 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. We do the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, and they are all recorded, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website and see all the recordings of all our previous sessions are available there. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, so anywhere across Nebraska, or across the country, or even in other countries, you've had people come as attendees and speakers. You can watch the live show and recordings. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, many training sessions, book reviews, interviews. Basically anything related to libraries, we're happy to have it on the show. We have commission staff, Nebraska Library Commission staff that do sessions, do episodes of the show, and we also have guest speakers that come in sometimes. And this morning we have a combination of that. This morning we are going to be hearing about here at Lincoln City Libraries here in Lincoln, Nebraska. They're in service day that they did in March, when it was back in March, about program breaches out of poverty. And today with us we have Pat Leitch, the director over here, and Julie Hector, assistant director. We'll be talking all about that, and over on the end there, Laura Johnson, who's our continuing education coordinator, will give some just info about the grant that helped them have this program that was offered via the Library Commission, the continuing education and training grant. So I'm just going to hand over to you guys now, Julie, and you can take it away. Thanks for listening to your program. First I'll give a little background about Lincoln City Libraries, for those of you that don't know. We are a system of eight locations and a bookmobile in approximately 150 staff. We serve Lincoln and Lancaster County, and that population for Lancaster County is 293,407 people in 2012, and the city of Lincoln is about 265,000 people. We have some estimates of the amount of residents living in poverty, which in 2010, 42,319 residents of Lincoln live in poverty, and in 2010, 12,864 of Lincoln's 59,450 children lived in poverty, which is about a 21% of them lived in poverty. And actually in the next year, that amount increased by 25%. So we have seen a lot of information in local news and reports, articles, that we thought that was something that Lincoln City Libraries needed to address with our in-service training. So our in-service training is something that happens on an annual basis. It's been on different topics, but it's for all staff in Lincoln City Libraries to attend, and we try to have something that's relevant to their work and maybe personal lives, something that's going to help them serve the residents of the community better. We formed a committee actually in November 2012 to talk about what we wanted to do for in-service in March, and the topic that came up was poverty in Lincoln and Lancaster County. We did a lot of discussion about that, and after meeting as a committee and gathering input from staff and management, we decided that we would really be interested in bringing in a nationally known speaker on the topic, Jody Farr, who's done the Bridges out of poverty training at several locations in Nebraska, and I believe in in-service, I think she did a pre-conference at one point. So we were interested in bringing in someone nationally known, someone who was familiar with a program that would be relevant to our staff in our community, and that's why we really wanted to get Jody Farr. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of funding to bring in a national speaker on our own, so the great part about that was we applied for a grant from the Nebraska Library Commission for Continuing Education and Training Grant, so we could help support bringing in Jody Farr to speak at in-service. I don't know, Laura, if you want to talk about that grant process yet? I can just say that we do have a program where every year we have a certain amount of money to give for Continuing Education and Training Grants. We like to support this kind of project, so any kind of training, if people want to go to conferences, for instance, this year a lot of people went to the ARSL conference, and we kind of dedicated the money to that. So this was last year that the money, our year doesn't run quite character, and I would just like to encourage people to really apply for the grants. What we're really looking for is what we look for in the grant applications is did you have a good idea, and have you put together a plan that we think you're going to be able to pull off the idea? It's a great way to get started on grant writing. We were just talking a little earlier about how so many people are having to learn to write grants, because you're never going to get a more sympathetic greeting than you do here. This is a pretty simple and direct process. It is a fairly easy application. We were thrilled. We thought this was such an interesting program, and we were really pleased to be able to fund it. It's great. Thank you. The great news is that we were funded for a grant in December 2012, which was very exciting because it meant that we could actually bring in this nationally known speaker, who we thought would do a great job training our staff and bringing a different perspective on poverty in our community and how it relates to the library. The purpose of our training was to provide library staff with an opportunity to learn more about the issues and then develop ways in which we can better serve our low-income customers. That was the goal of the training. It's a pretty broad process, but we had a lot of helpful information. Just related to our planning for the in-service, we wanted to have a broad education for our staff, not just have a one-day training. We wanted to actually incorporate a few months-long training, including activities coming up to the program and actually surveys and follow-up after the program. It was just a one-time thing. In doing some of the planning, we realized that we needed to partner with a community organization, that there are a lot of community organizations