 I thought I'd ask sort of a lightning round for those except Miguel to tell us one thing, one idea or trend that you are taking away from Miguel's presentation that you know you're going to be talking to your team about tomorrow. Can you start? Sure. I'll start first and foremost. I'm going to start with the Curiosity Kits. Miguel talked about that. And it's actually something that our library is already doing. It's called Get Lit, Terture. Get Lit is a service that we launched maybe a couple months ago and it's going pretty well. One of the hurdles that we have so far is getting feedback from those who are actively in the program. They get the books delivered, curated by our awesome librarians. And then they return them, but we have little to no feedback on how they are seeing the service, but we're working on ways to improve that. And secondly real quick, the shared experiences I think is a good takeaway that I will bring back to our library, try to get our patrons to share their experiences using the 3D printer or various technologies in the library. For me and I work at Mountain View Public, when Miguel talked about how it's our job to look at trends and new technologies in the community and not just like hit the highest bar as like in Silicon Valley, we have to get to this level. It's like presenting it to everybody so it's equitable. The idea of we look at what's happening in the world, we look at trends, technology, and we present that to our patrons in a way they can explore it at our library even if they're not at that level yet. So if there's something happening in the world and it's leaving people behind, it's our job to present it to our patrons. So I'm going to be talking to my stuff about that. Yeah, so I actually thought the Alexa LA calendar app was pretty cool. So I'm going to kind of look in to see how they did that. It would be really neat to be able to, you know, ask Alexa what's happening at your local library branch that day, so it would be kind of cool. So I'm going to go dig in and see how hard that is to make happen. That sounds great. So I hope each of you will think about what you can bring back tomorrow and share with people who couldn't be here and in a way that will be exciting for them to say, yeah, let's try something new. And then go back and start looking at the website, the ALA website. So another question I have is sort of for each person is what is the favorite method that you have or the way in which you approach getting staff who may not be very open to change, may be pretty resistant to change, become more effective at embracing and actually implementing change. I think it's a big question for many of us and I thought maybe Erin could give us some of her insights. Thanks, Shannon. You know, by definition, if you're the innovation manager, you're the front line of change, but also you're trying to get others to do the change for you. Yeah, so I, you know, obviously it's a problem a lot of us face. I think we're very fortunate and say to say that, you know, we have our culture of a changing library. Like it's kind of expected from the second you start from all of our staff levels that, you know, you embrace these, that we're always going to be pushing the boundaries, we're always going to be moving forward, we're always going to be trying new things. But that's, there's still people who don't want to move or they're, they hit a comfortable, the point they were comfortable and that's, you know, that's as far as they're willing to go. And so one of the things I've been working really hard on and is to bring, bring in our initial meetings when we're starting new projects, bring everybody's voice to the table. And it's actually a personal challenge of mine. I can tend to be a bulldozer and just like, go in and like, it's exciting. Let's do it now. And just like steamroll everybody who isn't speaking up very loud. And so I've been trying to adopt a lot of new techniques. I'm using a lot of the design thinking tools that we have in order to give everybody a voice and to know that, you know, even if you're working as a page and you're, you're on the project, we're giving you a voice to tell us like how you could see things run. How you would envision the project to be. And, and I find that the more and more I get everybody's voice heard and we discuss and we talk, then they get excitement because they can see their influence on the project. They can see why their opinion matters. And then we're, we're taking time to listen. A lot of times when we see people not, not changing, we think it's just like, oh, they don't want to do it. They don't want to learn something new. And we take a really like defensive attitude and sitting, instead stopping to listen as like, why are people feeling that? A lot of times people are scared. Change is really frightening. It's this unknown. You don't know what's gonna happen. Sticking to the known is much more comfortable. And so if we kind of embrace that and say, you know, like, I'm gonna, we, we teach how to fail successfully. We teach that it's okay to like it, not to go right. Like, it's okay to run a 3D printing program and the 3D printer breaks and like, I don't know, everything goes wrong. You know, it's like, that's okay. Like, what can we learn from that? Like, how can we move forward without feeling like everything is, is over with? And if you kind of start to, to cater towards that mindset a lot more, I think you, you'll find people are more adaptive to wanting to move forward with the projects, even in little steps. And like giving encouragement when people do take something that's out of their comfort zone and giving them encouragement. Like, hey, thanks, like you did a really good job on that. Like, thank you for making that step forward. Like, next time let's try this other thing, you know, and, and keeping that ball rolling. Candice. I'm trying to think back to a time where there was a change that I was really unhappy about and really resistant to. And I'm happy to say it's been a while. I'm, I'm trying to think because we've had a lot of really good changes lately and a lot of things to be excited about. But I would sort of echo looking across the whole organization, it doesn't have to stop, you don't, you don't have to start at the top and get a small managed group, meant group, everybody on board and then it trickles down, you know, start across the whole organization from every work group and every job description and find who's on board with this and who's excited about it, who has something to contribute and, and go from there. And also something