathering information from our community about its desires. When we do that and deeply listen to our community and identify what its needs are, we're engaging them. We are acknowledging that their aspirations are ours and that we are here to help. It really changes our relationships. So when Erin talks about getting together and asking people to lunch, it sounds dissectably simple, I think. But the result has been profound. She created the neutral space for people to meet and develop relationships. We were no longer trying to work with an organization. We were calling someone we knew. We each have limited resources. Through partnerships, those resources increased exponentially. The relationships are created by the formation of new groups, such as the Red Hook Community Arts Network, which was an initiative of the Chamber of Commerce, which wanted to harness the energy of artists to help create a vibrant business district. Strictly speaking, this wasn't in Bard's mission. It wasn't in our mission or anybody else's mission, maybe the Chamber of Commerce's, but nobody else's. But everyone recognized the value it brought to the community and wanted to work on it together. So our relationships have allowed our little library to do far more than we imagined and have increased our value to the community. We've partnered with pretty much anyone who won't run away from us at this point, from creating ladies who launch with the Chamber of Commerce for women returning to the workforce after transition to the annual Egg Scramble with the Red Hook Village Police and Read Local Literary Festival with the Red Hook Community Arts Network. Our road reach chapter held a book sale to raise money for the library for early literacy programs, and the Boy Scouts hold spaghetti dinners for us. We will collaborate with anyone. I call myself a promiscuous collaborator, but today I want to focus on what it's like to develop one ongoing, committed relationship with a partner and how that relationship is shifted from our early collaborations. This is Erin again. When we first began working together back in 2009, we realized we looked up from our desks and we made eye contact with each other and said, hey, I have undergraduates that would like a place to run workshops and to get some opportunities. And the librarian here, Erica, said, free smart labor, I'll take it. And it worked really nicely for a while. And we met part of our mission, the Red Hook Together mission that I read earlier, where we were creating opportunities for youth and it felt good and it looked good too. But we really were only acting on behalf of our two institutions. We were acting out of our own agendas. But with this recent grant that we've been working on now, almost close to a year, we realized that we shouldn't just make eye contact with each other, that we needed to begin looking outward to better understand our own community and possibly our own institutions. Our institutional missions as well, if we really think about libraries and colleges as democratic institutions, that at the heart of it, by looking outward, by turning our gaze outward, we would actually be meeting our own institutional missions. And we really needed to do that to consider what aspects of the community we weren't representing, that we were representing the library and we were representing Bard, but there were a lot of other voices that weren't being heard by just having the two of us making eye contact and collaborating together. And for our part, we were eager to collaborate with Bard College. I'm mercenary enough to be able to appreciate that we have all this talent at our fingertips. From the beginning, our relationship gave us access number one to a low-class educational institution. But also to a community of professionals with expertise in various disciplines, as well as its students and their unbridled energy and creativity, which if I could can, I would. The relationship allows us to leverage the hive mind of multiple intelligences. In the past four years, we've worked with Bard College to develop a robotics and coding workshop, a volunteer fair, the Big Read, the Read Local Red Hook Festival, had a host of science-based programs for kids, thanks to their citizen science program. We've learned to dance Bollywood style, have a sister city in the West Bank village in Masson, and provided support for LGBTQ teams and a whole lot more. The opportunities that have come our way have been incredible, enriching our lives, our library, and our community. But the real value has been the relationships. The student who calls the library when she's sick and needs to be taken care of was taken home and nursed well, sharing thanksgiving with Nepalese students, taking the student for a driver's ed test, and when she doesn't pass, taking her again and again, and keeping her car in our garage for four months until she does pass, having an intern called to tell you she needs to come sit in your office because she just broke up with her boyfriend. This is when the magic happens. When the people you've been working with are no longer bar students or interns or the heads of other organizations, what a part of our lives and our families. We nag them about their schoolwork and make sure they're eating. They share their talents and give us a glimpse into a much larger world, giving us hope that the future is something to be excited about. Barriers are removed, more voices enter the conversation, and the community and library is a better place for it. And it has brought millennials into the library and into the community in meaningful ways. Erica asked me to think about what made the library attractive as a community partner from a college's perspective, and I think it's the openness. The library is an open resource for student opportunities that link them not just to the library, but other places in the community. Recently, a student intern working at the library found a freelance reporter job through her connections here. She's now graduated and she now works both at the Red Hook Library and at the Bard Library, and she's just been named as a developing leader and yet another grant won by Red Hook. I'll let Erica tell you more about that. Erica asked me how can libraries encourage connections with colleges in order to develop the up-and-coming young leaders? So I'm pitching my idea across, I guess, North America to start Find Me a Millennial campaign. And this is because studies are suggesting that millennials believe in the theory of government as a powerful tool for addressing social problems, but have found putting that theory into practice challenging. Think about it, they grew up after 9-11 with the Great Recession and multiple military fronts. Millennials are considered the start of generation, one that looks outside of government, forging individual pathways as entrepreneurs rather than investing collectively as citizens in typical ways like voting. They really are taking their own path to addressing social problems. And what can this mean for libraries? So I say, look at millennials' habits of car ownership. What millennials are doing around owning cars tell us about that generation. What does it tell us about their sense of civic duty and