dealing with the same issues that we do. We decided to ask the Center for People in Need to partner with us in this event. The Center for People in Need, and I think we will talk about this a little bit more, is a Lincoln organization who does a lot of programming to help people in need. That takes a lot of form. Some of that is food distribution through food net. Some of it is, say, Christmas gift distribution. They do quite a bit of technology training and have a technology lab. Then another interesting aspect for us for our day is that they have a very well-appointed meeting room for people to use. In addition to relying on their expertise kind of going into this, we held our event there, which is another way for all of our staff to be at their facility to know where it is and to have a sense for what it is. Then I think I don't want to sell more of what we did with the Center, but we also invited their staff to join us for the day. There were other things, of course, that they were doing, but many of their staff then came in to hear Jody Farr as well. I know a lot of times in-service days, it's just speakers come to the library and you guys are all still in the same place. It's kind of cool to get out and go somewhere else. I think that often, as staff, you'll hear about a particular resource like the Center for People in Need, and it just seems kind of out there, but this gave everybody a chance to see their facility and know some of the people engaged in that. So it worked out right. It did. With the space that the Center has, we were able to invite more guests to the in-service training. In addition to our staff, we invited staff from LPS, from the city government, from the commission, the Nebraska Department of Labor, and other special guests. We had a great attendance. It was about 160 people attended the training, which was fantastic. And I guess I'm getting ahead of myself, but before the training, in order to provide an in-depth learning experience for staff, we designed training actually before the training day. So people would have a chance to think about the topic of poverty and how it affects them and their community before we actually get into the training. So we had several pre-service activities where we had, and this is on the website, if anyone's interested, we had an online quiz about poverty and Lincoln and look at the numbers, and staff were encouraged to take that quiz to see if they, thank you, and there is the quiz up there, and that was just to see if people really had an idea about poverty in our community. And I think it was an education for all of us who think maybe were familiar, but maybe were not about the extent of poverty in Lincoln and Lancaster County. And then once people took the quiz, they could go back and look at the answers. Which is really helpful to see if you're right on, or if you're way off. And we actually have the answers posted on the website as well, so you can go through and look at that, which is pretty amazing looking at some of the numbers of the amount of the community who live in poverty, and how many of the Center for People in Me actually serve, which is 30 to 40 percent. What it's interesting for us and that just as any library, we know that there are certain pockets of the population where we think, for instance, do we serve people in poverty well? Do we serve elderly people well? Do we serve children well? And clearly in Lincoln, if there are 42,000 people living in poverty, that is a significant group that we want to be sure we're serving well. Absolutely. In addition to some of the online quizzes, staff had time to do individual reading of articles in the Bridges Out of Poverty book. It's just to have time to familiarize themselves with the things that they'd be covering in the training and just kind of information that is very helpful. I'm just clicking now on what some of the resources that we were able to rely on from the Bridges Out of Poverty people, and this is a checklist about could you survive in poverty? So kind of an example of some of those pre- and service activities. And I think it really worked for staff to look at that and just to really think about how you would, how would you, how could you survive if you were truly in poverty? And I think that raises another point that came up quite a bit of a lot of the information that we covered is, I would say, already broad generalizations. And I know for some of our staff, which was entirely reasonable, there was a concern about are we generalizing in ways that are helpful? Are we avoiding just labeling? And so we talked a lot about using this kind of information to use broad strokes to talk about how a particular group of people tends to see the world, but to understand that always the person in front of the library is an individual whose needs are their own. But we feel like this kind of general information helped to give maybe a framework for an overall approach. In addition to some of the online activities, we actually kind of poster sessions at the branches where questions were posted and then staff had the opportunity to write their thoughts with their questions on these posters. And some examples were questions like does poverty exist in your life? Does poverty exist at or around Lincoln City libraries? How does poverty affect all people in the library area, not just those living in poverty? What barriers exist between Lincoln City libraries and customers affected by poverty? What barriers exist at your library? There are a multitude of questions that staff had a chance to think about just as far as how we're serving that area of the community. And after everyone went through those responses, each branch had a meeting and met and discussed their responses, which is where some of the input came in, which was interesting. And then all the responses were collected and compiled into a complete list for our system. And then it was available electronically for all staff to go through so they could see what other branches were discussing. And the other part of that, which I thought was really interesting is that we gave staff the opportunity to come up