 All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do the record of the show every week and post it to our archives page. And I'll show you where that is and how to access that at the end of today's show. We post the recording of the show. And if any of our presenters have slides, handouts, other documentation, things that they've used in their session, we include links to those as well. Both the live show and the archive recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think that may be interested in any of the shows we have on. The Nebraska Library Commission for those of you not from Nebraska is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, and that's for all types of libraries. So you will find things on our show for publics, K-12s, academic schools, universities, colleges, corrections facilities, museums, we're all over the place. So basically anything library related, that's really our only focus is libraries. So anything libraries are doing, cool things that we think they could be doing, new services and products, things like that. You find something for anybody on our show and either upcoming shows or on our archives. So share everywhere. I do want to just mention first before you get started that the situation in our country right now with the COVID-19 pandemic going on for Nebraska libraries, we do have on our library commission website, a pinned post right at the top, always at the top of our blog here with resources for libraries. We also are trying to keep track as well as we can in Nebraska of libraries who have closings or changes or things that they are doing. So if you are in Nebraska library, take a look here and we have a specific page where we've tried to gather information depending on your situation in your library. If you're a business, personally, having kids, anything we can hear. Specifically for libraries, of course, we have links to probably lots of things you guys have seen from ALA, IMLS, et cetera, et cetera, always being updated here as much as we can. So just keep an eye on that for anything that we're doing here in Nebraska. Here at Friend Compass Live, this is actually okay for us. We are an online webinar show and we and our presenters can speak from anywhere. Do not have to be in the same room together. Social distancing is definitely happening between me and our speakers this morning. States and states away. So we will keep going on with the show as long as I have speakers and presenters that will be able to come on. They'll always be here for you for continuing education, just for your own personal professional development. We'll be here for you guys every Wednesday morning throughout everything that's going on. So I am going to hand over presenter control to you guys now so we can get your slides up before I do my intro to you. So you should see the pop up to show your screen. There we go. I love that picture, okay? Sure, there we go. So and this morning and coincidentally our upcoming shows which were scheduled a couple of months ago are actually very relevant to what's happening in the world today and I think can be re-health to libraries. Social well-being in our rural libraries which Nebraska's full of them. So with this morning we have as you can see on the screen there Margo Castina and Eli. Daddy Pranchin, Gwinnie, Gwinnie. Hi, I'm Gwinnie. Thank you, Vast. I like your name. I like your name. I like your name. And as you can see Eli, he is actually a state library. They're both joining me from New Mexico. Good morning guys. Good morning. And now Eli is a state librarian for the Mexico State Library but Margo officially works for a southern-tier library system which is in New York state. Yes, on the opposite sides of the country. And which is awesome that we can all remotely do what we need to. But Eli, I know you used to be in New York as well though, correct? Correct. I used to be the director of Chautauqua-Cateraugas Library System which is right next door to us. Great. So we actually have on the show then all three of us on New York transplants. I mentioned to Margo yesterday. I'm actually originally from New York as well. Sarah took a spring in upstate New York. So none of us are there now, but today Margo and Eli are going to talk about the rural library service and social well-being project they've been working on. And I'll just hand it over to you guys to take it away and tell us all about what you guys have been doing, what you've come up with, and how maybe other libraries can help. Yeah. Awesome. So we won't be able to see ourselves while we present. So if we leave the frame because we're wandering around, somebody just holler at us. That's okay. You can answer that. Also, as Krista mentioned, as you have a question or an idea or a thought, please feel free to interrupt us. All of the resources that we're building, all of the findings from our research, which we'll get into a little bit today, are all going to be published in a rolling way on our website, which we'll get to. So what we want to take advantage of today is that we are together. So if you have a question or an idea as we start talking through these concepts, please just interrupt so that we can talk it through. I think that's the way that we can use this time together probably best. So I'm Margaret Gustina, Special Projects Librarian for the Southern Tier Library System. This is Eli Gane. We do have been doing for two years, two years, a project on social well being called the Rural Library Service and Social Wellbeing Project. Today we're going to focus on the resources that we are developing out of those findings, but those findings you can see as they roll out publication. We'll touch on them today. Eli, will you talk about the Pathways Personal Reflection before we get into the details of this concept? Yeah, so