 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I am Dr. Michelle Villagran, the Chair of the Diversity Committee for the San Jose State University iSchool. I want to welcome you to our 2020 Diversity Webinar Series for our university faculty, staff, students, alumni, and affiliates and friends. This is the fifth webinar in our eight-part series, and actually it's the first webinar for the fall semester. All of our presenters are sharing content around diverse topics, which align with the goals of inclusive excellence, diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice issues. You'll be able to find a full list of the upcoming sessions, topics, our presenters on the link I posted within the chat on the upcoming webcast page. And also you will be able to see any of the past recordings. We are recording every session, and you'll find those on the On Demand page and also on our YouTube, and we have a playlist just for our diversity webinar series. And there's the podcast I will also mention if you prefer a podcast to listen to them there. So the session title is Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as Action, Designing a Collective EDI Strategy. And our presenter, which I'm so grateful we have her today joining us, is Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros, Assistant Professor, Latin American Studies Librarian University Libraries, the Ohio State University. So now I will turn it over to you, Pamela. Thank you, Michelle. It's such a pleasure to be here. I wish I could see you all. I'm delighted to be here and to present a tool that was co-created with a good colleague of mine, Sandra NML, who is now at Yale, and is a copyright librarian. And we're hoping that you may hear something today about designing a DEI strategy with your staff that will help us meet this important moment as DEI and social justice conversations have been brought to the forefront. So I just want to share a little bit about who I am. So DEI has been a personal journey for me. I'm originally from Mexico and I immigrated here when I was very young. It's also been a focus of my academic training. And I have really dedicated my career to advancing and cross-cultural understanding. I've been privileged to find positions like some of the ones that you see here listed that almost exclusively focus on restorative and social justice goals. And these jobs have allowed me to do a variety of things from traveling exhibits on Mexico's biodiversity to coordinating concerts on the history of the blues. Here you see me reading a toddler storytime. I've also done a lot of translation support to Latinx communities and also got to open one of the first deaf and hard of hearing foster homes in San Diego. And I want to share with you that as big as these projects may seem or I was really ignorant to all things DEI when I first came to them. So people assume that I was really culturally competent because I was an immigrant and I was Mexican, but that was not really true. My identity gave me some insight into this area, but most of what I learned, I learned by doing. And that's my main message for today. And the project that I'm going to share with you that was co-created was to support this, to support assisting people to approach DEI as action and to share some of the philosophies that I picked up along the way. So diversity, equity and inclusion, they're espoused values and acknowledge gaps of our profession. As early as 1920, the LIS community has sought to diversify its workforce in order to better reflect the demographics present in our institutions and our communities. And I'd like to start here, if you can pull up your chat. And I'd like to ask for your feedback about what do you think diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice work looks like in the library. So what are some of the programs that you've seen or how does it actually manifest. So I'm going to give you a moment and if you want to put your answers in the chat. Book discussions, staff program for immigrants, collection development, inclusive hiring practices, yeah, featuring different types of authors. These are all great. Definitely. So we have, we have a lot of different, we have a lot of different feedback about what, what this can look like or has looked like. And I'd also like to hear from you about who do you think is doing the heavy lifting in this area. Who do you think is who do you when you think of equity diversity and inclusion work in the library. Who do you think at the forefront of of this conversation and this action and engagement. So that's your responses in the chat. Yep, so I like that we are, we hope that it should be at all levels of the organization. And if you are just joining in to our discussion, we're thinking about who, who do we see most active doing di work in the library, and we're putting this information of who we think is at the forefront of these initiatives and activities in the chat. So it's often people of color minority communities. Somebody said, not specifically non management employees. That's an interesting, that's an interesting. So great, great answers guys. So it looks like we are on, we're on the same page. And here, as we were talking about before what what does, what does di work look like in a library. And I want to express that many of us are doing this work already it's already happening. So it can be any way from instruction. It could be outreach to the community could be a cultural program it could be activism for our dreamers on campus, it could be looking at diversity, and diversity in our collections it can look at diversity. And so many of us are actively doing this work. And also the values themselves are being are being reflected in our institution strategic documents the code of conducts guidelines and search committees, professional resident programs and training is as many of you have said, you know the importance of embedding these values and actions at the highest levels of our organization and all throughout. Great question. So we are doing the work and it is being included into our, our guiding documents and charters. What do you think is holding this work back. Go ahead and and and put some of your reflections in the chat and even if you may not have a question right now, or an answer right now it's it's something that I really would like for you to to sit with for a while. So for those of you that that are joining us just now we are looking at what are the ways that di work has been held back or what are some of the reasons that might be the case. So some people think it's the power structures restrictive library policies. We have lack of engagement by di by staff and leadership. We have lack of funding. Too many people unwilling to acknowledge that there's even an issue that apathy that's a that's a big problem. Some people don't want our resistance to change institutional bias lack of diversity within the field that definitely contributes, not knowing our communities. Yes. Too many people wanting to avoid conflict. Yep. Yeah, these this I always say that di is a contact sport. See how it's, it's not easy. So yes, like a it's it can be very difficult work. It can make us very uncomfortable. So great, great responses. So it looks like you guys are also aware of what is holding us back. And as as all of your