I was asking Jane about earlier, what happens when you have resistant people? And, you know, she was quoting, let's say you have a percentage of people who are on board, people who are resistant and people who are maybe in between, go ahead, leave the resistant people behind for now. You probably didn't say it that harshly. But to you, I did, but yeah. But get the people who are on board with it to go ahead instead of trying to work on convincing everybody, go ahead with it and see how it goes. If it works, it works and if it doesn't, it doesn't. But I think having some people resistant is not a reason not to go ahead with something. I think the most important thing when dealing with this situation with people being resistant to change is sharing the stories of success that the change led about. That could be either on the patron side of things or amongst your coworkers and staff. I think that will show these, these coworkers or colleagues that the change was made for a necessity and for a good reason and that the results are well worth it. Oftentimes I try to ask my staff to share their experiences with their coworkers because sometimes hearing it from a higher up or a supervisor or manager maybe doesn't really get that message across, but hearing it from a colleague up here may add some additional benefit. One thing that I have done in the past, sometimes if I knew, if I was smart enough to know it was going to be a big change, sometimes I wasn't, but if I didn't know that, then I would put together a team of people to work on the plan for that change and I would pick at least one person who had an excellent reputation in the library, was very influential, but who tended to be negative or not all, I thought maybe from my point of view they were negative, but what they were very detailed people and so as soon as the idea came by they just picked it apart for all the little details which I frankly didn't care about. So what I did learn though is if I put those folks in the group and they became part of the group and part of the solution, they were off selling all those people to whom they were influential. So it's something to think about understanding the dynamics and respecting the dynamics of your coworkers too. So I was just talking with Miguel a little bit about, he was talking about autonomous cars, but it's not going to be just autonomous cars. It's going to be autonomous vehicles of all type and the change that will happen is transformational to our whole society because it changes the whole way things are transported. When you look at how many trucks there are moving products around, you look at how many, I live in a condo building, how many different packages get delivered by how many different delivery companies get into our building in a day, pretty amazing. Look at all the meals that are being delivered to people's homes. Look at all the ways that we use transportation to keep our economy running. Imagine all those jobs are gone and it's vehicles. Imagine that your library's parking lot is unnecessary because everything gets dropped off, nobody stays. Imagine that if all those jobs are gone will there be new ones or will we actually switch to an economy where many people do not work and never work again? And then what does that mean for libraries? What does it mean for society, period? But for us, what would it mean? If, in fact, there are new kinds of jobs that come up, what's our role for adults who have lost their jobs in making something happen around that? So the more you think about it, I was happily thinking to myself, well, if I'm really lucky by the time I have to give up driving, they'll have autonomous cars and Uber will come without a person in it. But I read the other day, and some of you may have seen it, that there's a senior citizen's development, a big one, in San Jose, way up in the hills, far away from everything. But it's a very large facility place. And they have just announced that they are going to have some autonomous cars to move their residents around just within the complex. And they're all by definition over the age of 55, or we're laughing, maybe they're early adopters, will in fact be people who are too old or too young to afford a car or the other. But that really made me think, what are you seeing as kind of a future impacts on our society and then therefore on our libraries within the next 10 to 15 years in the area of transportation changes? So we're going to let you start. So I think you just walked through, I think one of those essential elements of futuring is trying to figure out from that trend or change that we see what's the robust realistic story that we can tell, which is a realistic vision of people being displaced from their employment opportunities, trying to figure that out and then insert ourselves into the library as librarians and information professionals into those scenarios. We can certainly look at it from the positives of, oh, maybe we can expand our building to cover the parking lot that's no longer necessary or something, but we also have to look at it from the negatives. I think we're starting to see more and more conversations around universal basic income, wherein those companies that introduce these types of technologies that displace significant amounts of workers would then be responsible through taxation or some other system to contribute into a basic income that's distributed to all citizens. It's kind of interesting because I think when we talk through that universal basic income, we think, oh, well, wouldn't librarians be like, wouldn't we be the recipients of a universal basic income? And so we wouldn't have to work anymore. But if you look at the scenarios around universal basic income, more and more they talk about people will have time to pursue their educational and informational pursuits, self-directed learning, leisure pursuits, and you're like, oh, we might be busier than ever if the significant portions of industry are displaced and they're given that sort of level of protection. The other thing that's interesting around autonomous cars, artificial intelligence and algorithm-led industries is that there's more focus on the skills people will need to contend in such a market, and I think it reinforces many of the skills that libraries provide to people. Curiosity, question formulation, evaluation of resources, high-level dialogue, and discourse. So what steps are we taking to really emphasize and perhaps reframe the traditional skills that we've always built through any one of a number of our programs so that people recognize their tangible