with questions that they would like to see addressed during the training. So those were all compiled and they were sent to Jodi Far prior to the training so that she had a chance to address issues that we were facing at Lincoln City libraries. And in addition, one more activity, we in March 2013, we did a snapshot survey at the Center for People in Need. And that was during a food distribution day, so there were about a thousand people who came in. And they did a quick survey for us and just some interesting statistics from that. 77% indicated that they used the library regularly. And 41% indicated that they used their spouse or partner or their children had library cards, which I thought was great. And the three most services they used at the library were checking out books and magazines, checking out DVDs and using the internet. So it's interesting to see how those people are using their facilities already. And then a little bit about Jodi Far and the bridges out of poverty. Jodi is a nationally known speaker, as Julie mentioned, and I have heard her speak several years ago at a conference. A lot of what she talks about is she works often with people like librarians who work for institutions that basically are middle class institutions. And she then talks about how different classes interact. And so we can use that information to think through when we design services and when we work with people, are there things that we might be doing that just aren't working for that particular population group? So I'm not sure that her workshop is listed here, but we'll take a quick look. You can see that they offer quite a few different sorts of things that they can present. And basically what we asked Jodi to do is I think she took about a two-day workshop and compressed it into a shorter one for us. And we wanted her just to give an overview of how they would describe what are often called the hidden rules of classes. And so, for instance, what she talked about a little to introduce the topic is, as typically middle class people, we have a certain way of speaking, a certain way of interacting with the world, certain expectations. And again, speaking in very broad generalizations, what she talked about is how people who live in poverty, for a variety of reasons, their focus tends to be on relationships. And the key aspect of coping if you're living in what's typically referred to as generational poverty, and that means it's not just that you've had a temporary setback and so for a year or two you have less money. That means that probably for two or three generations your family has lived in poverty. Relationships are key. And that contrasts with in the middle class what's considered key is achievement. And then she goes on to talk some about upper class people in America. It tends to be about connections. And the way that she would give examples of this just to provide a little bit of illustration here is she was talking about how if you live in poverty and you might have housing arrangements that are shaky and maybe you drive a car that's somewhat unreliable, if you have employment it may be that if your car breaks down the way you're going to get to work is that you're going to call your sister. And it's going to be really important that you get along with your sister in order to rely on each other. She will likely do the same for you later on or already has done so, similarly with housing arrangements. If you are on the edge as far as being able to pay your rent and you're going to be evicted it may be your brother-in-law who will take you in. And so that relationship is really very important. And kind of similarly then against speaking in generalizations it's important to protect that relationship. And so for instance growing up in my household we would hear the expression sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Well that's a pretty middle-class approach. If you're somebody who's lived in generational poverty words do hurt you if they're attacking somebody with whom you have a relationship. And so what we might see at the library is fights that break out because one person has disrespected another. And to them that's just a natural reaction because you can't disrespect somebody that somebody's in relationship with. And so sometimes we look at some of that behavior that happens at our library and think well why did that happen? And I think that part of what she was saying is if you grow up following the hidden rules of any class that's what you'll be following and so it's important for us to know more about each other. Similarly something that happens at the library where we have rules that are based on the hidden rules of middle class. One of our main rules is to use the internet you must use your own library card under their own names and it's quite a bit of education for us to help people see that even though their brother said yeah you can use my card I don't mind we don't want them to do that we want them to be under their own name. And so again kind of thinking of what is the way that somebody thinks and how do we work with that. And Jody also talked quite a bit about I think she described as creating a stable environment. If you're living in generational poverty as I mentioned before it may be that your housing is shaky your transportation might be a little bit shaky a lot of your arrangements might be somewhat shaky. What we see at the library is when we as you would guess encourage people to use our materials but if we're not helping people understand that we want you to take them out but if you don't bring them back you could end up in some trouble with us. And so we have been working on how do we maintain that friendly approachable information while still saying you know it's important to us that you are able to get these back on a timely basis. And I think later we're going to talk a little bit about how we've looked at some of our policies and in light of some of this information but one thing that we've known over the years is that in terms of children if you live in a family that moves a lot anytime a family moves is a time when library materials get