colleagues have been saying, the despite the prevalence of these values and establish initiatives, decades of as research regularly conclude that there has been relatively limited progress in advancing di. So, and as many of you have mentioned, there are several reasons for this. This is a very complicated question. And I think we're also going to try to see if we can share the chat so that you can see the responses from everyone because they're very, very good. So we will definitely look into that. And as we were talking that this is a very, very complicated question. And I'm hoping to address one area that may help. I'll say may because this was a pilot tool that we that Sandra and I started, and it's given us results, but it needs it needs more data. So we need more people to try it out. And the main concept of the tool is to reframe di work as action. So one of my mentors always says that in action is a form of action. It's often missing in our DEI practice. But why so as we were saying, di can take many forms as we were mentioning it. It comes in strategic documents. But one of the areas that you see it more often manifesting in the library will be in some sort of a diversity committee, like the one that you see here. So the diversity committees are interesting because they're often the only library committee where black brown folks will be represented well, even overrepresented and put in charge of advocating for themselves, as well as educating their peers in areas that, frankly, most human societies have historically done poorly. And in this committee is minorities metaphorically play the role of of doctor a patient of diplomat of public relations secretary of press secretary, their event planners their human resource officers. And that's just in addition to the actual job that they were hired to do. In 2017, I find myself being this one man orchestra and being one of these committee members. And this wasn't really unusual for me, because as I mentioned, before I have been doing this work for a while, but also as, as a, as a, as a minority, I was often that's told I'm not told but volunteered into these spaces. And a lot of assumptions made about my cultural competency, as well as my ability to represent Latinx communities that have often been exaggerated or imposed on me. And there was a myth to that my presence in the organization could automatically transform the organization. So I use this metaphor of immunization and I want to preference this that I know we're we're living in during the pandemic, we have become much more acquainted with these kind of images, but this was some metaphor that that we were working with about two years ago. And we were just trying to show that you could have the most cultural competent person in your organization. But if you only have a few of them, that's not going to give you de I immunity for your entire organization. So here I found myself beyond the diversity pipeline, even though that is extremely important, but that's not going to solve all of our problems. And so here I found myself in 2017 I was doing the work I was on the diversity committee we had great success. And, and the university libraries took a really progressive stance, and they included social justice as part of their strategic plan. In addition of social justice as a new organizational value, it was received with very mixed reactions. Some people welcome its exclusion because they recognize the libraries as a place where social justice was inherent. Others were really confused they saw this term as very politically charged. They struggled to see its relevance in in our organization or their particular job. They expressed concern about eroding or diluting the true meaning of the phase if we fell short of meeting this goal. And so, and even though it was, it was a big step and a risk for our organization to include this, this organizational goal. You know, many of us left that meeting when it was announced confused, really struggling to figure out how to define identify or assess what this value would look like in day to day practice. And I'll share I'll share with you how that ended up manifesting on that very same day. Social justice was added into the organization. There was another meeting that took place in which it was decided to sunset a very early digital humanities projects that digitally repatriated the pope of the pope of the is one of the few pre columbian college works that survived the conquest. It is the Mayan cliche book of creation. And this particular project was really unique. Because if, as you can see the social justice objectives were were exactly what the value stated. We were digitally repatriating an object that was questily taken from what the Mala and put in an archive that the mind cliche no longer had access to. It was providing online edition for global South scholars that may struggle to come to the US to complete their research in an archive far away. It was also helping to create new scholarship that was going to look at the document with a new epistemology. So rather than relying on previous translations that where we didn't know as much where the translations were wrong. I was trying to support new scholarship and more than anything, we had a platform that was in an indigenous language, which even today, that's very uncommon. And this situation is not unusual to sunset a project like this and there was a lot of factors. And I want to say that this was not based on malice. The factors that that were taking into consideration about how why this project we needed to put aside were very real. We had a limited resource that digital infrastructure that needed to be built on this particular manuscript was not in our collections, we were just So some of the justifications were we're not we're they're applying criteria that we consistently use to think about what we what we do in the library because we can't do everything, but you can see why it might be problematic when it comes to social justice projects, because What justifications does Midwestern University have to support the Pope will when there are no professors of my studies on our campus, there are no kids students on our campus, there are no courses devoted to the importance of my and contribution to our society. I just want to pause here and to let you know that today, there was, there was a news article story coming out of South Florida, where there is an 80,000 My MP shared that reside in Southern Florida and they are one of the communities that have been the hardest hit by COVID. They have a 30% infection rate, which is extremely high. And so here's an opportunity that we as librarians can support some of the knowledge works that they find the most sacred. So when this situation happened. There was two ways to look at it. I can look at it as an individual event that happened to me personally that's affecting me personally, or I could take a look and say, Oh, you know what this is. Here is like a little alarm. That's telling me that there is something going on with the structural inequality here. So most people are going to expect that di work is going to be stalled by overt racism and that's still the case. But it's actually something much worse as many of you mentioned in your chat. It's often in action it's inefficiency or it's just plain apathy inside