we want to start by just having you reflect personally a little bit. So take a minute to think about a specific community member who has lived an interesting life. And whenever I ask people to think of a specific community member, they always tend to think of an amalgamation of multiple people or a group, but try to think of one actual specific person. Think about the unique talents and knowledge that they have and think about, is your community right now able to benefit from these? So if you're a librarian, if you live in your community, then that's the community. Otherwise it could be the community you live in or the community you work in. But think about, is that specific person's talents and knowledge able to to contribute to the community as a whole and can the community benefit from that? Now multiply that across the entire population and consider what your community would look like if you were able to use all of its collective knowledge. And as we talk about social well-being, that's one of the core concepts that we keep coming back to, that a community is made up of people. And one thing that we've learned in going to small towns and rural areas across the country and talking to, now we've talked over 200 people in those towns, each one of them has a remarkable story. They have talents and they have experience and they've got ideas. But we don't always see that talent and knowledge is being fully contributed to the community. So the next time a new resident walks into the library looking for a library card, what thoughts or aims do you personally want to hold in your head as you talk to them? Do you see them as just a customer? Do you see them as the potential for an annoying interaction? Do you see them as taking away time from a project you wish you were working on now? Or can you see them as potential to contribute and can you keep in your mind what your community would look like if all of that potential was realized? This goes through a few iterations and it's one of the first tools that was developed out of our findings when we started to think about how we saw people acting within their communities towards social well-being outcomes. And we'll get into some of the details and definitions of all of those words, but I wanted to set your mind within the frame of community resources and community-wide action. Unless we're there, unless we're thinking about our communities from this place as active contributors to the community well-being overall, the rest of the talk won't make much sense. This is where you already have to be in order to use the tools we're going to talk about. A community needs assessment of what's happening outside your library. Yeah, Krista, what you're talking about is we're going to get into the specific steps, but that's exactly how we view it. We view it as a two-stepper that before you take any action, there has to be, as our colleague, Hope Decker, who is the only person on our immediate research team who did field research with us, who isn't on the call because she has another webinar that she's giving right now. But as she says it, a library director or a library staff person has to be awake to the uniqueness of the community. So it's more than just needs. And what you may have noticed in the reflection steps is that we're talking about the assets and strengths that are unique to the individuals that come into the library or exist in your community. And it's that awakeness to the uniqueness of where you are that will come up a lot and a lot. So a needs assessment, yes, but a needs assessment that is very keen to identify exactly what's going on in this community as opposed to any of its surrounding communities. And that's a little, so it has to be rich and nuanced. And we'll get in a little further on that specific idea really soon. Before we go any further, I want you to know that this work is like the work of dozens of people. It isn't just Eli and I, we're here to talk about it. But the Southern Tier Library System, some of the people on the call helped us test our audio equipment and all of our first question sets. Thanks guys. Without Brian Hildreth's support, Southern Tier Library System is the lead agency on this multi-agency grant with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. So without the board and Brian's support, this thing just wouldn't have happened. So thanks guys. Hope Decker, along with Eli and I visited eight communities across the country and spent two to four days in these places. Hope did half of those site visits. Thank you, Hope. And then we have advisors. We've got a consulting methodologist. And then everyone in this right hand column gave us really key and important advice, but didn't continue on with the project after giving that really great advice. Thanks guys. Which all brought us to these questions. Are public libraries a component of social well-being and resource poor geographies? And if so, what practices do they employ? Eli, do you believe that our findings are limited to resource poor geographies or rural remote locations? No, I think what this research question did was help us focus on areas where we could boil down the connection of the library to social well-being with enough simplicity that we could see those connections clearly. We could tell that the library's impact was not really the local school's impact, the local hospital's impact, or the local major employer's impact. We could see that impact more clearly. Once we've seen those connections, the findings really, I think, will scale up very nicely and will allow communities that aren't as resource poor or even suburban and urban communities look at things a little bit differently. Yeah, I agree. Most of this talk is going to be about what practices do they employ, but very briefly I'll go through a few