 And welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online webinar, where we cover a variety of library activities and topics. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We record the show every week and it is posted to our website and I'll show you that at the end of today's show where you can see our recordings. Both our live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, neighbors, family, colleagues, anyone who you think may be interested in any of the topics that we have on the show. They can sign up and watch our shows on Wednesdays or go into our archives. This is actually 2018 is the 10th year, the beginning of the 10th year of Encompass Live. So we do have a lot of archives, I'll tell you. We have all of our recordings going back to the very first one, which was January 2009. So do keep that in mind when you're looking at our archives, you will find some historical information, some things that are out of date or things have changed since the show was broadcast, but they're all dated so you'll know when it's from, but just keep that in mind. We are librarians so we archive and keep everything out there for you. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, demos of products and services, mini training sessions. The only real criteria for any of our shows is that it is something library related, something libraries are doing, something we think they could be doing, programs or services grants, things that we're doing here at the library commission for our local libraries or any libraries around the country or doing fun, interesting, innovative, whatever kinds of things. We at the Nebraska Library Commission, we serve all libraries in the state, all types. So public, academic, K-12, special, we've had corrections librarians on. We're all over the place with that. We do sometimes, as I mentioned, have a Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do presentations but we also bring in guest speakers and that's what we have this morning. On the line with me is Joshua Finnell who is from Colgate University on East Coast. Good morning, Josh. Good morning. And Sheila Garcia, who's from the University of Michigan. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. And they're both involved and I'll let you guys explain more in the Innovation and Libraries Awesome Foundation chapter which sounds like a really cool thing and it is. I love to think about this organization, the Awesome Foundation. Keep my eye on it for a few years now and it's just, yeah, it does some really great things but this is a great organization that can help libraries do some really cool and innovative things but I'll just hand it over to you guys to explain exactly what you're doing, what the Foundation does and how you're doing it specifically for libraries. Sure, thanks for having us, Krista. So I'm gonna start off by talking a little bit about how the Awesome Foundation, our specific chapter was formed and how we're structured and then Sheila's gonna talk a little bit about her experience as one of our trustees and then we'll pause there and answer any questions you have or continue to make on and talking a little bit more about the projects that we fund and kind of what we have stored in store for 2018. So to start off, the seed for this idea of the Innovation and Libraries Awesome Foundation chapter really came together in Library Pipeline in 2016. So Library Pipeline, for those of you who are not familiar is a grassroots library organization of librarians who are pretty much interested in creating sustainable and unique solutions to professional development, green open access publications, strategic problem solving and of course innovation within LIS and it's within this working group that really the seed for the idea of microfunding campaign came together. I, myself, Bonnie T. Arena and Robin Shampo who are all the co-founders in this chapter, we all met in that working group. And so we knew that large library ideas largely start as very small seeds of ideas. So we wanted kind of a mechanism and a funding mechanism for people to try out risky, creative, first and inclusive projects and have those funded without any strings attached. And in addition, Library Pipeline also provided us with a lot of support, both financial and champions in the field. So folks such as Stacey Cokkeel at Altmetric, Brett Bonfield who is the executive director of the Princeton Public Library and Emily Ford who's a librarian at Portland State University. We're kind of all early champions in helping us shape our chapter and help get it off the ground. So we knew we wanted to do a microfunding campaign but we didn't necessarily want to create it from scratch. So we came up with the idea of approaching Awesome Foundation about building a library theme chapter. And we kind of did this for several reasons. One, of course, is we didn't want to have to build the infrastructure from scratch and of course the Awesome Foundation has a built in infrastructure. It's also a known entity. So it came with marketing and publicity so we could kind of lean on that a little bit making sure our chapter got out to the appropriate audiences. And of course, in speaking with Avi Kaplan who was one of the founders of the Awesome Foundation, he was very supportive in allowing us to create and structure our chapter in a way that we wanted to do it with a global cohort and run it a little bit different than a geographically located chapter. So for those of you who are familiar with the Awesome Foundation, chapters are usually organized geographically. So most chapters take place in a city or a town. 10 individuals