of a system that is not designed well to be equitable and including diversity. So are we going to continue to look at those gaps as individual instance, or are we going to start addressing them at a greater scale. Will we change the underlying structures. And I want to remind or if this is because because of everything that's going on in our society today. It's hard to forget that we're living in an era like no other. We can really design and redesign our systems and institutions to be more inclusive and more equitable systems that may have previously been designed to ignore exclude or at worse oppress like this mural that you see on your left. This is one of the first points of contacts in the America. And it went terribly terribly wrong. We're not living at that time the very fact that we have 90 people here today. That says all volumes. What's and it's other areas in the past have also noticed that we have not been so equitable and inclusive to all communities. Our era could be different if we actually act on it and actually change the systems. But before we get started, we all have to get on the same page. Because we each come to the table with our own definitions for di terms, what they mean to us personally how they influence our professional behavior. They're left undefined. These values are are left to subject interpretations. And that leads to situations like the pope of there is no set criteria yet for which projects we should do if they have social justice goals. And this is the problem. I it depends on on what the different imagine doing that in cataloging. We're going to approach cataloging based on our passions based on what we think is important that day. No, that that's not how it's going to work and the same criteria needs to be applied to di practice. It's also really important to not make a lot of assumptions. Okay, we have the value there. And now people are just going to automatically know what to do. That's not really true. And it also puts many of us in conflict with each other, because those that are more DIY aware are putting conflict with people that, you know, maybe this they may not have thought the intersections of social justice and in the library context. And in the end, as a result, they render these values ineffective at being less, and it can cause a lot of misunderstanding. And it can cause people to just say, you know, it was just lip service. They didn't care. I'm not going to waste my time on this. So it's really important that we have explicit definitions for this for these terms and that we know them at the individual department and organizational level. And so many had a question, if my library does not have a strategic plan, do you think it's appropriate to find these terms in a strategic plan for a library, or surely be defined written in other places that shape the structure work of the library. This is a great question. And I'm hoping that the tool will be able to answer them. But it's, it's both, it was you're seeing with the tool. The hope is that these values will be defined collectively. So it won't be dependent on an administrator. It's not a top down. It's a ground up. I hope I get to it later. Jacqueline, if I don't answer your question, please come back to me at the end. So what did the actions look like in our profession. When we put them in practice, you know, well, that's really unclear. It's really unclear. When you're looking at existing allies research, the majority focus on gaps, perceived or documented in the profession, including issues of bias, racism, discrimination, and tokenism. And while this research is incredibly important to build awareness, like the values, it has not translated into advancing DEI. So it's time to shift our focus. This is something that we're proposing to shift our focus from problem focus to solution focus thinking and to look at addressing it at the systemic level. And to make solutions that are reproduced like reproducible by the average employees. So the tools that we're going to address attempted to do this. And I want to stop right now and talk about working in DEI and I'm sure many of you are doing this. So I may be preaching to the choir, but I just want to give a pause and a cheerleading speech of this work is extremely hard. This work has no infrastructure many times. If you get a no, you are on the right track. Expect many no's expected to be bureaucracy, ridiculous sometimes to have misunderstanding to make a lot of mistakes. That is just part of it. And it's really important not to internalize that failure and to kind of get really curious about it. Let's get curious about why didn't that work or, you know, wow, like the way that I said it did not, it was misunderstood or that person's afraid of me now. Get into the habit of being really curious so that the more that we try through iterative attempts, we're going to get it right. Somebody asked, could you walk through how we might balance efforts to include more people of color, the same time of creating an environment that is actually healthy for them to enter. Yep. So just not to bring folks into dysfunctional environments. Yeah. Okay, so this is a tough balance. And this is why allies are really important. So as a white minority, I have the privilege of being able to walk into worlds. And one of the main things that I often do is I stand in front of my other colleagues who are tired, who have encountered terrible situations. And I don't make them. I don't put them in positions that are uncomfortable. But I, if with their consent, I do bring things up that for them, they are just exhausted. So here's an opportunity that the allies can really play a big difference. And that's why the relationships between minority communities and majority communities are extremely valuable here. I hope that addresses some, and I will definitely talk more about it as we go through the tool. So the DEI, the EDI at OSUL initiative and I'm sorry for the name, it's a really bad name. We need to come up with another one. It was really meant to help staff transition from discussing the values to embedding them through strategic action. And the, the objectives of the tool is to close the gap from values to practice to set priorities. You can't, you can't solve everything. So you have to pick your battles. You have to define what EDI is going to look like at the individual level at the department level and at the organizational level. And the very important message is that we all have to do this work. This is no longer something that only minority communities or people of color should be doing. And so the framing of the DEI as action informed by values pushes participants to recognize that embodying DEI values is not the same as adopting them as ideology. So look at the work. Don't look at what people say. Behavior is likely more to be changed with other behavior. You have to replace behavior with another behavior. If we continue to attack this through an ideology lens, which is still very important, it brings awareness, but it's going to take a long time to get on the same page. And we only have a limited amount of time. So if we're going to give, if we have one hour and we're going to give it to a wordsmithing a values document, instead of actually doing the work, I don't know. Maybe we should do some work first and then write