benefits in a world where technology is displacing traditional repetitive skills in different workplaces? Erin, do you want to share some of the things you were saying about your inside knowledge about this field? Yeah, I mean, I was just saying earlier my partner's works in autonomous cars, so I, you know, and, you know, if inside the industry it's coming even faster than I think a lot of people conceptualize it could possibly come, but Miguel hit like pretty much every point that I was speaking, as we were speaking earlier too, but I think another thing is to think about, you know, the way our cities are going to be shaped and built, especially moving forward, especially new and growing cities, you know, how will streets be laid out, how will, you know, there'll be a lot more pedestrian walkways, there'll be a lot more opportunities and I can tell you like I've been speaking to our city planners, they're already thinking about this sort of stuff. They're already thinking, you know, 20, 30, 40 years down the road, how many parking lots do we need downtown? How is traffic going to move around the city? We should make sure we're part of that conversation and not an afterthought by our city planners, you know, how do we leverage, you know, people coming and walking a lot more places so that, you know, we can be part of that whole community center where, you know, people, there's the DMV, there's the city hall, there's the library, like everybody comes, there's parks, there's things all together and how can we leverage those partnerships and so starting to have those conversations with our elected officials or our city planners or any of that sort of stuff about how to make sure that the library is also, you know, as more people have more time for information needs and that's only, like that's autonomous cars are not, that's always growing, like in the Western states especially, but like more people are having more free time to do stuff and so how do we kind of make sure we're in people's minds and we're part of the process not an afterthought, right? Do you guys have anything to add? Just to tackle or to add on what Erin said, yeah, do we get involved in putting the library and its services in these autonomous vehicles whether it's e-books, whether it's language learning, any kind of databases because like Miguel said, with these autonomous cars comes this wealth of free time that people will have and the library has tons of services that I think would be perfect for marketing and these kind of vehicles and the trend that's happening right now. Can I have one more thing that I've forgotten about? Perhaps we also overlook the political divides that will come around some of these technologies. In Chicago, one of the aldermen has already proposed legislation that would outlaw self-driving cars specifically because of these reasons, the displacement of workers. And so we may find ourselves not only in a community that is facing significant technological change, but also a community that is deeply divided around specific technologies. And we're already seeing it, you know, everybody hates Facebook right now. No matter what side you're on, it seems like Facebook that we all kind of love, now we have these deep political feelings around these technology platforms. And I think it's gonna be much the same with robots, artificial intelligence, autonomous cars and what role are we gonna have in civic dialogue around these types of issues. And in aligning ourselves with different political strengths and parties and labor organizations and other types of things, what's our political role in some of these dialogues? Well, I would add on that too is to think about, you know, while it might displace a lot of people, it'll also give a lot of people more access to being more mobile, more independent. So there's a huge portion of our population that might not be able to drive. You know, there might be elderly, disabled, all sorts of different people. Also, a lot more people won't have to own cars. And so some of our residents who have lower incomes will be able to afford to get around because now they don't have, like there's a whole bunch of different ways that mobility will change within demographics and class structures. And so while some might be elevated, some might not be. It's gonna, you know, restructure and change and starting to really just thinking about these things and having the conversations now makes a difference. You might be a great time to invite your planning director and some of the staff to come and meet with your staff or come to an all staff day or something to really start talking about it kind of more seriously and getting around and thinking about it. So, well, I have one last question for the group and then we'll open up. So this is kind of a question I thought about a little bit this morning when Luis was talking about his four decades and I have a similar amount of time in the profession. And obviously he and I both have had incredible opportunities and have had, you know, wonderful jobs and careers. But still, when you start thinking about 40 plus years, you have to think about, well, how do I keep myself honest? How do I keep myself fresh? And to me, fresh means open. It largely, it means open. But it also means that I'm learning new things. I'm engaged and I'm leading people in a positive way and to the degree, you know, that I am struggling. I have people with whom I can share the struggle, but I do not carry a big cloud over my head during those periods. I'm sure I never, I did not succeed in those goals of being fresh, you know, every day of my working life. But I think it's a question for everyone who loves our field and is working in libraries for their career, how do you keep yourself fresh? So we'll start with Erin and go in. I think part of it for me is not just talking in the echo chamber. So making sure I am talking constantly with people who don't work in libraries so I can find out what's happening, what's going on, you know, connecting with our teens whenever we can. Also embracing that, like, I don't have to be an adopter of the technology to understand and be open to it. So like, I've downloaded Snapchat like three times and I get how it works. But like, I don't really, none of my friends use it so it's like the most boring platform ever. But I get it, like, it's a thing, our library, like we utilize it, it's fine, but like I, you know, making sure you're constantly like, you can check something out, you can understand, you know, 3D printing or virtual reality. You might not see a use for it in your personal