lost or just can't be found for a while. And if you do happen to live in a family that moves a lot you know that could end up complicating your library life. So what we're looking at is how do we work with children especially the families generally when things when things get missed. But all of this relates back to people living in generational poverty tend to operate with the hidden rules of their class and so we want to be aware of that and respect that and work with that. And then as I mentioned she talks about how within the middle class achievement is more the orientation. And so a middle class family tends to be thinking about completing education, acquiring certain material items, doing some of those kinds of things and that's what the hidden rules of the middle class are about. When she described those using various examples she talked about then how relationships when you're thinking about people living in poverty, how relationships do key into almost everything else. And then for the mental model for the middle class as I said it's about achievement and it's interesting then how this is an exercise that we did. When you think about how does that key into things like financial planning? How does that key into education? How would that key into just different aspects of our living? I think that some of those exercises were just really helpful as we stopped to think okay from my viewpoint or background how do I see some of those things. So I think that her talk was to use the word bridge pretty clearly that we get this information and then we use it to create better experiences. And as I'm looking over some of the materials that she provided under mental model and generational poverty it's described as a description of the concrete experience as well as the abstract representation of poverty. It's about vulnerability and then the relative importance and interlocking nature of those things. And this was something that when I read it I paused in that she wrote it's a depiction of the trap no future story no choice no power. And so part of what we're thinking is how do we provide reasonable choices? How do we give somebody power in order to make something good happen? And then just generally when she talked about some of the constructs of how they approach it what they say they do is use the lens of economic class to understand and take responsibility for your own experience while being open to the experiences of others. And again I think it's a matter of not labeling people but using this experience so that when we're working with people at the library maybe it makes a little bit more sense. One of the aspects of this that I didn't mention is that Jony Farr is a really good speaker in the sense of you know when you're bringing somebody in for a whole day you need to have somebody with really good content and also really good delivery and she is somebody who combines both of those I would say she herself she describes herself as having grown up in generational poverty and so she has quite a few examples from her own life and in her case one of hers I don't know that it really relates to the model so much but she said her trouble in the library was that she talked too loudly basically you know she came in and was well I think it was at the school library and she was told pretty much all the time to use her indoor voice and found it maybe not an especially welcoming place because she thought she was always being told you know you're not quite following our rules appropriately and she gave several other examples in terms of interacting with other agencies as well but she did she did raise a few issues that I think we all thought about a little bit and an example of that is how depending on your circumstances you might be filling up forms all the time and so she was talking about barriers and perceived barriers and that if a person's first experience at the library is here fill out this form we need all this information she was saying something that's been helpful in some of the other places that she's consulted with is maybe some kind of master index for information so probably the families who have children have already saved registered for school is there some way of saying when you fill out this registration it's also good for the library it would be good for the health department it would be good for a lot of these places that you are already going to interact with and she was describing I think as well a situation where with each agency a family visits they have to tell their story over and over and is there some way of maybe creating coordination among organizations so that we're more working together and I'm not I'm pretty sure that we weren't able to solve that problem that day but I think it was one of those suggestions that made us all pause to think you know we are kind of silos when it comes to the information that we gather and trying to think if there was some way to to make that process easier when you think of a family who visits maybe several institutions or offices throughout the course of a month or year is there some way to make that easier as we came out then of of that day what we were trying to put the focus on with our post and service activities was kind of figuring out what wasn't that people took with them in terms of the information and then also what would we need to look at and we tried to come to some consensus about what is the one thing that our library should do in response to what we learned in service day and Juliette know if you want to maybe go ahead and talk about some of that some of the post and service activities we had a system we actually had a branch and system wide discussions about after we had the training day and what people got out of the training we had a really good response 81% of the staff indicated that the activities and training heightened or somewhat heightened their awareness of poverty and Lincoln and its impact on our customers so we thought that was a really good result and also as far as the Jodi far presentation 88% Jodi far gave information that was applicable to their job in and their daily lives which I think