it up. These are again, my very personal opinions, but I do think that we will we tend we can build bigger bridges if we have people doing the work first because the work informs the ideology. You can't go into this work with certain perceptions and have it work out and continue with those perceptions. So the actual tool. So what is it? It's a workshop. It's designed by employees, foreign employees to engage in meaningful conversations about their and about their practice in DEI and developing solutions for DEI challenges in the context of the organization. So we're looking at how we're going to fix where we live our house. And the solutions that they themselves can enact. We emphasize that together we can address these issues. And perhaps we cannot solve them right away, but we need to track. And one of the things that we do is we try to bring these values down to reality. So what how do they actually manifest in the library. So we used real life examples of diverse users in our library spaces as an example. So it could be a student veteran with a traumatic brain injury seeking support for instruction or it could be somebody in a wheelchair who's juggling their lunch at a library cafe where the space is not really designed for them. Or it could be an international student responding to an active shooter texts, or it could be a Muslim students praying with their backs to a glass wall, assuming they have privacy. And what we were attempting to show is the breadth of DEI work in a library context, the variety of needs, and also to show that the identification in a minority or majority group was not really going to be sufficient to respond to this distinct need. You still had to do your homework. You still had to approach it just like anything else. And so here we're trying to relieve that dependency on oh it's a person of color they'll know what to do. We also really encourage participants to look for solutions that are in reach. So starting small and it's good you practice that muscle. I mean you're going to pick up the weight pick up the one that's appropriate for you until until you know you have all of these muscles and then you can pick up all sorts of things. But it's important to practice small and then you are able to tweak and it's important to put your mask first. It's a lot of self-reflective work and when you mask somebody else, when we see these images often and that you know the mother with the child, it's a loving relationship that lets you support the other. And again this is a delicate balance. We don't want to make people that are culturally competent responsible for educating everyone else. But what matters here is the relationship between the two people. So if you dismiss people right away because of they said something ignorant or they dismissed something that was important for you and you kind of cancel them out. You lose the opportunity to try again tomorrow. But if your end goal is the relationship itself, your approach is going to be more long-term thinking. And again sometimes you do have to be pretty rash. It's not about making people comfortable. It's just about prioritizing that long-term relationship because we all have to come together at some point for this to work. The initiative also dispels the myth of DEI should be solely the work of people of color, of DEI leaders or a committee. You know this is not something that can be solved by a committee. So we, and what's the underlining phenomena of that? It's that any perspective originating from isolation or a homogeneous group is going to fall victim to groupthink. So we need to be very comfortable working with people that hold different opinions that are different and we need to bring them to the table equitably. So it's not about coexistence of difference. It's about interdependence of an ecosystem that is sustained by the quality of relationships built between different types of people. And it's definitely not about artifacts. Having the presence of someone who's a minority in your group does not mean that the group is inclusive. It's really important that we recognize what inclusivity is and not just the inclusion of an artifact. So this is one of the first world maps made in Asia. And just to give you context, that big, that big middle part, that's China. Over there to the left, which has like a black inner outline that's Africa. Europe is almost invisible at the very top. And our hope to with our curriculum was to kind of show the importance of looking things through a global perspective. So historically, when we talk about library and information science field and DEI, we're looking at communities of black and Latinx communities or Native American communities, Asian American communities, definitely people of color. But we also have to remember that there's other ethnic and cultural minorities in other parts of the world that are never going to be represented in an LIS pipeline, or a library diversity inclusion committee, or even on our academic campus. And information flows are global. And it's also an important component to consider when we're building any DEI strategy. So to resolve the dependence on minorities, we built a team, we modeled what that would look like. So we built a team of different types of representatives throughout the library that had different levels of cultural fluency, different experiences, leaving DEI. Some of them had never led a DEI effort before. And they were from different backgrounds. So they were from minority majority groups, they were from different career levels. They were staff faculty, they were early career, late career, they were tenured on tenured. They were also from different library units, IT, HR, public services, technical services. And this was really intentional because when you walked into the workshop, we wanted you to see a DEI ally that maybe you had never seen before. Maybe it was somebody that was in your department and you saw, hey, they can do it, I can do it. And we spent a lot of time with our, as a team, and training to do the workshops to get the tone right to get what we were trying to get across. And each of us brought really unique insight into this. And that's what made it so special. So we were trying more than the, than everyone here. And what mattered was this equitable process that we built, where everybody had a place at this table, and everybody was contributing to one project, and we all got used to working with each other in that way. And that's something that you don't commonly see, at least in our organization. So here's an example of a facilitator leading one of the workshops. They were offered to different units of the organization. And here on the left, you're going to see the agenda. So what ended up happening is that we had a set curriculum that was customized. At the very beginning, the facilitator started by making themselves very vulnerable, talking about their journey to approach DEI work, talking about what diversity meant for them, and expanding what diversity may mean. And I know that we're disclosing, you know, I have a medical illness or I've seen generational discrimination, or, you know, I really messed up this one time doing a DEI offense. And, you know, that's really got me involved in this. So, and, and we tried to set the tone like we're all learning in this space, and we're