partnering with libraries? Well, they're less likely to want to own cars. They are more likely to be living with their parents after graduation. They are single longer and they are in more debt than previous generations. Although burdened by more financial hardships, they're optimistic about the future. They're more racially diverse than any other generation in American history. They don't believe social security will provide them with full benefits when they're ready to retire, but oppose cutting current benefits. People under 30, those who use internet connected technologies the most, are more likely than older adults to say that there is a lot of useful, important information that is not available on the internet. And millennials say they value libraries as a place more than for the books it has to offer. So I think millennials are primed to work very closely with their libraries as libraries reinvent themselves in this coming century. So based on this information, what we know about this current generation, I want to make a few practical suggestions on how libraries can connect with the rubric of civic engagement and civic duty through millennials. First, everyone should know that students need an average of three internships when applying for paid positions post-college. And libraries are great places to offer free opportunities for them to embark on. I suggest partnering or connecting with a career office, a career development office at one of your campuses, even for campuses that are not close to you. We noticed that some of you are very remote as we are, and you might not have a college close by. But one of the things you should think about is that students need summer internship opportunities, as do the high school students and recent graduates, because as we know, many of them are returning to their parents' homes. Students who may go away for the academic year but return for the summer or return home after college are looking for career resources. And you can get together with a college career development office to post job postings on their online databases. All colleges have internship sites available through their career development offices, and this is something that I would explore if there's a local university or a city that's within a certain range distance from you. So if there's no college close by and if it isn't realistic for you to get together with a college, I would consider joining an annual event held at a college within a certain vicinity where you bring folks from your local community, be it vans or buses, to a campus event that may host a wide range of speakers that might not be available to your community. And the colleges are very open to this kind of thing. We host lots of conferences. So getting together and having people sign up to come where you go on a road trip. So bring your library to the college campus. Or, if that's too much, inviting an engaging faculty member to give a talk at your library. Or contact the director of civic engagement, for instance, and invite them to join you for an event. I also think creating a volunteer youth advisory board for your library. Not a teen board. This is a 20-something board. This is where the mason jar comes in. Working with them to develop events that highlight interesting thinkers and bloggers and using the internet as a way to connect with people out in the world. Doing webinars like this one with a young youth board may help them access in your little community with things outside of your community. We call this the radical do-it-yourself, where youth can help us think about innovation spaces, maker spaces, mason jar giveaways, local food movements, volunteer opportunities. These are all things that the millennials are very interested in and that are easily put together by a library. So I encourage you to invite local stakeholders to discuss the development of youth leadership program in your community and to create those informal spaces for community partnerships together. So that's a big tall order. Thank you, Erin. So I want our library and all libraries to go viral, to become so deeply embedded in the community as we serve that we are part of every conversation that we are always at the table. Our mayor calls us happening in our village, the Red Hook Renaissance, and says the library has been an integral part of it, which makes me really proud. But we're only one small cog in the wheel. We are part of a community that is willing and even eager to embrace change. We challenge ourselves as we step forward into this bold new world to stop doing the same old things. As we look to the future we have nothing to fear. We need to be flexible, ready to connect, contribute, and collaborate. We need to get comfortable with thinking beyond our mission statements, beyond our policies, and look toward our communities. Be prepared to embrace failure. It will happen and it's not the end of the world. I can tell you from experience. But mostly, we need to do lunch. We're living in a world of escalating complexity. To navigate it effectively and to meet the audacious goals we set for ourselves, we need help. Ask for it. You won't be disappointed. Now go outside and play and have some fun. Thanks so much for your time. We're happy to answer any questions that people have. Great. Well, thank you for that. I just want to remind everybody that if you have any questions or comments, feel free to type them into the Q&A section of the GoToWebinar interface or submit them via Twitter. I got to say, watching it, Twitter here, getting a lot of good comments. And I think I will say that the one thing I've learned from this, and correct me if I got it wrong, is to be promiscuous and partner with anybody that won't run away from you. I thought that message came through last year. I'm sure, however, we need to keep that in context. No, no. However, it works for people. We have a question from the audience. Yeah, they'd really love to get a copy of the Red Hook Together mission statement. Sure. We can provide that. Yeah, we can send that, I guess, to the organizers and then they can share it out. Sure, yep. We'd be happy to do that. Is it online somewhere already or no? No, because we don't even have a website for Red Hook Together. We just get together and have lunch. You just send it to us and we'll post it along with the slides and the recording after the conference. So we'll have access to it, yeah. Could you elaborate a little more? We've gotten some Twitter comments or at least mentions of the 20-something advisory group. Can you elaborate a little bit on what it is they do for you? So what we're suggesting to the libraries is to think about reaching out to, depending on where you are, you can either invite young 20-somethings who are in the community that maybe have returned to the community, have just recently moved to the community, or are still at a college if you're near a college, to think about ways to create innovative spaces within the library or outside of the library. So where they would get together to discuss targeting specifically youth patronage, whether it's through making recommendations on who to invite to maybe give a talk, what kinds of resources should be available through the