in that city or town come together. Oftentimes they're friends. Each one of them contributes $100 in aggregate that creates $1,000 and each month they fund a project. We, so for example, the Awesome Foundation in Chicago often holds live pitch events every month around the city whether that's a co-working space or a bar, sometimes at the library. They come together, folks pitch their ideas to the trustees, their judges and they fund the winning project. Now our chapter of course is structured differently both in terms of how we recruited our trustees and also how we vote. So in recruiting and accepting trustees, we wanted to be intentional in recruiting both a global and a diverse trustee cohort and we also wanted to be mindful of not preventing or allowing folks to participate if they could not contribute financially. So I mentioned earlier our financial champions and supporters out of library pipeline. Many of those people donated their money to create sponsored trusteeships. Though some of our trustees pay their own way, others are actually sponsored. So their financial contribution is covered by someone else but that allows them to be a trustee and a voting member. So as a result, we have a fairly global trustee cohort from around the globe and across almost every sector of the library world. So we have everyone from recent library school graduates to library directors. We have academic librarians, public librarians, private librarians, private sector and even government librarians as well. So we have a pretty good cross-section of folks as our trustees. So because we are global in scope, we can't exactly host a live pitch event. So essentially for the first six months of Awesome Foundation Chapter's existence, we pitched this as a six month pilot project. And so for six months on the first of each month, we accepted applications for projects through the Awesome Foundation website. On the 15th, we would close that application call and over the next two weeks, our trustees would look at the application or the applications for each month. They would then use a Google group to discuss the actual projects and rank their top three. And then from there, after a discussion was closed, we would then take the top three projects that everyone had put into a Google form and essentially vote and come to consensus on a winner. And so once the winner was decided, I would then contact the winning project, the individual who submitted the application, and we would transfer the money to them via PayPal or Venmo. Eventually repeated this process every month for six months over the course of 2017. And we funded, I believe, our final project of 2017 in August. So that's kind of a broad overview of exactly how we're structured and how we came together. And I want to toss it over to Shayla to talk a little bit about her experience and perhaps even her motivations for becoming a trustee in 2017. Hi. So I became a trustee in February of 2017. So right at the beginning of the pilot project, at the time I was in my second and final year of my MLIS program, I went to the university. And the way I found out about the opportunity was through Twitter and active communities on there, such as Crillip, Critical Librarianship and the Spectrum Scholars community. And my main motivation for joining as a trustee was really to be more engaged with the library community because I was doing an online MLIS. I wasn't necessarily kind of having that face-to-face interaction a lot. I did work in a public library, but also funding kind of limits how engaged you can be sometimes. So being able to be a sponsored trustee really helped me kind of learn network and also learn about what other librarians are doing around the world to promote literacy, information access and community development. It's also been a great CD booster. All of when I started applying for jobs after I graduated, pretty much every single interview asked about the awesome foundation grant. So I mean, if you wanted some motivation to join, there you go. And we can pause at this point and take any questions you might have about kind of how we're structured or how we're formed before we then talk about some of the projects we funded in the first six months. Sure, yeah. So does anybody have any questions about how this all got started? You can type into the question section of your GoToWebinar interface. I can see that here on my screen. So I was actually gonna ask you, you had mentioned it, Josh. This just started last year, the library chapter of this. Right. Oh, this is something brand new. So if you haven't heard about it, that's okay. But I know Library Pipeline has been around for a long time. Yeah, Library Pipeline. I've known about that for, yeah. I don't even know how long. So they were at their actual organization that I was always thinking about, getting more involved in or having them come on potentially onto our show here to talk about what they do and everything. And then I wish I could remember where I saw stuff about the awesome time. Maybe they shared it, something from their pages or information shared it. So you said this is now growth of Library Pipeline. Is that group still doing something separate from this or is it kind of become this now? So the idea for Library Pipeline as it was conceived was to be kind of a launching point for multiple platforms and projects. So we were certainly an incubated idea within Library Pipeline. The idea was to provide both consultation support and even financial support if it needed it. And then as projects kind of got their feet underneath them and start running as ours is, then we kind of spin