not here to teach you anything. We're here to have a conversation with you. So we had pre-assessment worksheets that we gave everybody, which kind of helped the participants clarify some of the existing strengths, and also some of the gaps and challenges that they had seen in DEI in different areas of the library. Again, specific to our library, so that they would be prepped to do some of the workshop questions. When we arrived, they were put in different groups based on the question that they would want to address. So there was four questions, and each group was able to select one to answer. And there was the workshop is divided into two sections. So the first part was the presentation, the second part was the actual discussion. And during the discussion component, we had them all come together and brainstorm solutions for each of these questions. Then select two ideas that they really wanted to unpack and spend the rest of the time unpacking and, and kind of beefing up what that solution would look like. In addition to answering these questions, because that was one part of it to collect their feedback, we were really just trying to make a space for our participants to build a common language about DEI and a collective DEI vision. So we needed to make a space for people to practice. And as many of you know, this work is very challenging, and it's even more challenging if you think that what from the moment you're opening your mouth, somebody is going to judge you. So here was an opportunity for us to give them a space to really, to really try in a non-judgemental space, and to also to model what those inclusive conversations that community of learning is going to look like. And also to let them know that we wanted to hear from them also and contribute to this collective DEI vision. We asked everybody to reflect, not on other people, not on what somebody else wasn't doing right, but what could you do from your particular role, and what could you do that you knew that you could advance in this area. And a lot of people were like, I don't know. I don't know. And that was really valuable information to have, because it seemed like we need to practice this a lot more. We were also trying to broaden, and again, to our message that broadening who could do this work. And finally, we wanted everybody to pitch in about prioritizing what should be our DEI goals and needs. So whenever you make a plan, the more that you have people participating and creating that plan, the more likely they're going to buy into it. So that was our, that was kind of our focus there. And also thinking that, you know, a group of different people from different backgrounds is going to make a much more inclusive plan than if it's just a couple of people at the executive level. So here you can see what the brainstorming we just used post-it notes for people to capture. The facilitators also played a very significant role here. They documented all of the ideas we later transcribed them. And we also asked the facilitators to keep kind of like a journal of what happened during the workshops so that we could consistently be tweaking the workshop as we were doing them. So a quick glance, we had seven workshops, 114 participants. I think if I may be wrong, I think we have 200 employees. So that's a pretty significant amount of participation. We trained seven facilitators. I always said that this project was my retirement project, so I could stop. That hasn't been turned up the case, but I'm so glad that the organization has several different people that they can talk to and pull from when they have a DEI project. And we collected 51 ideas. The data, I just want to touch base on the data, but I want to move on because I really would prefer to hear from you. We took some of the ideas and we coded them. So we were trying to see if we could quantify some of this qualitative data. And we made up the schema, which is really raw. It needs a lot of help. But we were just trying to figure out how do people approach this conversation? What are the things that came out of our discussions? Were there areas that people are more interested in others or more familiar with speaking to than others? And what were some of the target groups that they really wanted to support? And here is how this is what they look like in the end. I will tell you that it wasn't as informative as I was hoping it would be. And for you that are library students, please, please, please explore data and DEI. It is a really underrepresented area in the literature. It is fascinating. There could be so much more and it would also help to assess some of these, some of these programs that we do more objectively or to look at them in new ways. So please consider that area. Finally, we took all of that information and we curated all the data and we looked at the major themes that came up out of all of the sessions. So here are the major themes that came up. So we had professional development accessibility actually came out as the one that most people touched on and was the most common. Of course, diverse multilingual collections, communication and transparency came out, which is not unusual for us because our organization is so large. And this is how we curated some of the responses. So we did really want to preserve anonymity so people would feel very candid in there in what they shared in the workshops. And I'm putting these two ideas here. So please feel free to steal them and and to try them. One of the things that we're most excited about is that our HR department is actively looking at incorporating explicit DEI definitions into job descriptions, specifically any ones that are new so that nobody has to think, okay, how does my job intersect with social justice or specifically what can I do? They'll know they'll know and it'd be tailor made to their job. We also made recommendations that we presented to the executive leadership of the organization and I'm happy to say that many of them are now being enacted. And it was just an opportunity to prioritize where we should, where we could direct our focus and also as our organization makes, we make all personal goals every year. We could look at this as a menu and say, okay, I'm going to work on that this year because we've decided that this is a priority. I'm going to end here because I really want to hear from you. Some of the things that we notice was that people really, it's hard for them to separate DEI challenges from organizational challenges. And that's not uncommon because DEI at its very core is good leadership. I would say that minorities were like Marines. We feel it first, but it's a problem for everybody or it can be a problem for everyone. And having people to think about, it was hard for some of our colleagues to really focus in what could be a DEI challenge. And I think earlier on in the chat, that's what some people mentioned. They didn't know that this was a problem because it doesn't affect them personally or in their profession. And so that's something that we need to kind of unpack a little bit more. A lot of people didn't see themselves, didn't see how they could advance DEI personally. They felt that they were not qualified. It was easy for them to recognize what the problems were, but it was very hard to come up with a solution. And so here again, if we are depending