definitions. So when we talk about resource poor geographies, we specifically looked at communities where there was no school facility within the zip code, where there was no other what's called a community anchor institution. So major employer, major nonprofit organization, major institution within that zip code. And as Eli said, we did that at first. It was our legitimate research question. It was like who we were most interested in looking at, but we rapidly noticed that doing that allowed us to cut through all the noise of other institutions. And it allowed us to really get at specifically what a public library does since the public library was the only institution. We used data first, so GIS and census and labor, bureau data, vote data, public library service data, survey data, that's those annual reports that you do to your state library. They're different all across the country. And then a few of those questions go up to IMLS, and it's compiled. We used that nationwide stuff. So if you're a library who hates your annual report, no, we do use it, promise. And we use it for good, not evil. Yeah, we use it here too. Keep doing. This is a location that I got to visit. This is Elk River, Idaho. Love you guys. You're so pretty. We I bring them up because while we visited these places that are really, really remote, what we saw taking place are things that we saw taking place in most communities. And we could see how the interactions between individuals, organizations, even non-governmental organizations that exist in small communities and institutions and the people and the businesses, those connections followed certain paths, certain routines and activities that happened over and over across different communities. And we decided that we would call those routine and obvious things pathways. Each community is different, and each pathway is nuanced and complex. What we noticed was those pathways that were positive, when a library acted with intentionality toward making that pathway wider, they were more successful at reaching positive outcomes. Eli, do you want to talk about what some of those pathways are and then where they go to briefly? Sure. So pathways, it's a metaphor, but it's a metaphor that really jumped out at us pretty quickly and that we're finding pretty useful. The reason it's useful, I think, is that a pathway has a lot of components to it that match pretty nicely with what libraries do. A pathway, for instance, has an entry point. What we saw with a lot of the libraries that we researched is that the way that they were able to foster social connection, for example, was by bringing people in. And as all of you on this call know, one of the most important things the library does is just bring people in and bring people together. So you need those entry points. Those entry points are unique. There's no best practice really about the entry points. There's some features, though, like being seen and feeling known that the entry point should be unique and specific. So one feature that is common is we like to use the word bespoke. Another word is tailored or customized. Or old-timey. People like it when libraries provide old-timey service. But what that means is that whether you're a long-term resident, whether you're someone who grew up in a town, moved away and came back. Or a newcomer. Whether you are a newcomer, whether you married into the town, which is common. The library starts to provide a service that makes you feel seen and known. So it's more than just being vaguely welcoming. It's the experience is tailored to you. So for instance, it could be something as small as a book purchase specifically for you. Or even a book recommendation specifically for you. That sort of brings you in and starts you down a pathway. One of the strongest pathways I think we saw is a pathway of contribution and belonging. There is in rural small towns. And again, this is something we can see in rural resource or geography is a week that it's maybe more complex in an urban setting. When there are newcomers to town, it maybe don't share the history of that town. Maybe don't share the family connections. Maybe they share the family connections, but they just they think differently. They have different philosophies online. They live differently. The key to them feeling like they belong and the community feeling like that person belongs to them is that they are able to find meaningful ways to contribute to the town. I was just thinking of Marlene's example of fixing a banner that had a saint's banner that had been had fallen apart. She's not Catholic. She's not of the community, but because the community overall valued this Catholic banner that was a couple of hundred years old, her fixing it was her entry point into the community as an embroiderer. Because she had the skill to do it. Right. And again, uniqueness of the person and their contribution. Right. It's not just does anyone want to volunteer? But this goes back to this goes back to the idea that everyone has talents and knowledge and everyone wants to feel valued. And it's important to say in rural communities, it's often common that people very highly value privacy. That is not the same thing as feeling known and seen, though. They want their privacy, but they also want to be able to go to the post office to know everyone in that post office. By and large, for the most part, people want to be seen and known. They also want to be valued in the community at the same time. Yeah. One of the quotes that jumps to mind comes from a community member in West Virginia who said, nobody's in my business, but if I don't show up to a place where I was supposed to be, they'll call me up, but not in an annoying way. So there's a recognition that there's this current of mutualism, which was the other, which was another