off and become a separate project. However, I can say that we are exploring, incorporating our financial future through Library Pipeline. And so far as I right now am simply the treasurer of the chapter. So I kind of maintain all of the funds. So we might use Library Pipeline going forward and nonprofit status to actually be kind of our financial caretaker as it were. Okay, cool. All right, well it doesn't look like any questions came in just now for what you started out talking about. So I'd say go ahead and talk about some of your projects. All right, so Shayla and I are gonna switch back and forth giving you kind of a brief overview of the projects that we funded over our six month pilot project starting in I believe March. So the very first project that we funded was entitled 100 Years 100 Selfies. This was a project submitted to us by the Warehouse Gallery and Project in Summit, Illinois. And they proposed this project in conjunction with the Summit Public Library. The library was celebrating its centennial in approximately six months from when they applied. And what they wanted to do was the Warehouse Project in Gallery is actually a teen art center. So what they wanted to do was use the teens at the center to go out into the community, photograph and interview approximately 100 members of the community talking about their experiences at the library and of course the impact the library has had on the community itself. And so once this project was done they then mounted it within the library to celebrate the centennial. So then each floor of the library would have pictures from the community and a piece of work to do a company at it. And I'll let Shayla talk about Serbia. Okay, so the second project that we funded was to expand a library for refugee and migrants in transit in Belgrade, Serbia. While the library already carried materials in Urdu the Assam Foundation funding allowed for materials in Pashto, Farsi and Arabic language to be added to the library. The reading material included textbooks, nonfiction books, poetry, novels, children's books and beginner script books for teaching language. And the premise of this grant really came from the idea that a lot of times refugees and migrants they do get funding in grants for food or for other necessities but something that kind of falls between the cracks is the fact that they spend a lot of time waiting just simply waiting to see where they're going to go next. So the library kind of serves as a place to fill that time in which they can learn about other subjects and study other languages while they wait to see if their application has gone through. So the next project we funded was entitled Breaking Library Siloes for Social Justice. This project was submitted to us by Cynthia Fisher who was a librarian in Texas. I believe I saw a few folks from the Austin area as participants in this webinar today. So Shaila mentioned earlier her involvement largely coming out of a post from CRITLib. So this project was proposed as a CRITLib workshop kind of engaging and exploring and talking about systems of oppression that exist within information work. And so this workshop brought together I believe approximately 64 librarians from across central Texas, archivist public librarians as well as academic librarians together for a one day workshop to explore these issues and figure out strategies going forward. And this actually just took place on January 20th I believe in space 12 in Austin, Texas. The awesome foundation because we underwrote it or the grant allowed the workshop to be freely available. So our participation in that grant itself provided free access for those 64 librarians to engage with these. And looking at social media, it looks like it was a smashing success and will possibly be replicated in the future. So I'm probably mispronouncing this wrong but I'm going to try a Lib project, TCHAT Education Plus. So TCHAT has the highest ratio of students per textbook. So apart from the programs designed by the National Curriculum Center, there are very few textbooks for teachers and pupils in secondary education. So the TCHAT Education Plus project's aim was to collect and digitize materials for general secondary education and distribute the materials free of charge in order to reduce the educational divide that's present throughout the country of chat. So shared, this project came to us through actually an existing nonprofit. So shared is actually a nonprofit that works with middle schools in India around educational materials as well as training. So the idea of this project, the rotating pre-K library concept was to work with both teachers and librarians in English medium school in Pune, India, providing them with approximately 10 themed learning kits, early childhood learning kits, as well as providing training for the librarians and teachers. So the concept was to work with one school and then rotate those kits around to other schools. In addition, since the librarians and teachers would be trained, they could create learning communities which could then share out their knowledge as well. So this project got off the ground as a small pilot project with those eight to 10 kits. And I believe is now scaling upwards and forwards in terms of replicating those kits in other areas of India and replicating the project going forward in 2018. All right, so the ETC all abilities lending collection. This project came from the Solene district library which is in Michigan. And of this library district funding to compile a collection of gadgets and equipment to make available for track out by patrons, which they call the all abilities lending