on everybody to have cultural competency at the highest levels, that's going to be really hard because that's like training a brain surgeon. Many of us are not going to get to that level. So how can we make DEI actions that anybody can take? And that's why looking at the system level is interesting because if you fix the system, if the system in itself mitigates for bias is inclusive to diversity, has criteria that is going to help a group of people evaluate different projects, then it doesn't really matter what people believe. The system itself is going to get them on a conveyor belt and get them going in the right direction. Just like it is right now, not doing those things. And we also like broadening this definition of DEI to include age, invisible illness, mental illness, thought diversity, and even the hierarchies that are embedded in staff and faculty status. I think what's really interesting, because that really opened it up and made me pull people like think, okay, this is not just a minority-owned space. I can operate here. So here are some quotes, but that's okay. You can have these for later. And what I would really love to hear from you is what are your thoughts on this project? This is one of the first times that we presented it outside of our organization, and we just want to share your feedback, your questions, anything that might have come up for you. For those that did ask questions, let me know if I did not, this presentation didn't address what you originally asked. And so I'm going to stop talking now and hopefully get to listen from you. And while we're waiting for questions, I just have a few, I don't have any questions, but Pamela, I took a few notes. One I think was really important that you stress is the need to define the terms, because we all come to this space and this work from our own backgrounds, our own experiences and thinking about what one term might mean for me might be different for you or for your colleagues. So I thought that was extremely important and something I'm going to incorporate. And then also I loved your workshop questions and then really trying to dive into solutions and hopefully a lot of those were then put into place or practice, which I know you talked a little bit about them, so I'm hoping those were, but I really appreciate some of those items. And I see now you have comments coming in, so I will jump off and we'll go to the attendees. Okay, so did salary equity come up in a, up as a topic in our workshops and report. Yes, it did. It came up a lot. And we did include those. And our, in our organization, our Dean has done a really good job at addressing some of at the faculty level and we have now are pushing it for the at the staff level. And it was something that did come up and it was it did give us space to talk about that, you know, in a way that didn't feel uncomfortable, because salary questions sometimes are shy away from them, and also to talk about what's a solution for this, a solution could be, let's talk about how to do negotiations when you take a job. That's something that that also came up. So here from the address had a question from earlier about this balance to include more people of color at the same time as creating an environment that is actually healthy. So Jess, I don't want to put you on the spot. Could, could I ask you to, to clarify your question. I'm an oral, I'm an oral person so that will really help me out. Yes, I'm sorry, it's a complex question and I realized that this is going to take a lot of, you know, figuring out with my own organization but I What I'm trying to, to get at is like, like what's, I hate to say like what's more efficient, but as someone who's trying to take on like you mentioned like take on some of that emotional labor. What is like more pressing or urgent or like what's more efficient. My organization kind of has a little bit of a negative or neutral attitude toward DEI right now and yes. So, I've, I've been trying to go to more and more webinars. I'm on our council for diversity, equity and inclusion. So I'm, I'm trying to make this into action and not, you know, I don't want to just keep putting on diversity training after diversity training because that doesn't work. It's like, at the same time, if I know that our organization's kind of a little negative or at the very least neutral or lukewarm, I don't want to bring people into an unhealthy environment. So I feel like I'm kind of stuck like between, well, but we need to make the environment good before we bring people people in but then we need to bring people in to make the environment good. I just, yeah. Yes, that's the catch 22. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thank you. Yeah, no, that's a really great question. I would say that we I had this I had a similar discussion, because we have diversity residents in our organization. I would say that it's important to be upfront to any person of color that you will bring in or a minority that you'll bring in and say, hey, we really need to work on this. And I have a commitment to support this area. But I would really, but it is something that we're going to have to co build together. And that means that the there's going to be a lot of weight on on the communities that are minorities, which they should, you know, it's, it's, it is something that we are used to. But it is something that has to be co built. And that the the idea is that the relationship so that there's going to be friction is not the issue, but that they are that when we do have friction we're committed to figuring it out. So I think that's what makes the biggest difference. It's not realistic to think that if we're going, oh, the environment has to be great and then we're going to bring them in, because if that's the case, I'm assuming you don't have that problem. I'm assuming your, your staff is already diverse. So that's a really good question that I would just keep trying to have those relationships build those relationships and start with a problem or a challenge that's inside of the organization but that both both the minority and the majority groups would benefit from it being resolved. Tone here is really important. You don't want to wait till it's a big problem for it to have been addressed. So, and that's the purpose of this workshop is, let's talk about it before there's a problem before there are issues. So, in the, in, in this case, you know, we could have just got really angry. And in fact, I did get angry about the purple but the important thing is what you do about it afterwards and to make it into something productive. I hope that helps and I'm happy to offline later give you some more tips or get actually more feedback about what you might be addressing to to kind of customize it to what you might need. I would love that. Thank you so much Pamela that that did give me quite a few starting points, and I would absolutely if you're open to that. I would love to, to reach out to you afterward. Sure. It'd be my honor. I'd be happy to. Thank you. You're welcome. So there's another question. Great. Great start for me in which we just started the diversity group at the library. I'm so glad. Yeah, there is a lot of really good literature on setting up a diversity community diversity committee. So if you have any questions on there, I'm happy to point you