key pathway we saw. Right, for sure. So just finishing the contribution thing, when someone's able to contribute, they both feel like they have value and the community treats them as a valued resource. The community as a whole becomes much stronger, more resilient, more able to adapt because they've grown their capacity. That all leads to, in the end, a better social connection so that, and this is where you really start seeing real social well-being improvements, when someone doesn't show up to an event, someone knows to go check on them. When there is a pandemic, someone knows who is the most at risk and maybe needs some food dropped off for them or knows to call and ask if they were able to get their medicine. That is not a one-to-one immediate, the library does this and this happens. It is the library starting someone down a path that they walk, oftentimes it's guided, sometimes it's self-guided, but it's the library sort of starting someone down a path and keeping them engaged on that path until they get to that point of social well-being. Yeah, and they mentioned that there at the end there they get to that point of social well-being. We did have a question a little bit ago, and I think you might be getting to this, but I'll ask it now and see if it does make, you know, when you want to deal with it. Hannah wants to know, could you define what social well-being means to you? I think you spoke in a bit to it already, but it still feels unclear to me. Yes, or yes we can. Or are we getting to that, yeah. Yes, and also yes. Good segue. While we're here, before I tell you specifically, I'm going to say that just as we spoke, started talking about pathways, getting to places of social well-being, they're interconnected. So none of these things is, as Eli said when he said it's not a one-to-one, it's also not a one-direction. These things are multi-directional and recursive, and they happen over time, and they're extraordinarily complex. An example that I think is particularly striking to me right now is how we, during this crisis, are losing a year of school. Using a year, losing a year of school for individuals who are emerging adults, who are just entering college, especially if they're first year or first generation college attendees, this is, they are going to fail. In the New York Times recently published a piece based on some other sociology research called Working Class Life is Killing Americans. This is the middle-aged death rate for folks without a bachelor's degree compared to white non-Hispanic folks with a bachelor's degree. There is a mortality that is currently being evidenced and correlated with educational attainment. So as we talk through social well-being outcomes, don't imagine that when we discuss them that they are on their own. And when we go through an example of how pathways lead to outcomes, we're going to be talking about how you can engage with this complexity and nuance, so that when you see that your community, that you have an entire generation or at least a few years of emerging adults who are leading themselves down a path because of challenges at school and because their colleges have been shut down, that this might have real immediate mortal impacts on their lives. So we have to mitigate those negative impacts with other things that we have a little bit more control over, like social connection to mutualism. So this is a fake image, a fake example of social well-being measures over time. So the red is economic development over an imagined 150 years. The dark, dark blue is the place making in the environment. The purple is lifelong learning and cultural engagement. And the blue is physical and mental health. So I put them like this for you. We use the social well-being dimension categories that the Reinvestment Fund and IMLS used in their 2017 report, Strengthening Networks and Sparking Change. It's 40 pages. If you're from STLS, I've emailed it to you like five times because I love it so much. But it's this really wonderful piece positioning public libraries and museums and schools as community anchors and how anchor institutions operate when it comes to social well-being. Our research builds on that to find the complex meaning and the complex ways that works in a community. So let's take the red line. That's economic well-being or sorry, economic development. You'll notice now all of these wavy, tiny lines. The category economic development actually includes a bunch of things and indicators or dimensions sometimes work against one another. We can find an aggregate community well-being line, but when we look at a community in particular, it's significantly more complex. The system of what's taking place locally and regionally is more complex than just saying economic development is up, economic development is down. So when we talk about this, these wavy lines can indicate affordability of housing. It can indicate employment rate or poverty rate, but it can also indicate employment diversity, access to different kinds of employment over time. Do you want to talk about? So I was just going to give a really brief example, which Margo just touched on really, is that if you see that unemployment is very low in an area, it might be that housing is not affordable. So there can be, they don't always go in the same direction. When one's up, another one might be down. Right. Or we, because we were traveling through remote locations, this community timeline is based on information that we heard in a lot of towns, which was that I keep looking at the microphone. So sorry, people on the internet who don't exist in the microphone. So that red line is economic development. If you are in a community that saw a lot of extraction, that down line as a place making the environment meant that your economy was based on explicit extraction