it's a really high rating for staff to find that that useful so I thought you know everyone kind of agreed it was a really great training and it was great to have some system wide discussions to mix up people from different locations and to get their ideas about barriers and what we can better do to assist families and I think some something that came up in some of those discussions is you know anytime I compared to sort of like when you first take a Meyer Briggs test a personality test and you realize oh my gosh you know this explains so much of why maybe something didn't make sense to me or I had trouble communicating something and I think that our my hope in bringing Jodi far in to speak to library staff is that the way that we grew up in terms of class is sort of the air that we breathe and often we're not aware that we're behaving and thinking a certain way until somebody says away other people see this differently and I my hope was that we would all begin to think about that in terms of if there are significant parts of our population who see the world differently we need to be aware of that and adjust in ways that that make our institution work so it was interesting in some of the post discussion how much people maybe saw that or then were able to say oh I can think about this a little bit differently now and after those discussions and ideas and lots of discussion we came up with some ideas for changes we could make and new policies we could implement which I we can both talk about that it's we developed a task force for staff to develop three to five statements for staff to use when they're giving someone a library card signing up for a library card or maybe just checking out items to a person so we don't we set them up for success we talk about fines and you're responsible for this and just to make sure people are aware of their responsibilities I think it's staff are a little bit worried and we kind of touched on this earlier that we get pretty excited when we give somebody a library card and we really emphasize all this great stuff which is great stuff by the way that you that we are then we're happy to loan you and then we rise that depending on the family or the child in some ways that's not sending them up for success that we feel like then if they have trouble that ends up blocking their library card and instead of becoming a regular library user they become somebody who has a blocked library card and so we felt like there would be a balance I would say the friendly invitation to use the library that's accompanied by a friendly information piece about how to stay in good standing right exactly um one of our I think it was one of our biggest policy changes um was actually allowing library card holders who have fines or fees over $10 to use internet at our library locations and to be able to use electronic resources such as databases where before we block them for that from that kind of access nowadays it's seen it's I can see that being very there's so many things people need to get online for now applying for jobs unemployment a lot of services provided by the city or the county for them that the library being the one place and go for that and saying well you owe $10 because you didn't bring back that dvd lots of more of everything else that yeah well we it was interesting that we had quite a bit of staff interaction about this change because I think that one well once you've had a policy in place it's hard to change it because then that becomes kind of a way of thinking about it and our line of thought about that particular policy was that we felt it was a reasonable consequence if you have not returned materials on time that you can't take out more materials but until you paid your fines but we certainly welcome people to come in and use the library and we felt it made sense to allow them to use the internet because they weren't like they couldn't take it with them essentially so where our concern was that they had a record of not returning things on time use of the internet wasn't really a matter of returning something on time and then Chris as you said it's such a major internet is such a major information source that where we're information providers for the whole community we felt that it simply didn't make sense to know that so many people couldn't use the services and I would say that in our discussions with providers such as the people the center for people in need when we would talk to them about library services often their responses you know we have lots of people whose library cards are blocked because of fines and I think that they were pleased to see that we were taking a different approach on that and it really is a balancing act between on the one hand keeping people accountable but also saying that within this situation we can allow a certain amount of access so you know we try to find a balancing act there I think this was all about access especially with unemployment benefits being all online right is if I get from the department of labor here and come us live before talking about that it's all online exactly yeah that was part of the discussion and that very often the library is the only place for these people really have the ability to access the internet exactly so cutting that off is really severing a lifeline for me and one of the other policy changes that we made is we began having a certain category of library card called youth limited use and what that means is that if if youth come in to the library to get a card and they don't have somebody with them who can verify their address we still allow them to get a card and then they can check out a limited number of items kind of I would say in some ways protecting our losses but more giving them a chance to establish library use and then we have a parent coming with them to verify and then take that limit off is that a fair enough basic description and we felt that that was a way again to set kids up to succeed from the start so that again they don't start by taking out a whole bunch of materials that maybe they can't take care of we get them into a pattern of library use and we