to those sources. I'm curious how this project was approved and supported by administration to even set aside the space and time for this. Okay, so here's the thing. I did I asked permission, but I was going to do it anyway. So here's something where you, you, I had the framework I did have a conversation with my colleagues about one, it was actually Sandra animal that pushed, pushed me to think about this at a bigger scale and then we had a discussion with the dean, and we said, we want to do this. And this is what we need from you. So we came in with very specific asks, and they took a lot of risk in, because it was coming from a place where I was somewhat angry. So, but, but I was trying to turn it into something productive and, and to their, I really wanted to like the support that I received was, was, was wonderful. And, and it was, I think it has done a lot of healing and a lot and showed us how we can work together. So, but you know you don't have to wait for the administration to say yes you can do it in a diversity committee meeting you could do it in your department meeting, you could do it on your own for anybody who wants to show up. You, it's not necessary something that needs to be sanctioned although when it is it is very helpful. Our city's equity department has trained multiple library staff to lead di workshops however these trainings keep getting canceled rescheduled in favor of more pertinent needs. Yep, yep, any advice. Okay, so here's the thing di is always something that is never seen that that doesn't oh until it's a problem, it doesn't seem to occupy that urgency. So, I always stress to people that to show up, like, if you want di to work, you have to treat it with the same level of professionalism that you give to things that you deem important. It's very so that that means that you give it your all if you're coming to a meeting, you have an agenda, you have, you treat it just as professionally as you would anything else, and that kind of sets the tone that this is important. But this is this is something that often happens and so I think it's important to have a conversation there and to and to and to come out like a, I like to do things with a nice white glove so to say like where we really need to keep these trainings because I already had 50 people that were going to come and then it was canceled. So something's like showing the merits of keeping it consistent without letting them know hey I know you're just not you're not making this a priority. Amy asked I've been reluctant to make recommendations to hire people for roles specifically as di specialist or accessibility specialist since this work is everybody's needs to embed it how do you expect the relationship to work between one hired expert and the whole. So I was a really resistant and this is when we decided to make this recommendation for a di officer. It's because some it the the responsibility has to be coordinated through someone it has to be somebody's job. At that time it was Sandra and my job secondary job and and that means that we were struggling because it would often be put aside for our actual job. So having an officer there if the officer has the adequate resources that they need. If they are given a team so like it's not coming in and all you solve a unicorn librarian. No, it means that they come in and they have a council or they have a team or they have. They have a budget they have resources and that people work with them in tandem with them but they're not leading everything. We have a wonderful diversity officer at Ohio State by the name of Yolanda Cepeda and she is instrumental in doing many things on campus but it's not her that is at the forefront leading them. You just go to her and say hey I have this really great idea and and I would like to get a your advice and she goes oh sure here and she puts you in connection with this and that and she helps you with resources if she has them or she just helps you or she she's a voice of support. And that's what I was envisioning for that that position so it's more of a liaison like you would to a department rather than you're doing everything. If you want to read more here is our chapter that gives more context please feel free to email me. I'm so thankful for your time for for listening to this and I'd love to hear your feedback. As we continue to develop this tool. Thank you so much, and I'm happy to stay on and answer some of them or some of these other questions. Go for it. So, Michelle, could you tell me what where we are adding the questions I think I might have lost my spot. Let me scroll up there's so many questions great questions. Yes. Hold on. Um, can you speak about data in DEI and potential places to look for more research and information in this field. And also can you reflect on how powerful or not your representation of data in DEI has been. Yes. So there really is very little so a lot of the tools that try to do that, that try to quantify qualitative data is actually proprietary and there's one open sort like one open tool but many of them are are sold as a consulting and consulting packages. And so it puts librarians in a position that they would have to have the discretionary funds to purchase something like this. And I don't have them at the top of my head that they're most likely used at public libraries. I really haven't seen an instrument or too many instruments that are available for academic libraries. And so it would be thinking about just like social scientists look at and specifically I would say anthropology and sociology can we adapt some of those tools to look at DEI challenges in the library sense. And what makes libraries an interesting space to do that is that we all have collections we all tend to have instruction so there are specific areas that are going to be similar to each one of us. And so thinking about how we can, and particularly for trainings, I think this is a really important tool to do a to do more assessments in that area, like for me, I almost wanted in this presentation for you guys to send me little emojis when something actually helped, like, so that I would know and and things that were like, Oh, you're just talking, you know, I don't need to hear any of that. Because I think when were those moments transformational is hard to tell one of the questions that we asked was what training have you taken that was actually helpful and transformative. Very few people at could answer that question. That's a that's a problem. That's a problem. So, yeah, I can send Michelle in a follow up some of the instruments that are available and just keep digging. I don't have to dig much because there's not much there. So here's an open field for you to do and a wonderful, you know, environmental scan for anybody in graduate school. I see another one. I don't think you address this one. It's someone commented I've been reluctant to make recommendations to hire people for roles specifically as DI specialist or accessibility specialist since this is work everyone needs to embed in their work. How do you expect that relationship to work between one hired expert and the whole meeting to do the work. Yes, question. Yeah, so that was back to to having that liaison. So it and it needs to be expressed specifically that way. It needs to be expressed that this is not this is not