life, but maybe you can try to be open to how it might be impactful to the people who are using your library. So yeah, just always kind of thinking about those things, always taking opportunities to come to things like this, to talk about crazy, wild ideas, and not being afraid, again, to like reach out, I think it's something, you know, go talk to your lawmakers, go talk, go over to City Hall and make friends with people. Make sure like you're in people's minds when they're thinking about how cities are developing, how we're influencing technology, like how all of that change is occurring and happening. So you should be part of that dialogue. And so making sure to insert yourself in wherever you can. Yeah, I'd echo that about inserting yourself. You know, I hate to use the word networking, I think we're tired of that word, but it's just look around your community and where can you pop up? Where can you be? Who can you meet? Who can you bring into the library? Who's looking to come to the library for a craft program? And then suddenly you meet them and they say, oh, could you come and meet with this group I have and bring something? Old time organizations, the Kiwanis, the Rotary, they love us, they invite us to come talk. We see patrons there. They bring, this is a great story, we went to talk about library resources at the Rotary. We saw patrons there and we saw a patron who had met a young man at LanguageSwap and brought him to Rotary. Not necessarily to convert him to Rotary, but like here's a civic group where you can meet people and speak English and learn a bit about our town. And it's like, it was a match made at the library. It was awesome. About keeping fresh. I don't know, I just look at some of the things that are happening in our library and the most exciting things are not things that have been around forever, but change. And having young people, people fresh out of library school, hiring them, they always keep things fresh. Being open, like you said. What else? Just keeping kind of, for years I felt sort of like I didn't work in the real world. My friends who worked in tech companies are here, there. They worked in the real world and I worked in this sort of alternate reality. And I'd be like, how do things work in the real world? How are things in other jobs? And then I started to realize we work in the real world. My friends who work in companies where they've seen the same 12 co-workers every single day of their lives for the last 20 years. I tell them things that happen at libraries. They're like, you're kidding, that's crazy. I never knew that happened. I said, that's my life every single day. We see a wide mix of people. We see new people. We see different segments of the community and I feel so much more like I work in the real world than I have ever in the 27 years I've worked in libraries. I think for me, trying to keep it fresh is trying to look at things outside of my position here as a library assistant at the Birmingham Library, but just as a person bringing in my passions for my personal life and trying to integrate that into the work I do at the Birmingham Library, whether it's shooting video, whether it's photographs, try to bring that passion into work keeps me fresh. I think my co-workers see that passion and then it kind of has a ripple effect to them. Also, as of late, taking our outreach bike out into the community kind of reminds me and keeps me fresh that the library's here to serve our community and actually being beyond its walls and actually going out into Berlin Game and seeing the community firsthand, seeing their excitement when they see the bike and seeing the library out in the community has been one of the driving forces for me lately to be fresh. Can I say also, I often think about our introvert nature so everyone's like, go talk to other people and I'm like, we don't do that. So, an alternate idea. I've tried to start reading diversely. The same thing that we tell our patrons to do, I try to read diversely. So even in news sources, I'm not black clearly, but I've started reading this news source called Blavity and it's black perspectives on current events and I learned so much from doing that because it just helps me look at things from a different perspective and you can do that from any one of a number of perspectives given the number of news sources and blogs we have. If you're a guy, try to follow a beauty blogger for a week and they see things with so much insight that we wouldn't know about because we don't have to deal with that world but those are helpful things. Just read diversely if you don't wanna go and talk diversely in your community because you're an introvert, at least read diversely I think, yeah. So we're open to taking some questions. I honestly am completely ignorant of how the Twitter questions are being relayed to us because we're the first panel. Yeah. I'm sure there are many, you know, really wonderful questions up there. But let's take an in-person question and I think a mic is coming right down to you. You mentioned you ride a bike into the community, is that right? Yeah, so we have a tricycle actually, it's from Haley Trikes and we received it through LSTA grant a couple of years back and we have since used it for community outreach and going out to city events, like last month was Berlin Game on the Avenue and we were out there giving away free books and reintroducing people to the library. We have like a bike and a cart full of books. Yeah, so the initial plan for that bike was to haul technology. We had our 3D printer out there, we had some podcast equipment, a music production studio and we would load it all up on the bike with a solar battery and demonstrate that technology that was available in our tech media lab. It was quite heavy, but now we lighten the load a little bit and go out with specific purposes. I just wonder with all this talk of autonomy and vehicles and I understand that throughout time that the equity, we will bridge that gap. However, there is a huge gap from the haves and the have-nots and I think that all of these things are wonderful, all of these things are great, but how is it that we get on board with the city hall and we get on board with funding, especially with recovering economies like Vallejo in California, they've recently been bankrupt and it's been an overhaul of working and growing and building that economy back up. So I guess just, I would like more insight and how that gap is filled. Go ahead. Don't believe that the equity bridge is gonna, it's not gonna get solved. I mean, I think we have to be, we have to fundamentally