and that once it, all of the materials or resources had been extracted, your economy failed. Tourism sometimes works the same way. The economy is doing well in beautiful locations when there's a lot of tourists attracted. Right. But that might also mean that your quality of life in terms of being able to enjoy a peaceful, beautiful environment goes down. Right. Or that you can afford a house, right? Because everybody, because rural gentrification exists. So over and over and over again, a million times, believe me when I say your community is complex, lots of stuff are going on. But in our data, it indicates lots of stuff is going on. But what we found is that there are clear pathways that help people get to the place they want to go. Further, it is true that, yes, public libraries build pathways to social well-being in rural communities. We know it. We've got evidence from all eight locations, even if the pathways look slightly different. And the practices look slightly different. You'll hear me continually say, and Eli and Hope, if you are ever on one of her webinars that or any of our local library partners who give talks on this, we use pathways and not practices because the practices are different. They're unique to the specific situation occurring in your specific strengths, just like we would say the pathways instead of practices is like saying, is like the difference between saying we need volunteers and saying, hey, you're really good at embroidery. Can you fix this banner? And I would add that every library we visited was really good at one or some of the pathways. Yeah. And other pathways they were barely doing or not doing at all. No library is building all of the pathways completely. And no library is doing nothing at all. They all had sort of their strengths, which is largely based on the interests and strengths of the director, but also and especially the needs of the community. Yeah. And pathways is a way of describing what's already occurring in your town. And we'll get a little bit more into that in just a second. So not all of them are good. Where we focus on the ones that are good, but not everything that happens in a community is good, but it's still a pathway that everyone follows. Looking at those obstacles and seeing what you can do to help them there, they could become opportunities that you could do something with. Yeah. Yeah, some of them. So the next two slides are quotes that get at the unique role of a library, but also get at the community constraints that a person enters the library with. So when a person comes in who has no transportation and is obviously walked for like 10 miles to your library, it doesn't mean that they only have needs. This quotes actually from a person who became a library director. I think sometimes when we see a person in need who comes into our library, we don't recognize the, we don't always recognize them in terms of their ability to contribute. Rather, we also reduce their personal complexity down to the needs that they have in the immediate. If our research showed us anything, it's that as often as possible, if we can hold both of those things in our mind when making decisions about how to serve or what kinds of services to build will be most successful in helping people maintain their personal paths that are positive toward positive social well-being outcomes. This quote is especially poignant right now because we're all sort of shut-ins without access to the library for the most part. Without physical access. Yes. Yeah. Right. Right. And I think what we what we heard over and over again was how much a library full of physical books, so the library is a place itself and the books as things you can touch and smell, um, for many people that having access to that reduces anxiety and has big connections to mental health, especially in remote geographies where, um, could be in the winter that you just don't, you barely leave the town or your house during the winter, for example. So this is like where even in our most it's actually in our densest most urban areas where people are in our use to having sort of daily transactional relationships with people. We're finding some sort of correlate some distance correlate to this becomes even more important because those folks who live in urban areas are now experiencing what our rural remote people um their daily life are sort of like more used to right and it also gets at this other thing that they'll probably struggle with when we listened or talked to people who moved back to rural locations from urban ones. One of the values, one of the deep and personal values that they held was access to wilderness or nature, access to the outside. Um, as our communities are constricted and forced to not access the outside, I think as librarians helping people find facilitating that connection in some way to them even if it's through some dumb VR app or something. It's got to be better than nothing, right? And it was a real value. It's a value that people everywhere hunger for and it's the reason why the Italian mayor is going, what, everyone's a marathon runner now? People still long for the outside even under conditions like this. When your community is allowed to come back to the library and your library is allowed to open, a lot of people are going to feel the way the person who said the quotes in the previous slide felt that being able to go to the library and select books and sit and read is going to them feel like the first time they've been able to really breathe for a long time. There's going to be sort of a really, in many cases, intense emotional connection that's made when people return to the library. Yeah. So thinking that through now while you have the space and time I think is really valuable. I'm going to be really brief in going through, so this is