feel like it sets them up to do really well they have a good first impression of the library too of yes of course it would be the library card you don't have to come back again with your parent and yeah that's right and we've also tried to spread word about that we have something that we refer to as a fresh start waiver and if somebody has accumulated significant library fines and if they did that when they were a minor so they might still be a minor or not but if they accumulated those fines as a minor we're willing to weigh the certain amount of those charges so that then they can clear their record and use their library card again and I had somebody just last week come up and tell me that that had made a huge difference for her and she's a young woman who is a single mom and she's been doing kind of a bit of speaking in the community community about issues of poverty and describing what her upbringing was like and some of the ways in which poverty interacted with her drive to succeed but it was a heartwarming story for me and that she described how her daughter who I think is now just entering school is doing really well with reading partly because she's been rather loud too so much because of books from the library and that is exactly what we want to have happen when we provide a fresh start waiver is giving people a chance to try again once they know how it works and then wanting to see that difference go into other generations so in many ways that's the perfect story in her case she had a teacher who advocated for her and kind of helped her navigate who do you need to ask what form you need to fill out so that we can make it happen and it turned out to be a great a great ending to that story it's a great story well this is this was one of the things that made this grant so interesting for us was the idea that you didn't just have a speaker that you prepared people for the speaker and that you did follow-up on it so that the the material was emphasized and reinforced and that part of your assessment of the success of this program was how it affected people afterwards and as you say you've actually changed policies now I'm not saying that any continuing education should change policies what I'm saying is there does need to be reinforcement of the message and assessment of the success of the program right and that was a very important part of this we thought when I feel like our staff person our library and Carol Sponson did a good job of organizing that and we thought some too about which of our staff should be on the in-service committee to represent all the branches and continue to stay in touch with our people about what the in-service is going to be about and then and then the follow-up that you're saying oh and maybe we should give a shout out to Carol Sponson. Poor Carol has a few things to say about the case of Marguerite. Yes Carol Sponson if anyone's paying attention to the description of the session who is going to be here changed from when we started until today yeah Carol approached us about wanting to do the session to talk about and share what they did and work with her on it but unfortunately once it came up to it she was unable to be here and so get better Carol. Well and then we have done a few other ways of continuing this topic for instance our training calendar through the year includes some topics that relate back to the in-service day so the people's city mission did a presentation on the services that they offer the Department of Labor as you noted earlier they work so closely with people who are looking for jobs in weeks so we've done some training including them and then we have plans for topics such as mental health working with substance abuse working with diversity generally so that our training calendar through the year also relates back to what we did on our in-service day. Do you feel that this poverty generally is a more urban than rural kind of problem? You know I would have to look at the numbers my hunch is that it looks different maybe in a bigger city but I have a feeling that the poverty rates throughout the state probably indicate that almost all of us are serving a significant number of people who live in poverty. Well I think sometimes the temptation is to think of it as being very urban and I'm not sure that is true. I looked at the map from the center for people who need and who they serve in Lancaster County and it's more concentrated in the city of Lincoln but it's spread out through the entire county so I mean I think it's I think it's an issue everywhere. When I would say that kind of looking a little bit big picture I think we all take a lot of pride in libraries and the access that we provide and so one of the ways that we evaluate how well we're doing is whether we're pulling in people from really all kinds of groups and I think if we felt that we were serving primarily and only middle class people we would be saying to ourselves you know we need to be making some changes here to appeal to a broader spectrum and that's part of what influenced us to do this and I would say the other pieces that in Lincoln there have there's been quite a bit of information about the growth of the number of children in poverty and Julia you mentioned that kind of early on in the presentation that a lot of what we're thinking about is we're all about having Lincoln be a strong city and a place where people want to live and so we need to be thinking given that new circumstance what are we doing to strengthen the community by giving some really great library service for that whole spectrum of people. I was actually wondering something similar to that. You're giving out statistics about poverty in Lincoln as a whole and then you talked about how it was good to get the different branches people from different branches talking and discussing together about what's going to happen in their area in their library. Did you have any breakdown of poverty in different parts of the city so like so-and-so branch could say oh here it's more like this and ours over here on the other side of the city is like this I mean was there any breakdown of that that