believe that our economy is becoming less equal, not more equal. The income inequality gap is accelerating at a major pace. We need to be observant of the ways in which technology is also creating economies of superstars wherein certain industries are dominated by a single brand and they aggregate all of their jobs in one locale at the detriment of other startups, mom and pop organizations, whatever it may be. And so we're starting to see where it's those single economies of New York, San Francisco, Austin and surrounding communities are going to be, they're gonna experience significant downturns and they're gonna hurt. The urbanization trend is really tough for us to understand and so I think we have to be observant of that and start to figure out where does the library fit in to starting to create for income inequality. One of the best solutions is to bring people of different economic backgrounds together in dialogue and force them to confront each other. We have certain activities that do that, story time, summer reading programs, people of all different types. What's the next level of program that we develop to bring that type of thing? What's the economic development activities that we can engage in, even if it's not specific job skill creation but other types of things that force people to confront each other in very real ways and understand their circumstances. And I would build off of what Miguel is saying and that's something that we're starting to look at exactly that on libraries are open and for everybody, right? And but part of what we serve is this democratization, this making it so that there's more equality and access. I think sometimes that we try to be a little bit of too much of everything to everybody and that we should start finding out ways that we can really focus our attention on the populations that need us the most and then leveraging other economic communities in order to help us serve some of our communities that need that service. So a lot of ways we've been looking as like, how can you engage, especially living here in Silicon Valley, how can we engage people who might not come into the library and don't honestly really like need us. They want us there but they don't need us. How can we leverage their skill base to come into the library and utilize them as engaged volunteers in order to lead programming, to share their skills, to connect, to see how like to interact with a group of people that they might not ever interact with and do exactly what Miguel is saying, to have these relationships being built instead of saying, well, you know, our only volunteer opportunities are shelving books. You know, say like what skill do you have that you could use to help out the rest of your community in order to make everybody their best possible selves? And that has been a stumbling block for a lot of libraries to open up to say, we want programs done by people who are not us and we will set some standards, we will do things but you're the expert in those things and we aren't and so we want to use your expertise and open it and that is a door many libraries have been very reluctant to step through so one can hope maybe. And I would say you're talking about these communities that are like Vallejo or something like that, it's a challenge but it's also an opportunity for the library to get involved with government on a local level to start bringing in people to have those conversations and especially in your neighborhoods, I was in Denmark at a library conference and they had a great speaker of this guy in Canada who goes out into communities to leverage and give people the tools to become engaged, active citizens in their communities. So how can we teach people through the library by bringing in speakers and working with our elected officials and our city planners on developing policies for their neighborhoods? How can we get people to be involved in their communities at a very local, at their neighborhood block level? Like you can make, and once people see changes and learn the skills on how they can make those changes then you can see more and more development happening, you can see a more engaged populace and if the government or the local city government isn't available to do all of that sort of stuff, we can be a leveraging place to help teach people to get engaged. And I think it's sometimes termed high-low activities. I don't like that term. Maybe think about it as AZ type of activities. Storytime is an AZ, everybody comes no matter what their educational background, income level. There are very few things that do that. Food, does it? I was not surprised when Philadelphia Free Library introduced their culinary kitchen where community members can come in and they do programming around food because it brings people from different perspectives together. Austin Public Library's New Central Library will have a demonstration kitchen in there. Sports teams do it. No matter your income level or education level, how long you've been in the US, how new of an immigrant you are, there's something about sports teams that also starts to bring people together. What are the things we can start to leverage that aren't based on educational level or privilege a certain group of people so that they have authority over another group of people but that bring people together in equal entry point? We're gonna have to find those things to do because that's a major deterrent against income inequality. I'm seeing and I'm sure a lot of you are also in your communities an increase in a certain type of diversity but a homogenization on income level. People look different but there are so many people who are at a certain income, they have to be to be able to live where our library is. And right there downtown, we have all these tech workers flowing out of their offices at lunch. And in a way, they all kinda look the same. You all know these are tech workers and they're a certain age and they're mostly male. Two blocks away, we have an RV neighborhood. We have the people living in RVs in front of a distressed cottage that sold for a million plus recently. I don't know if you saw this in the news. What they described as a distressed cottage, to me it's a charming craftsman cottage but they call it a distressed cottage. It just sold for a million plus inside unseen. So the cellar stipulated, you can't see what it looks like inside and you get to let me live there for seven years rent free. Is that a new trend? Buying a house you won't live in for seven years just so you can say I own something in Mountain View. You're staking your place