the thing I want you to always keep in mind. Library service is complex, relational and context-driven just like our communities, just like our people, just like pathways. I'm going to cruise through some of these so that we can get into talking about how we plan using them. So we talked about belonging and home, that feeling that people have where they contribute and they belong, but also that feeling where they're like, oh, I can breathe or oh, it's when I'm outside here that I finally feel at rest or at peace or at home. People who were asked or through economic circumstances had to leave their place where they grew up and came back. They often describe the years while they're away as pining, pining for this place. What we found is once a person has those feelings of belonging, have those feelings of home, there are these other powerful pathways that you can help them beyond that march towards positive social well-being outcomes like physical and mental health, like physical security, like mental comfort, self-perceptions of mental health, and sort of all of the outcomes of social connection, as well as political voice and civic engagement, engagement and local decision-making in a powerful way. Those things can really only be well-developed pathways after people have a sense of belonging and home, but there are also pathways that we saw libraries really acting to shore up, to build, to broaden, and to make visible to everyone who came to the community. So let's start with mutualism. Everyone here would give the shirt off their back for you. So if mutualism is an annoying word, because I made it up, this is what we mean when we're talking about it. So thinking through how remotely and then how once we're back together, we're able to build this culture, like make it so pervasive that it's immediately obvious when you show back up into town, when everybody comes to the library, you can tell that this is a place where a culture of mutual aid and support, a culture where everyone would give their back or the shirt off their back for you, and also expect the same view. The way it's often expressed is as humility in a community. So one of the interesting things about the interviews we did is that we hear about some amazing thing that a library director or someone else in the community would do, but when asked about it, they wouldn't think of it as anything special at all. They'd say, oh, anyone in this community would do it. That's not, I didn't do anything special. This set of folks, one of these ladies, her husband, a tractor rolled over on him and the entire region came out to harvest their corn so she could care for him as he recovered from not being able to walk. In a lot of the communities where we were, it would be from the statistics unwise for an older adult to continue to live there if their spouse had died. It would just be a mistake because they have limited access to medical care and resources, but in most of those communities, widowers stayed and they stayed because they had a clear recognition that it was safer for them, and they may have been right also, they were safer for them. They would have better physical and mental health outcomes, but physical health outcomes, better physical security if they stayed in a community, already knew them and that had a deep culture, a pervasive culture of mutual aid and support than if they moved to a city with access to medical care but were anonymous because they can count on their neighbors. So the entire community itself sort of acts like its own insurance. Self-determination. I couldn't pick a quote from towns to use because they're both kind of in self-determination. It's like you get to be who you want to be, and also everyone has equitable access. So these are quotes from two different communities of community members sort of talking about what their life was like at the library but also like what their life is like in their town. Eli, do you want to talk a little bit more about self-determination? These are, well first, I'll just say this is Rick and Tanya from Elk River, who I love, and they're co-directors. Self-determination includes infrastructure, and in Elk River, the library is the ISP. So there's an infrastructure support, sorry, internet service provider. So there's infrastructural support for people determining their access and their opportunities. And this is Susan Green from Marshfield, Vermont. Marshfield had like the best quotes around self-determination. So self-determination in communities is helping, is acting on the community level and on the personal level. Yeah. So what we found in talking to communities is that not every community wanted the same outcomes. And it's hard for people to believe that sometimes, but not every community, for instance, is looking for big economic developments. Not every community is trying to bring in tourist dollars. What they want though is to be able to determine what for them looks like success. They don't want success to be determined, the measures of success to be determined by someone on the outside. Now there's a point at which the individual interacts with the community when it comes to self-determination, because who in the community gets to determine what success looks like? And we did have some communities where everyone was on the same page, everyone wanted exactly the same thing for the community. They had a direction and they were all going in it. We had other communities where maybe the municipality and the mayor and the board had totally different ideas of success than what the community members wanted. And it caused a lot of frustration. On the individual level, what we see in rural areas especially, or the areas that we researched is that people really value being able to have access to the wider world. For one, that's part of