people that you guys had access to. I don't know that we refer directly back say to statistics but I think that each branch has a sense for well as an example I'd say that some of our branches that are in parts of town considered newer or maybe upper middle class within Lincoln almost every part of the city has low income housing for example or places such as that where we probably don't have any big area in Lincoln that is without people in poverty and so but you know where it looks in the southwest part of the city is probably a lot different than say in the northwest or northeast part and so I think all the branches were sort of reflecting on the people that they serve and who comes in and what the concentration is I mean certainly we have a couple of branches that that serve a higher number of people who would be considered in generational poverty and we're actually just about to do some of the studies right now about make up around the different branches. Do people who use this completely off the topic but do people who use the branch generally only use that one branch? I think that people anecdotally I would say people use more than one branch and usually yeah and it typically has to do with what other things are going on in their lives so if they take the lessons or go to a doctor in a certain place they'll often stop at the library that's on their way somewhere else. Now I'd be curious to know I mean that raises a question and Laura if a person has probably limited transportation I wonder if people who have very limited transportation tend to use the same location because that's a pattern that works for them I'm not sure. I don't know sometimes I think well I'm just absolutely moving from branch to branch all over I try to get to them all. I've heard people like who work here talking about like I'm working I work downtown so I'm going to pop over to downtown to this but I live so and so so I'm going to have them send the book I want to hold over there it's up to night instead and so they pass back and forth between that kind of thing where they work where they live because I think that's really typical which is great yeah yeah that is great. I did want to mention that continued partnership one of the other changes is our continuing partnership with the Center for People in Need. Carol had another meeting with let's see probably in October and we are actually going to be in their Complete Guide to Human Services booklet that they publish every year they're now going to include library information in that which hasn't been in there before. Well I think that points out what's a great thing about collaboration is that our work with them what I what I would hope is that as they're working with their clients you maybe say I don't have access to the internet that their people are immediately saying oh the library is a good place to go for that so that they are carrying the word of what we offered into their homes or the families that they serve they're also including at least one library question in their annual survey it's the I don't know if you've seen it and you can look at it on their website but it's the face of poverty today in Lincoln Nebraska that's their annual report they have a lot of statistics in that and they'll be including at least one question about the libraries in that so that'll be great and we're actually started in the summer and we're continuing to do a weekly story time at the center for people in need on food distribution afternoons which has been really successful so your this is also encouraged an outreach correct yeah this is great yeah it's it's affected a lot of things so there's all kinds of information out here this is one of their promotional pieces I do believe um this the center for people in need did start just working out of a house and now they're in a really it's a former Rob Kush furniture warehouse which is where they operate now and so they do a good deal of services to a variety of people and their director Betty Brash welcomed us on the day of our in-service and again they do a variety of kinds of distribution and work a lot in a lot of different ways with people who for whatever reason need to need some extra help so finding ways of working with them kind of as I mentioned before allows us to use their relationships with people to support the work of the library would you say that access to information and lack of access to information was a major problem for people in poverty because this is something that libraries really can absolutely really can help them absolutely well and I think that the piece of that too is then talking through how we how we work with people so that if it's a matter of meeting information often that's a matter than of talking to a librarian yeah and figuring out what do I need to do to make this war and I think that another aspect that we begin to think about was as we're working with our customers to figure out what is their information do you how do we do that respectfully and how do we how do we work with people who maybe have a lower level of familiarity with technology in fact one of the monthly reports I recently received mentioned that one of our staff members had received a compliment from somebody who was so grateful to her for not making him feel stupid that she didn't know how to use the technology and I think again when people come in needing information but they're not familiar either with computers or the whole process of getting our website part of our job is to work with them respectfully so that they can end up knowing what they need to know and come back to use it again yeah that's just this also kind of means that our libraries need to be informed about what the social services are absolutely when I think that you know a lot of what librarians do is think okay where is the information source for this you know if if somebody has a particular kind of need how do we how do we make that make that work well and then just other kinds of everyday things for instance at our main library we have a particular phone that is meant for the public to use and so how do we kind of make that work well