for your future residence or perhaps it's just an investment and they'll never live there. So we have that going on now. We have people living in their RVs side by side with a rundown home that sold for a million plus and is not even gonna be inhabited by the owners. So I'm looking at the RV neighborhoods and seeing how do they get to the library? The RV, you can't just drive your RV to the library. So how are they gonna get to the library? Is there a bus route? Can we have a little pop up there? And for me, a pop up is I'll go sit in a chair with a laptop and wave a flag that says Mountain View Library. That's, could we do that? Is that a way to provide them some service? How do they get internet? When we had the heat wave, I drove by there and people, their generators are going constantly because they're living in this metal box that's 100 degrees. I'm thinking, do they know the library's a cooling center? Why aren't they all over at the library right now? Another local library increased their hours. They stayed open three hours later for people to be a cooling center. So yeah, we see that right in our own backyard, that disparity even in Mountain View. Or I should say, especially in Mountain View, right? Other questions? Good morning, my name is Susan Clark. Thank you, this is a wonderful panel. I work with libraries on a variety of different projects that speak to this income inequality. We work with local governments, we work with civic tech, I'm at common knowledge. And part of what we do in working with libraries is help the other people in the community have that mind shift that that community member who is seen as someone is a bucket of needs is actually someone with assets and talents to be drawn forth. And I'm just curious if anyone on the panel has examples of helping the civic tech worker who's trying to work with the folks to say, oh, they could be a contributor, not just a user test. Or to work with cities where they see that they can invite people to contribute upstream to the challenges, not just be voters or customers of a service. Got a question here? Okay, I was just gonna say something about the assets. In this area, there's a project, a program of the YMCA that is called Project Cornerstone. And it actually looks at youth development. And based on some research years ago in Minnesota, said there are four, we can identify 40 assets that young people need. And if they have enough of those, they will be successful regardless of kind of a lot of other circumstances. And they have really worked really hard at getting people to turn around from thinking of a child who may be growing up in a poor neighborhood with a single parent, thinking of them as a bucket of needs and a set of needs to say, this person already has assets, how are we gonna build on them? And it's become a whole movement in this area. So there may be some ideas that could come out of that, focusing on youth services and thinking more about how do you look at building assets in communities and in adults and families and really begin to broaden that whole thinking about assets and getting rid of the, these people are full of needs as opposed to full of actual skills. And I think a lot of our libraries have started adopting the community conversations practice as well and getting neighborhoods of people together to talk about what their aspirations are, about what their vision is for their neighborhoods. And we've, a lot of times it's just that common ground if you think that you're so different from somebody and then you realize always we want education for our kids, we want a safe neighborhood for our families and realizing that we might have totally different incomes or come from different countries or any of that sort of stuff, but really our core values are the same. And so starting to humanize, start taking people out of this, oh, it's a tech worker, it's a person who lives in an RV, it's like, no, we're both members of our same community, we're both here and sharing that knowledge that you're gaining from your communities back out to the community is also, I think, really helpful to say, here's what our neighborhood goals are, here's what we're all coming to the table to do together and how can we accomplish it together. And I just worry that we also need to be very careful about falling into a system where we think that people have assets that can be leveraged by the empowered within the system. There was a Guardian article a couple of weeks ago that talked about our coding education and about how technology firms have advocated making coding more accessible in schools and other people, so that, and the Guardian claimed that there was a cover that's being used that says it will allow younger people to acquire higher skilled and higher paying jobs, but the Guardian argued that economic systems dictate that if there are more people with these skills, that skill will actually become less valuable and it feeds into a system wherein those technology firms now have greater access to cheap labor. And are we feeding into, like have we thought critically about the systems that we're feeding into and have we thought instead of, okay, these aren't assets that can be leveraged by someone else, these are assets that need to be empowered for the needs of the specific users, not so that they play into someone else's systems. Other questions? Great. Good morning, everybody. My name is Dr. Francis Adibola Wilson and I work as a senior community library manager with the Contra Costa Library System. This is my question. How do we as public libraries diversify funding sources to be financially sustainable? Talking about future of libraries, there's no how we're talking about these programs without funding. So this is my question. Thank you. How do we diversify funding and find funding for? So I actually think it's really interesting because you know who's really good at getting money is museums in a lot of ways. No, a lot of music. A lot of music, a lot of music. But there's a lot of like fundraising that happens that doesn't happen within the library system. Like if you, like I come from a theater background and I did a lot of work in fundraising for theaters. And like people are not afraid to ask for money. Like they, it's just like, it's part because you're not, the city is not paying for your theater. Like it's just not gonna happen. And if you wanna put on stuff, you'll go out there and you'll NPR. Like how often do you listen to fundraise? Like public radio is funded a little bit but it's mostly done by you. And this methodology of like, or way of thinking