it, is having opportunities. So the ability to access the wider world, have educational opportunities, have access to books, etc. But also being able to determine what for you means success and for what you personal growth means. People value privacy. They value being seen known, but they also value being able to determine their own future and determine the way they want to live. And that's made possible when you have high levels of social connection. And old-timey service. So just because we value privacy and self-determination, self-determination sounds like I'm doing it independently and I'm doing it all myself. But it's quite true. When we saw this pathway be successful in communities where people really felt like they had control over their own personal futures. They had agency and decision making power over their future and the future of their community. It was because there was facilitation to be on that pathway and facilitation to enter that pathway. Someone invited them to the town board meeting, not in a flyer, but personally. You know what, Tom, your ideas would be really useful at the town board meeting. And that access to the wider world wasn't just inert, but also facilitated in that entry point kind of way that there was a person who said, hey, I noticed that you like this. You may also like this. And we found that especially for late-language learners or folks that had a challenge with literacy because of their background, it was only with that individual old-timey service intervention that intentional, designed thing that they were able to become a literate adult. Some towns have a million committees and the way decision making on a community-wide level is done is by committees. Everybody likes those people that are on committees. Sometimes the same person on the same on all the committees. But it's sort of a real sort of like grassroots community organization, right? Sort of style of decision making. Other communities was more top down. And you know, we saw communities where it was like I said that the local municipality was making all the decisions and there weren't community committees for having a say in things. But it's not size dependent. So Susan, who's pictured here is from our largest case study community where political voice, self-determination was extraordinarily evident and obvious. And her town has 1,500 people. Our smallest community that has 57 people in West Virginia was our other place where self-determination and voice and power were immediately evident. So building this culture through your library and in your town isn't size dependent. It's you dependent and your intentionality and what you think. I know we only have six minutes. So you guys have an, are there any questions about all of this before we try to put it to use on a current problem? Yeah, sure. Yeah, if anybody has any questions, definitely go ahead and type them into the question section and you're going to have to open our interface. We can ask them now. And if we do run over past 11 o'clock center time at the top there, that's fine. We will go as long as it takes for everyone to get their questions answered, their comments to be read and for you guys to wrap everything up. Linda did actually say about that document that you've been sending out to everybody in Margot. Please send it out again. You got it. Thanks. Not bad, keep repeating things. So this slide is two headlines. This headline at the top where it says more people are dying, you'd think would be around the COVID-19 outbreak. And I know a lot of people joining us are from New York, which is like at this point the entire Northeast has become a hot spot. But this headline, The More People Are Dying, was more about working class life in America and was published well before COVID became a US recognized problem. And it has to do with educational attainment. So let's say we know that in our local community, the pathways that we currently have where the outcome would be educational attainment, that pathway has always been sort of outsourced to the school and the public education system and our cool summer reading program. We also know that those things aren't going to happen this year. And that for a lot of people, this is an area of great concern. Well, mainly for our emerging adults, libraries, I haven't heard really talking about this. But it has real and significant impacts on mortality and well, life, right? Like life in all of the categories. We also know that coronavirus is making those pathways that we usually have unavailable to millions of young adults, emerging adults, and children across the country. So let's talk, think about the pathways that currently exist in our communities. Think about the strengths that we currently have, what's what's unique to our place. And talk through what it might be to mitigate the negative impact of this current disruption through other strengths and networks and pathways that we already have in our towns. We see this process as sort of what Krista indicated earlier, and we kind of touched on, which is first becoming aware, but aware in like a deep way, right? Like aware in like a, aware of all of the unique features of our social, cultural, economic, and environmental realities where we are. And then seeing in those things, and in those people value, like honestly valuing ourselves and the power of our libraries, but valuing each of those people. And then taking on a persona of intentionality. The pathways that we describe all already exist. They're in your town. Intentionality is about finding them and making them explicit to more people so that everyone in your community has access to a pathway that leads to a positive social well-being outcome. So behaving with intentionality around those things means being aware of the pathway, but then thinking through