collection. The purpose of the collection is to allow parents, teachers and caregivers of special needs, children and teens, a chance to try out some of the many tools available for sensory integration and social skill development. So a lot of these tools are actually quite high in price and some parents or caregivers may buy these and then they don't actually work for the individual they were meant for. So the ability to kind of try these out before they decide to fully invest in their own helps to address that social economical gap. Great, so that's kind of an overview of the variety of projects that we have funded. Of course, you can see some of them are in the United States, others are global. So we wanna pause to take any questions you might have about our projects. Yeah, I had looked at your site before and seen that there were so many from everywhere. I was actually happily surprised there was some all over the world to so many different things. I was kind of thinking this might be something more US centric, but it's not. I do have a question. How did these libraries find out about being able to apply for this, especially from outside the US? And I think, you know, I don't, I know, you know, library pipeline is, you know, started out here, but how does that information get out to them to apply? Sure, so, you know, in terms of outreach we certainly did a blanketing of listservs like good librarians to get an initial push. But surprisingly, we didn't have to push too much because I think almost immediately when our chapter went up, we opened up applications and before even really sending it out to the library community, we already had several applications pouring in. We also sent out the word to other awesome foundation chapters that if in fact they get a library proposal, for example, they can always send it over to us if we can consider it for our queue. So we kind of leveraged existing chapters and then also reached out to the library community itself. Great, we do have a question. Someone wants to know how many applications per grant, I guess for you guys is like per month, do you typically get? Yeah, Shayla, you were there during the early days. The early days were the toughest. I think at the beginning we had like 64 or something like that, but toward the end, I think we averaged about 30, 35. That's amazing. Okay, so each month it's a new round or at least it was for your pilot period. Okay, do previous applications roll over to the next one or would they have to apply again if they didn't get the particular the first month they applied for? Do they have to apply again? Yeah, funny you should ask. So this is what we discovered and why we have modified our program a little bit going forward in 2018 but it's very reason and Shayla could probably speak to this as well. We discovered each month we would get anywhere from 30 to 50 applications. Depending on the month you might get five to seven applications that are really strong and the trustees have a hard time deciding which project we should fund, which one's best or another month you might get one and that's it. So we found ourselves constantly like taking those six other projects that weren't funded in one month and keeping them in the queue for each successive month. The difficulty becomes keeping track of those and how to weigh different projects. So we're gonna change to a quarterly model in 2018 going forward to kind of help alleviate that which should give us a good three month period to kind of collect and curate down projects and make sure we're funding the best one. Okay, yeah. So then, so for next year there would be four opportunities to funding project chapter. Okay. And here's another question someone has from the audience. Oh, you talked about the contributing $100 to start these awesome chapter she wants. They wanna know, do people contribute $100 monthly to keep the funding going? How does that work for the chapter? So for our pilot project period we actually didn't ask people to contribute $100 a month and we didn't limit it to 10 trustees. So when we did our call we asked people who could contribute financially to contribute $50 a month for the pilot project for six months, so $300. So our sponsored trustees were sponsored at that rate and then individuals who were a paying trustee themselves they could actually contribute $50 a month or the $300. Okay, are you gonna change that going forward or is that just continuing? We're staying at the $300 level even for the quarterly model in 2018 and we're figuring out, we're still kind of tinkering around what that number should look like going forward. So it's still a work in progress in many ways. Right. So the money that people contribute goes to giving because each of these grants is what they're there is $1,000. Correct. For each one. So all the money that people are contributing goes to the grants or is there other monies that you have to do other things with? Is there like operating costs or things like that or is that what the whole point of the awesome foundation is that there isn't that? Yeah, we don't have too many operating costs and that was another reason we tried or we went with awesome foundation as our incubator. Any small costs we have in terms of marketing materials or otherwise largely are absorbed by the deed. So myself, Bonnie and Robin. So and admittedly it's our overhead is rather small. I think that's probably under $25. Yeah, and this is a lot all doing all this online helps hugely. There's not like you have to have an office or space or things like that. Or like you said, the funding goes to the library, the applicants via PayPal or