that you are a member, you know, you get a special like privilege, you're not really getting any special privilege but like there's this, you feel special. Like I donated, they gave me like a little, yeah, like I got a card, I got a thing. And like, I'm not saying we should start asking people for money necessarily for their library cards but maybe we should say like, hey, your library card's free but if you'd like to make a donation to the library, it helps other people, you know, get their library cards. It helps us to continue reaching out to more people that, you know, we should look at how we go and ask people. I think there are some really great foundation groups and friends groups out there that do do a good job at those sorts of things. I think we're in a library that has one that does that. But you know, not everybody does and not everybody has a library that's big enough to do that, but you know, not being timid, I think it's hard, it's hard, but it's hard to ask people for money. It is challenging but I think if we are looking to diversify as being able to go to our local businesses to be able to go to say, and you have to, sorry, I'm gonna backtrack a little bit but you have to be able to tell your story in order to do this. So you have to be able to have, you have to be able to say why people are loving those books that are being checked out from your like kit. You have to be able to tell that story, you need to be able to tell it, not, we checked out 700 of those kids, isn't that great? Who cares? But what matters is like we made huge change in these three people's lives, you know? These people got their high school diplomas from the library. These people got jobs. These people went on to do whatever. Being able to tell that story to your community members and how it impacts them and why they should invest back into us and how we're, but we're this reciprocal relationship between each other that is mutually beneficial and by them giving to us we give back to them and going out there and just yeah, just telling our story. And you know, we might not just need to be thinking a little differently and thinking go fund me, I'm gonna put together a program we'd like to do, a new service we'd like to do and we're gonna put it out there as a go fund me and we'll see if there's interest in ability instead of just give me five bucks for my library. It may be time to really start, you know, looking at trends in fundraising. And I think, so I didn't know this when we embarked on it but one of the interesting pieces of feedback I got around the trend work is that a lot of libraries come back and they say what we actually did with the trend work that ALA had done is they push those trends out into their community partners because, and this may not speak to funding but it certainly speaks to advocacy and partnerships which long tail have a funding element but we need to use some of this trends work to change the language and value proposition of the libraries because our potential partners, the people who have not approached us yet have a very definitive idea about the work that we do. We need not to convince them of what we're doing. We need to change some of our language to better resonate with the specific interests that they have so that drone developers recognize that our futures are linked together in a very real way or the maker community realizes that we're linked together in a real way. You know, there's just opportunities for us not just to continue to articulate what we've always said but to really try and be adaptive to the pursuits that other industries and sectors are making and trying to show them how we're linked in that process. And I think that that has a potential long effect on advocacy and funding. The committee had brought up the idea of in some cities library services and community services being merged together and managed by one department head. And this brings up the question of, well, community services charges, the rec program charges, should libraries charge? And I think a lot of us would say no, of course not. Part of our brand is, you get this for free. I don't want to charge anybody even a nominal, couple bucks for a library program. But community services do because they're, I think, they're offering expertise and like an ongoing class and you're going to learn a skill. But do any of us want to charge for library services? So, but how do we get that money? Community services gets money. Well, you might also reframe it a little bit too, is that money doesn't always mean cash. And so how can we can leverage those partnerships within the community? I think exactly what you're saying, like make it not just like this blanket story you're telling everybody that's, how do we benefit each other? And we're starting to really, I really do that. When I'm going to the table to talk to a partner, I don't do it as, you know, poor Annie, like, oh God, we have to say yes to everybody. Like, no, how do we benefit each other? And we have that conversation. Like, here's what we can offer. Like, what can you offer us? And like, let's talk about that. Like, are we best, are we a good fit for each other? And maybe they're bringing in people to run programming for free in the library. Well, that takes off my staff time. That is money, that's money right there. You know, our staff are able to go do other things. We have this great volunteer who's in our community partnership. And so, you know, reframing it that way too, but being specific when you talk to people. I was asking. Yeah, there's an ass that you have. And it's okay to say no if it doesn't fit within what you are trying to do in your library. Hi, I'm Mark Estes. I'm the director of the Alameda County Law Library. A comment first. It may be wise for us to charge something because if it's free, it is often valued at zero. But the real question I have, in the Bay at least, there's a growing trend it seems of disparate communities, your motor vehicle, your recreational home livers, residents. The homeless, the houseless. What trend can we, how can we respond to that trend of people using the libraries as a safe space that may also dissuade others from using the library for other higher purposes? I think that that's actually, in some communities, very much on the table as a part of kind of the way that we are kind of socially and otherwise so divided is that that can become kind of a firestorm area where people can say I'm not going to bring my children to the library if they have to walk by people who are stoned and are shooting up in public. And so I think it's