again if somebody has on again off again phone service and sometimes just needs to make a quick phone call I think we I think we've been considering just continuing that service and it became a parent test that that probably is something that we need to continue doing and so in many I think just in terms of a lot of details of how do we provide service a lot of what we heard from Jodi far helped us think through whether something should continue whether we should tweak it in some way and how can we keep in mind the barrier so that we're helping people overcome them this one if anyone has any questions or comments or thoughts from the audience please feel free type it into your go-to webinar interface there on the questions section I'm monitoring everything here so we can pass on if you do have any questions or comments you know one of our other areas of of concern and it didn't so much come up in this training but people may be familiar with some of the research that was done maybe 10 or 15 years ago about how people at different income levels interact with their children and there are interesting statistics about how many words children hear between birth and kindergarten and that lower income families tend to use a model of conversation that doesn't introduce as many words as middle-class families with their communication with their young children and I think again our line of thought with that is what can we be doing to encourage families to talk a lot and enhance vocabulary so we didn't mention it here but we are working with every child ready to read program in general working with parents and daycare providers to do certain kinds of behaviors that partly relate to conversation and partly relate to reading aloud and then we also continue to do some programs such as primetime family reading time a collaboration with humanities Nebraska which is all about using picture books for intergenerational book discussion and our audience typically for primetime family reading time is lower income families and we've typically worked with Spanish speaking families although now we're also incorporating a Native American emphasis also but again thinking of what are the things that you can do that show how how a family would do that and also that it's reasonably free of charge and reasonably easy to do and also been very effective so again thinking about how do we in general in our community set kids up for academic success well thank you very much then from our point of view this was a rousing success you know we're really thrilled to fund projects that work this well and we have to say thank you for the good reports and stuff that was nice um but um it also you've really given us a lot to think about everybody really needs to give this not just the idea of grants but the subjectiveness we all need to give us a lot more thought well we really appreciate that we had a sense that this is something that we wanted to do we knew that money would be the main barrier and so being able to get that continuing education training that made all the difference for us so we really appreciate that immensely thank you so Laura I know this year the grants the continuing education grants went to the ARSL conference and is info coming for next year's well um we have not whatever you know we'll have it up on the website and announce it when we have the dates um I don't have the dates yet um as far as I know we'll be offering grants probably in a couple of different categories either sending people to conferences doing projects like this or paying for people to go to you know there's so many online courses now where you know just a six week course from info people or something and paying for those as well so we'll probably have those three different categories again um and I do want to encourage people to apply to keep your eyes on the commission website or a blog or facebook page wherever we send things out and you'll get the info right doesn't look any questions came in that's fine um everyone was here listening very intently so um I think um let's have anything else I think we're good and we really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this so thanks a lot well we're like like Laura said very happy to have you on it was a very cool program so thank you very much uh Julie Pat and Laura for being here today um this year so that will wrap us up for this morning's show um and it has been recorded so um if you want to you can go back and listen to it later or when I announce the recording is up and ready to go and process you can share it with all your colleagues and get out there and get more people listening to it um so that will wrap it up for this morning but I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is um seeing dots at wilson public library sounds terrible but it's not um this is a program that uh lori opum at wilson public library cosad did international that day it's actually based on um the book uh peter reynolds book the dots um and actually have the website here where it's a day where you celebrate the you know concepts everything about the book their library actually did it for a whole month they did a month's worth of activities which she says um they may reevaluate that for next time but um it was a great program and um she's gonna be on the show we're holding in with us next week to tell you all about how they did that um at their library so um definitely uh sign up for that and join us for that show next week and if you are on facebook and couples live is on facebook as well um we do announce our shows um on our blog the commission's blog and on our mailing list but we do a facebook page as well so if you are on facebook go ahead and like us there and you'll get notices of when new shows are coming when recordings are available um I did a reminder this morning that this one was coming up right today so you can hop in and join us on the slide for that if you want to do so please do like us on facebook if you are a big facebook user other than that I think we are wrapped up no questions came in at the last minute so thank you very much and we'll see you next time bye