something electronic as well. Correct, yeah. There's another question about funding. Do you solicit funds from outside of the membership of the people that were listed there on the foundation or is like can people donate? I guess maybe is the question they're trying to ask. Yeah, that's something we changed for 2018 as well which when we initially did the pilot project, we people had been interested in donating privately and we kind of we accepted some of those but we didn't really have the infrastructure in place. So for 2018, yes, people who are interested in simply donating to the project and that money can go to sponsoring trustees or sponsoring projects. We do have a link on our website now where people can simply just donate to our PayPal or Venmo account. Okay, great. Cause I was looking through the site too and it had applying to become a trustee and you know, that you could either evaluate things or donate money or whatever. And some people I think may want to just say just, I don't have time to become involved and go through all those 60 applications or whatever that you get, but I want to help. So they could if they wanted to just say here, take some of my money and do good things with it. Yeah. And is this would be considered tax deductible as a donation or a charity or? Yeah, that's something we are working out right now of figuring out our 501C3 status as we do not have that currently. So that is why the admittedly, why the donations are at the $300 level. So I personally as the treasurer don't get hit with a tax liability in terms of taking in donations and sending them out. Oh, right. So we're currently exploring a nonprofit model with a library pipeline in 2018. Okay, so keep an eye on that then, yeah. Okay, here's another question from someone else. They say, I know you said no strings attached for this, but what do you ask for information about the outcomes and results of the grants provided? So do the grantees have to report back to you something about their results? What happened? How the program went? I know you said about the one with the lending, the one in India where they move things around that you know it's going on with that one, but is there some sort of official thing that they have to do after they've received the funding to report back to you? What happened with it? You know, we don't. So the no strings attached is truly no strings attached. We actually don't do much follow-up with the projects. The $1,000 is kind of given on good faith. When I do send the money, oftentimes people of course send back pictures. We do ask if people are going to send things out through social media to at least tag us in some way so we can be aware of it. But other than that, we give the $1,000 away and let people run with it. And then would they also, that makes me think of two about tagging on social media and for other grant type things that people get from IMLS, for example, they are required to say this was funded by IMLS. Is there something that Awesome Foundation has them do with that as well to make sure that people know at these locations where the monies came from? We do. For example, the breaking library silos for social justice, Cindy, when she created the site, had generously sponsored by the Awesome Foundation. And we do ask a request that people do that, but we certainly don't check up and make people do that. Obviously everyone, all the projects we funded have all been out of good will and I think everyone's really excited to kind of feed the joy back to us in terms of helping us amplify our project. It absolutely, yeah, I know we do grants here at the commission and there's always, here's what we did, here's the cool thing, here's the pictures of the kids using the whatever they wanna share, actually it's hard not to share the great thing you did with the money, yeah. Here's a more general question. What are the most difficult parts of this project? I guess the hardest things you had to do to get this going or ongoing to work with it? Yeah, Shayla, do you wanna talk about the trustee side and then I could talk maybe about some of the structural side? I feel like on the trustee side, a lot of it had to do at the very beginning anyway with really defining our principles and making sure that we were all sticking to them, we were evaluating them. A lot of times people took different interpretations of the principles and slowly through the cycles we kind of started to streamline that and kind of make it more consistent of what we were evaluating. So the time this thing was really just having very diverse views of which projects you think should be funding and which ones you don't think should be funded. So I think that was the most difficult thing and also kind of maybe sometimes kind of keeping that discussion going because I felt that sometimes some trustee just went in and put the two cents but didn't really want to keep the discussion going as to well, this is what I thought about it. Can you give me some feedback on why I might be wrong about this project or something like that? That's what a question I had. I know before I go on to you Josh about this, what are the criteria for picking? You said there's the principles that you have. So is more subjective? Yeah, I like the one. Choices, making the choice or? Yeah, similar to subjective. I mean, I feel like each trustee comes with their own background, their own experiences and they might waste and factors differently compared to other individuals but we do try to weigh them evenly. The four principles, diversity, inclusivity, creativity and risk taking. Risk taking was the most difficult one to really