library, either online or in the actual library. I mentioned job search resources because that's something that many of them will be looking for, but then also ways that they might be able to host events themselves. The mason jar giveaway, our students walk around with mason jars everywhere they go because they're very conscious about climate change. So it could be that there's a whole speaker series or event series geared towards young people and led by young people, maybe in the local brewery where you're talking about sustainable practices and you're doing things like giving away mason jars. And it's a place for an idea gathering so that young people can feel a sense of ownership because they really are looking for ways to address community issues, not through traditional means. So not by running for office or even voting. They're looking for ways to be more collaborative and collective, I think, on the ground in a grassroots way. And I think libraries are like, that's what they are. They're sort of grassroots community organizations. And this is not to be political. This is to be meant to bring people together and to work together and create... I can't emphasize enough the importance of sort of informal spaces. I think this generation is very interested in creating a way for them to be heard. And so to give them some agency to say, you know, plan four events that you think young people will come to. And of course working with your friends, group or your board on that, but really encouraging some sense of independence so that they can pull something together on their own. The other thing is that a lot of young people don't, because they have maybe not had access to opportunities, it's a way for them to understand how institutions work. So having a seat at the table with a friends group or with a board allows them to see behind the curtain. And I don't think we give them enough opportunity to understand how things actually run. So for our students to see how the library works or how any institution works is really integral for when they're off on a job search or in an interview. I think really giving them the... Go ahead. Allowing them to have ownership of it is really a piece. Great. Comment on Twitter from the Web Junction folks. So if the Web Junction folks are listening, perk up your ears for a second. They posted on Twitter that they have a community leader interview guide that was coming to mind. Sounds like it was relevant to what you were talking about, interviewing people in the community and maybe asking them about what they want out of the community as opposed to what they want out of the library. So if maybe the Web Junction person could maybe elaborate in their Q&A, that would be appreciated. And the link is in the Twitter under the BTSL hashtag for anybody who isn't looking there and sounds like that might be interested in. Speaking on that, what... So you've done the community interviews and you've asked what they've wanted out of the community. Can you give us any examples of then what the library has done in direct response to what they've told you in those interviews? Well, sure. We can talk about some of the things that came up now. Just to put in context, we're a small village. We have one traffic light so people understand what I'm about to tell you. So one of the things that kept coming up in conversations with the community, one of the concerns was about safety. And when we asked specifically what they meant by safety, it was about pedestrian safety. And we have one traffic light in the village and the timing on it has been really, really wonky and so frustrating. Leigh Ann Boston, the president of the bar, called it perverse. But it forced people to go to try and skirt around the stop light and to go through the side streets. And our side streets do not have any sidewalks. So for kids and everybody walking, it was really dangerous. And as I said, one of the people that's part of our cohort happens to be the deputy mayor. So as we kept hearing this, he realized that this needed to be moved up on their agenda. So he took it back to the board and the board got in touch with the DOT. And at the same time, as more and more people were talking about it, citizens just decided to form a Facebook group to talk about the issue with our traffic light. And through that, we started posting the contact information for the people at the DOT to contact and said, okay, so here's a chance to get involved. Give them a call, let them know what you think. And I guess it's been about maybe nine months since we started and we're happy to report that the speed of the stop light has changed. Now, this wasn't anything that we were doing, that it wasn't necessarily particularly the library did, but it was a concern that we uncovered and could communicate and could kind of facilitate actions we've taken on. I think that is spectacular. One of the other things that we've been working on that's emerged out of all these conversations is a need for more youth support. We're in rural upstate New York and we've had a couple of our local young folks die from overdoses and there's some real concern about the uptick and use of heroin and these rural communities. So we want more opportunities for young people. That's a huge need, I think, in any community, but especially in rural communities. And so a lot of people are talking about community centers. Well, recently somebody bought a building and is donating it back to the village to launch a community center and because we've been having all these conversations and been speaking at great lengths to just regular citizens on the street, we've collected a lot of information that can be useful to them to think about next steps and how to actually put the nonprofit together that's going to run the community center. Yeah, I think those are both wonderful examples. The library as resource, I mean it's great when people know that the library was involved and the library did this but if the library could just be involved at a certain level and provide the information that people are looking for then even if the library isn't up front people know that the library is a resource and the library can be used. And I think that was two great examples of how that can work. So any other comments from the audience coming in? Give everybody another chance before we wrap this hour up. If people have questions beyond today, how might they be able to get ahold of you? Oh, you know what, and I didn't think to do this but well here's our references but we did not include our contact information. But if you go to Red Hook Public Library or website you can certainly get ahold of me and my address, email address is director at redhooklibrary.org. I think we can remember that. You do get bonus points for bibliography. Thank you. So if there's nothing else coming in from the audience, I'm getting head waves here at this end. We'd like to thank you for participating this year. That was a wonderful presentation. A lot of good ideas and I think definitely from the comments I'm seeing in Twitter you've got a lot of people thinking about this and looking at things different ways. So thank you once again. Thanks so much for having us. You're very welcome.