one person is it's impossible to hire one person and solve it. In fact, if you look at DI positions in most private sector, that's why they have such high rate of turnover, because that it's impossible to do that. I just also want to do a quick shout out to my one of my key mentors is on this on this webinar. His name is Jose Diaz. He is absolutely phenomenal. If you want a great great advice this person and he has a question to that he says that did the issues of hiring retention come up as a topic in your conversation. Yes, they did. We talked about how why we were losing people minority leaders in the LIS community. Consistently in our organization. And that was one of the spaces that we could talk about it and so one of our focuses was rather than trying to look at the diversity pipeline and and diversity in our profession. So let's start by taking care of the people in our organization first and let's start asking what they need and how we might support them in in ways that are not just checking in. So one of the things that I that we have come up with is like help them publish help your minority colleagues publish. This is something that specifically. Jose Diaz really helped me. And so if he was not there to walk me through the process. All of these ideas that you hear forget them. Nobody would know about them. So this is just an opportunity to support your colleagues in that way. Two more questions. I see one here about says do you think the current priorities should be invested in administrative and or legislative library level. This being a set of standard by creating mandatory workshops or trainings for all library workers, whether permanent or temporary often filled there is a good amount of temporary employees who are discarded in the framework. That's a good question. Yeah. So I think it needs to be addressed at both levels. I think that when they come through administration. Sometimes they might not be connected to what's going on at the ground level. At the ground level you have more opportunities to do experimentation that hopefully then will inform other levels. The current priorities are are something that our whole profession really needs to think about term positions are then there's a lot there's there's thankfully there's a lot of research there to support this. So oftentimes like in a residency program, you get somebody in they get trained into the organization and then they, they leave and a lot of their insights are not really retained in the organization so there needs to be more mechanisms, not only to make their voices added into that organization, but also to think about how we're supporting these workers as they are as they're bearing the brunt of of the I and then and then also kind of whisked away. I think we're getting much better at it but there needs to be more conversation and more attention to those programs. And that's one of the recommendations that we put. So that's about this final question and then any others. We can address after in the document. Do you have information on doing displays that are geared toward minority communities. Yes. So, I had the pleasure of having Jill Baron do the the screening of her of her documentary on on the on the the cataloging term of illegal aliens and part of that we had, we invited student groups to come in and to tell us how they wanted us to support them. And one of the things that they said is don't do exhibits just on Hispanic Heritage Month. Like I know I would like to see exhibits that highlight my culture of my history in a positive light, not in the light of martyrdom and conflict and challenge and discrimination. But that's one way to do it is to do more exhibits that are celebratory. Other exhibits that I have done is I've invited artists to come in and to like, they've taken a book and a book quote, and they've made some artwork design, and that is put on display we've also done that with students. There's really creative ways that you can approach exhibits, even putting one of the recent workshops that we've done is to kind of put a manuscript like a traditional Western manuscript with with the description that it's looking at the manuscript through an indigenous epistemology epistemology. So that's completely new new way to look at these materials. I may not have addressed that question as as well as I want to. But if there's more if you have a specific idea that you would like to flesh out please let me know. And then one just came in and I think this is an important one and then we'll we'll wrap it up. How important, how important is it to have written definitions of EDI or even EDI wording in the strategic plan. I, I don't know if at that level it's, if you, if you put it this is again my very personal opinion so please test it out and ask many other of your colleagues what they think so we get at the best answer. So my personal opinion, I think it needs to be done more at the end. It needs to be like a pipeline up so it needs to start at the individual level, then the department level, then the organizational level and then finally when we see how all of those things are placed them into a strategic plan. Again, avoiding this top down strategy and better bottom up and because people that are in their positions they know better than anyone what they can and can't do what they may need to sit down with somebody else and and have a dialogue about what are the intersections of these of these values in their day to day work and those need to be put into their job descriptions when they are when it's appropriate or even as a as a goal for that year, or maybe they're just guidelines. I'm not, I'm not a fan of, of, I'm, again, I'm a fan of doing the actual work, focusing on the action rather than what it looks like on paper. Well excellent there's actually a comment I think that goes along with this one individual at their institution seems important to have di in the strategic plan because we refer to the plan to support our programs and actions. Yep. And so I think it's having that consistent conversation so that it doesn't turn into something that people don't know how it integrates into the day to day practice. I'm, I am after this I will also send Michelle so all of our, all of the documents that we wait the curriculum the handouts all of those things we are hoping to just make them share them. Anybody can do whatever they want with them. Our hope is to just give people a starting point so that they may try this in their organization and see if it works for them that that is our hope. That would be wonderful it's almost like a toolkit for everybody to get started and to help them. Yep. Well with that I don't want to keep anyone much longer but we really appreciate all of your questions for you being here today, and truly to Pamela for the time and sharing her expertise and this this wonderful pilot project and it sounds like it's had some great successes so I look forward to see all of the materials you send along that I can then share with everyone with the recording. Oh, I'm so glad thank you thank you so much Michelle for inviting me here for everybody that's here. I also want to thank Sandra NML who really was a big part of this project, along with Elaine Pritchard and all of our facilitators. So thank you so much, and I hope to talk with some of you later on.