define for us. So it's those four principles that we really, I feel like we really stick to when we talk about why we chose these three as our top ones, this is why, because they fit the principles this way. Yeah, I can see where some of those things to one person, a particular project is risky but to another person, it's like, that's easy. We do that all the time. Well, to these people applying, it's not. Right, you gotta kind of think like them. Okay. I think too, that's Shayla articulated it very well. I think those are some of the challenges. Certainly, the number of applications we received, it was not hard to get applications, those came pouring in. Trustee recruitment does take time, especially to make sure that we have a good balance of our cohort and then honestly, the biggest challenges are I think the voting procedures because early on when we had our criteria of diversity, inclusivity, creativity and risk taking, there was conversation around, do we create a rubric for this? Do we help define this? Like, do we create a like route scale of a one to five but what does that mean? Ultimately, we kind of defaulted and decided that if we recruit a diverse enough cohort of trustees, we will allow people through discussion and all of their life experiences to kind of figure those things out amongst them, which Shayla obviously mentioned. Some of those challenges early on were sustaining that conversation and figuring out what people's reasons were going forward and of course doing that and a reasonable amount of time so we could actually vote and actually get a winner each month. So those are some of the challenges we still maintain going forward, but one, I think we're getting better at figuring out processes of how to make that happen. So it's a really, it became a really organic process, not a check off the numbers and did they meet all these things then they're good or not? Yeah. That was all the questions we had at the moment. If anybody has anything else, type them in whenever you're thinking of it and we can grab your questions as they come. All right. So we talked about some of these things already, but in many ways our pilot project was certainly a success. So I believe we had over 300 plus applications in our first six months of our pilot project and we of course received interest and support from the library community in terms of we had articles appear in library journal, we had articles appear in the library with the lead pipe as well as the international librarians network. Perhaps nice of all, the Bonnie Tirina was asked to present at the awesome summit in DC. This is the gathering of all of the awesome foundation chapters in DC. And since we're one of four themed global chapters, we were considered unique and interesting. So they asked Bonnie to present on that. So we had a chance to connect with other chapters in actual summit. And perhaps most surprising of all, certainly surprising to me is we were actually contacted by an author, Michael Gillibow, who heard about the awesome foundation chapter at a conference and he was really excited about it. He really wanted to lend us his support. So he had his book coming out, Mad Librarian, and he is donating some of the proceeds of that book to our awesome foundation chapter. So that money is going towards sponsoring trustees and of course providing funding for projects. And strangely enough, the concept for his book, Mad Librarian, is that a librarian's funding is cut off by the city. So she begins embezzling funds from the city. So that is the fiction book that is out now and all those proceeds go to our chapter. I think I might have to look for that book. I love books about librarians doing not librarian-ish type of things. Awesome. And I did go back and check. That's where I did, I checked my emails to you guys that I saw the article in library journal. Yeah, that's right. And I started researching it and looking at it. And then I, digging through, found the connection to the library pipeline. I'm like, oh, I know them. Yeah. So most of our, I mean, we talked about this a little bit already, but in terms of our six month pilot project, it was successful. We did do assessment with our trustees. We sent out a survey and discussed with our trustees of how we should make this project a little bit more streamlined going forward. So we are moving to the quarterly funding model and attempt to both fund the best projects, but also alleviate trustee burnout, which I'm sure Shayla experienced the first two or three months as a, and we also, this is kind of an outgrowth as well of looking at the projects we were receiving. We actually are going to change our name in 2018 to Just Libraries Awesome Foundation Chapter instead of Innovation in Libraries Awesome Foundation Chapter. And the reason being is that innovation we found tends to be viewed through the prism of disruptive technology as opposed to societal or cultural change. And so instead of perhaps people who think they might not want to submit their project to us because they see innovation and think, well, this isn't a technology, it won't fit. We wanted to eliminate that and just be libraries and be open to almost any and all ideas. So we haven't- Anything can be innovative. It doesn't have to be techie, yeah. Correct. I agree. So the other exciting things to talk about in the future, we were invited to present at the symposium on the future of libraries at LA Midwinter on February 10th. So myself, Bonnie and Robin will all be presenting on a panel talking about the Awesome Foundation Chapter, how we think microfunding bottles like this could be small incubators within