there. I think the reality is, pardon me, I live in downtown San Jose and I walk through public parks every morning with my dog and usually in the afternoons too. And there are regulars in every store front that I walk by, most of whom I kind of know, they know my dog anyway. So I have, I am not personally afraid of homeless people. I think there are many people who are, the question kind of gets to be, how do we begin to figure out a way to get a lot of people less afraid than they are? And also ourselves and our staffs able to effectively deal with the different uses people have in the library. Some of the things that homeless people do in libraries are completely acceptable. Shooting up medication in the bathroom might not fall into that category but many other things that people do in libraries do. And I think some of it is that a lot of it is how do we handle those situations? How do we answer to folks who are complaining that that's not what their tax dollars are going for? And again, to some do it comes back to our values which can put us on the defensive. And I think a lot of people are on the defensive right now. As if it was a library specific problem which is pretty amazing to think that people think that in today. Yeah, I often wonder why we've burdened ourselves with solving systemic societal problems. And it is, I mean, we do it I think because we're responsible professionals and we're committed to our communities. But one of the early trends that we started to take note of was a collective impact model of change that a lot of social innovators are starting to look at that you address hunger and homelessness not as an isolated institution or system that you really start to look at who else in your community is aligned around these issues and how do you line up the best elements that you contribute to that solution with other people's best elements to create a more holistic response. I think for libraries then some of what we have to do as we try to align those institutions to better serve and address issues of homelessness, poverty or hunger is also to make it clear to our administrators, city councils, county administrators, however it may be how the long-term effects of changes that are made have direct effect on the library. So I was talking to Los Angeles County Public Library and they had their city manager at the table and they talked about how the closure of one shelter in a particular community had ramifications across three branches and it overwhelmed services at that. And I don't know that that city or county manager had thought through the full implications and domino effect that starts to happen. In Chicago, the chief of police has started to recognize that their prison population is overwhelmed not with people who have committed criminal offenses but with individuals who have mental health issues. And so unfortunately, he's had to advocate to the mayor of the interlinking connection between cuts to mental health services and public health services and its long-term ramifications on the prison population, et cetera, is trying to connect those dots for people so that they understand that it's not our problem, it's a whole community's problem and there's lots of elements to it. And frankly, a lot of our communities are not dealing with it at all well. There really isn't a holistic approach. There's just a lot of research going on, in fact, about what to do and a lot of it is a hangover from the recession where lots of people never got jobs back. And so I think that's part of it is we need to get people without being defensive to think about this is indicative of a big problem. There was a Yelp review of this library saying it's a great homeless shelter, ha, ha, ha. It's like, well. Really? That's because there is no homeless shelter. Yeah, yeah. That's because there's no idea. It's a little during the day. Yeah, that's the reason, because you can't find the Yelp review for the community homeless shelter because there isn't one. Yeah, there's no daytime place. I mean, I think that's, We don't have one. I just, I know we're getting ready to close real quick. It's a tricky balancing game. And I think especially for those patrons who do come in all the time who are not experiencing homelessness and a lot of your patrons are, especially in this area, might be experiencing homelessness and you not know about it. That's the primary, most of those people don't, you don't know, even know. They're living in their cars or I think one in three kids is living in a car or experience or living on an aunt's couch or something like that. But being able to just, like when somebody complains to you about something that's going on, so think of it not as a challenge but as an opportunity to educate, to connect with the person, to introduce them that these are human beings too. They have a story. They have a life that we're, and what the library is really here for. Are we kind of, this is the only place that these people have to go. How can we as a community together? How can, you know, you don't wanna see people in the library who are homeless, great. Well, then how can we work together to set up some homeless housing or to make, help people get onto a path towards success. And maybe they will just continue to come. You know, it's just like, it's an opportunity. Let's look at these as opportunities instead of getting, so like I'm always quick to like, no, no, no, they're loud and you know, like, but we have to listen, we have to address everybody's concerns and try to humanize, like just try to humanize as often as you can. So like, yes, you know, he might smell today, but his name is Paul and, you know, he lost his job and you know, we're trying to help Paul as often as we can too. We'll make sure, you know, next time he's, you know, we'll set him up with a shower or something, but you know, thank you. And just tell your story to your community, especially those people who are frequent customers who come in who might be influenced or impacted by other populations. Great. Thank you to our panel. We're gonna break for lunch and plan on coming back at one o'clock. I sent everyone an email on Friday about the internet archive is having an annual bash. If anyone is interested and did not receive that, they've waived the entrance fee to that. It's from five to 930. And if you're interested in checking out the internet archive, it's a good opportunity to do so. You can ask anyone on the committee, the staff development committee, we can give you that information. Okay, we'll see you guys at one. I don't think anyone tweeted us a question.