the library community for larger ideas. And to celebrate, we are also finally throwing our own live pitch party at LA Midwinter. So we sent out a call for applications and presenters. We whittled that down to about eight presenters I think at this point. They will all give a live pitch at LA Midwinter and then we will vote on the best one and that project will get $1,000. And Shayla is one of our judges. So I'll like to talk a little bit about her participation and what we'll be looking for. Okay. So I don't know if there's anyone here that will be at the pitch event and picking an idea. But I just wanted to give some advice as you prepare to pitch. And maybe just in the future, if you decide to submit an application for the event. We talked about this earlier, but really the most important thing to remember are the four principles that we use to evaluate grant applications, diversity, inclusivity, creativity, or risk taking. So you really want to make a very clear connection to those four principles, which will make your pitch or your grant application all the more stronger for us. In terms of risk taking, I talked earlier that this was a bit difficult to define earlier on among the trustees. But what we're really looking for we kind of decided on here is for you to address why this project wouldn't be funded through any through other means. And we're really looking for you to explain beyond there's no budget in our library for something like this, beyond that. Why would other grants not give you the money? Why did you come to us specifically? And we're really sticking to fit that gap between the projects that might be funded through other models, but wanna be funded through our model. So we really want you to address that. And also a note of advice because I did see this in a few, quite a few grant applications. Writing something such as like or pitching something such as just everyone in our community will enjoy this is not the best way to address inclusivity. We're really looking to see that you really thought through the ways in which different people in your community couldn't enjoy and benefit from this project. Something as blanket as like everyone in our community will enjoy it doesn't really show us that you really like thought it through and really necessarily addressed it directly. So that's just a word of advice and something that probably came up throughout the cycles of the grants. So based on my experience, same as the best advice I can provide, but if you have any questions feel free to ask. And I'm really excited to hear everyone's pitches in midwinter. So best of luck if you're going to be there. So this is just a come and speak type thing. It's not a form or an application in paper. It's gonna be on the fly, come and talk. And then right there, you guys will have to figure out which one immediately gets it, wow. Good luck with that. I mean, you said to decide previously, I can't imagine. But it sounds like a lot of fun too. Yeah, so we included of course our website and then all of our social media tags. So we certainly encourage everyone, if you're interested to submit a project or if you're interested in donating or becoming a trustee, that we have rolling calls for trustees, or if you just wanna know more about it, we'd be happy to discuss anything about the chapter, where we're going, what we want to do. And we definitely look for more people to help us out and figuring out what this chapter looks like in the future. Yes, and you said there, trustee burnout that there may be turnover, which in some places is bad, but I think is good for this that if some people have done it for a while and you want new blood, new thoughts, new types of librarians involved in it, that that's a good thing, so yeah. Absolutely. So we have some questions I think here that are specifically more general about the Awesome Foundation about starting a group there. But so for a library to apply to you guys to get a grant, the traditional way, not the midwinter way, you just go to your website there and there's a form or link to fill out. Yeah, there's a form there and then a brief narrative. So it's not too taxing, I believe it's three to four questions. And so pretty straightforward, yeah. So definitely not nearly as intimidating as other grants, IMLS grants or state library grants, I know are sometimes asked for a lot. He said you're doing this a lot through as, trusting them that what they're applying for is what they're gonna do and that it's, so it doesn't need to be nearly as intense. Right, we wanna do eliminate as much red tape as possible. So nothing will be submitted in triplicate to us. So then you said you guys don't do a lot of follow-up with them afterwards, does the Awesome Foundation come to you for more follow-up on what you're doing or whether they're gonna continue supporting you, is there something that as trustees, anyone who gets involved would have to be, thing with that kind of thing or are they pretty open and free with it as well? They are and the Awesome Foundation is really the kind of umbrella organization, but each chapter is kind of run autonomously. So even though they're all under the umbrella of Awesome Foundation, I mean, each chapter can decide how they want to create funding, how they wanna work with trustees. So it's really kind of wide open. Okay, because that was actually what the questions that some people had here was actually more general about starting their own sections chapter through it. So any 10 people in any town USA can just start a chapter by just applying to Awesome Foundation. So we've got people together and they've got their money. Yeah, yeah. And then people also say they like the name change, changing it from the innovation to just the libraries. I thought so too. I mean, in many ways it was kind of a name check to the group that we incubated out of since it was an innovation working group, but I think the drop of innovation going forward will be a good one. Yeah, I think it will bring in more, yeah. And if someone didn't necessarily have an organization, talk about the people getting really interested, I think in this whole Awesome Foundation itself, which I think is great too. If you don't have your own organization to start up, you could just look at other ones, even not beyond the libraries. Many people have all sorts of interests to try and join as well. I mean, they all would work similarly as you look through the list of chapters that are out that are in the Awesome Foundation and see if one is something you're interested in or you have an expertise in, and you can reach out to any of them to apply. Yeah, I know lots of chapters are always actively looking for trustees. So chances are if you're living in a major metropolitan area, there's a good chance that there's probably an Awesome Foundation chapter that's already been. Is it mostly their regional like that? Yours is a new model or a different model than what they traditionally done. Obviously it's working if you're getting hundreds of applications. A victim of your own success type. Exactly. Which is good to be. All right, anybody have any other questions? There's the link to their information, which is also included in the session description if you have a link to the website. And I can also add both of these, the link to the Facebook page and Twitter account when we put up the recording as well. So if you have any last minute questions you desperately have to ask of Josh or Shayla right now, get them in. You can always reach them through the websites as well. The recording, while we're waiting to see if anybody does have anything, I'll say the recording will be available probably later this afternoon. And this presentation, if you have it posted somewhere, Josh, I can link to that or you can email it to me, your choice. So people who have access to the slides as well. All right, I think I'll pull presenter control back to my screen to show you where all this will be as well. There we go. So this is now the Encompass Live website where we have our upcoming shows all listed here but right beneath them when you're looking for our archives is a link to the archive sessions. If you click there, you have our most recent ones are at the top of the list. So this is last week's show. And it goes, if you just scroll all the way down you'll get all the way to the original ones. We are working on adding a search feature to this. So hopefully that'll be coming soon. Our IT people are on it right now so that you can search for a specific topic or speaker or whatever. Now that I realize I did 10 early down the math that we're in our 10th year. There's a lot of sessions here. We do Encompass Live 51 weeks out of the year. One week we skip is when we have our state library conference Nebraska Library Association School Library and Associations Conference because everyone's too busy and involves with that both here at the library commission across the state. So we take one week off. Other than that every week of the year there is a session. So the recordings go here. Here's last week's. We've got links to some information about it. A links recording, links to presentation. So we'll have the same thing for today's show. All of you who attended and everyone who registered for today's show will be sent an email automatically letting you know that it's available when it's ready. Once I get it up and processed and YouTube does its thing I'll send that out. And then we'll post it everywhere as on our social media. Doesn't look like any other questions have come in. So I think we will wrap it up for today. Thank you Josh and Shayla for being here with us and telling us about the awesome foundation. This is an awesome project. I love it a lot. I'm gonna be definitely paying more attention to what's going on this year. Now you're changing things up. Thank you. And thank you everyone for attending. I hope you'll sign up for any of our upcoming shows that are all listed here. You see we've got some here and a few dates we're working on filling in. So keep an eye on our schedule. We are also on Facebook. You'll see here I have a link to the Facebook page here. So if you are a big Facebook user you can pop over there, give us a like. We post reminders. Here's a reminder to log in today's show on the fly if you hadn't pre-registered. When our archives are available, I post here. Our recordings are available. Any other news sessions being added, anything else going on, I post here to our Facebook page. So if you are on Facebook a lot, give us a like and you'll be notified about what we're doing. We also do post out to our commission Facebook page and Twitter and as you were talking about any social media things that we can have and then lists or library lists or so we're everywhere. Both our, as I said, our live show and our archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So once you do see something and you also Josh and Shayla, go ahead and share out to anyone you want to when our archives are ready. So other than that, I think that wraps it up for today's show. Nobody seems to have any other burning questions at the moment. So I think we will call it a show. Thank you very much everyone for attending and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.