how this pathway interacts with the unique strengths and conditions within your community. So do you want to say anything more about that before we try to apply it to our example? No. Even though we're out of time. All right. I'll say there's the thought experiment. That's what's happening in your town. Try to figure it out. And then let me know how it goes. I do want to say that in New Mexico we have a program called Libraries as Launchpads, which is supporting local, the development of new small businesses and entrepreneurs. And we had a meeting yesterday about how that doesn't feel right anymore. And what we're redesigning is Libraries' Landing Pads instead of Launchpads. And people have had their lives, businesses have had their businesses thrown up in disarray, exploded. A lot of people are facing a real existential crisis right now. And there's going to be sort of a couple of time periods coming. One, we have sort of our initial sort of shock and anxiety and novelty, strangeness. What follows is going to be sort of a new normal of just sort of boring awfulness. Yeah, optimistic. Yeah. Hopefully there should be a rebuilding. There's going to be putting the pieces back together and figuring out for our unique communities what comes next. We're going to be getting all sorts of best practices about what Libraries should be doing. We're going to be getting all sorts of programs about how your library can help the stimulation of your local economy, et cetera, et cetera. What we will need to start thinking about is for our unique communities how we look at the capacity that is within them, which represents the sum of all of the talent and skills of the people there, and look at how we rebuild our communities in a way that is more resilient and able to evolve and deal with seeing unknown crises that whatever the next crisis is going to be. I think one of the reasons why we feel like, and I've been very resistant to using the phrase, but I'm going to use it anyway now more than ever, why I believe that examining social well-being in our communities and that complexity matters now more than ever is because thinking in terms of someone else's practice doesn't help you be agile to your town's current situation. Even though we share the global pandemic in all its boroughs, our local communities have different networks. We have different networks of strength. We have different networks of resources. We are differently resourced. When we collaborate and coordinate, we are able to do greater things than we can do by ourselves, but that's within the context of our current capacities and how we are best positioned to build those pathways and our directions toward social well-being through activating those local people. So think in terms of distribution, because it's a distributed network of power and decision and action that makes the best outcomes, not one centralized body who tells you what to do and then you do it because it won't, it'll be like a poorly tailored suit. It might keep the rain off and make you not get arrested, but it's not going to be beautiful and it's not going to be you. So that's all of this, I guess. Any questions? Oh beta testers! Oh my good grief. By the way, coronavirus also like disrupted my life and this project in some pretty unforeseen, significant ways. And one of the ways was that I am just less productive than I thought I would be under normal circumstances. So you haven't received, excuse me, any resources in your email, sorry, but we're still really looking for people to sign up to be beta testers because having emails will make it easier for me to target you so that you get the rolling resources as they come out this week, next week, and for the next 12 weeks. That is something I was going to ask about because I thought I'd seen something previously about that either March 31st or April 1st was the deadline to join in, but obviously that's different. Yeah, I'll take you anytime you want. So if you see this video for the first time in May, go ahead and sign up to be a beta tester. It'll mean that you get all of the resources that have been published since April all at once. But if you sign up for as a beta tester, you should expect to get resources in a rolling way. And then about every week, starting in a few weeks, people who filled out their evaluation on that resource will get entered into a hat. I'll pull your name and names pulled to get $25 Amazon gift cards, which is pretty dope. So the sign up to test link is really easy to find on rurallibraries.org. Just go there, click it, fill it out. I want libraries of all sizes, libraries of all types, libraries from all places, please. Yep, okay. Yes, Linda asked how to write when you said it, how do we sign up? Oh, there it is right there. Sign up to test, there's the link right at the top there. Now, the question, would you should, I mean we're talking rural libraries who have very few staff, but would you want just one person from each library to do this sign up? Multiple, is it okay if multiple staff fill out the form? And yeah, there is also a question on there, which branch are you from? So if you're filling this out from a library that has branches, I'll still take multiple people from one branch. If I pull multiple people from one branch to win a gift card, I might, I might only send one to a branch and do a redraw. But so yeah, everybody, sign up. Tell your friends. Yeah, tell, yeah, share everything. Yeah, once we get, like I said, once this recording is available, it's going to be public and out there on our YouTube and on our website for everyone to have access to, which also the, the session information does have a link directly to the website where that sign up is. So easy to get to it. Would you have a comment? It just came in. Justin Zay, Zay, yeah, he says, hi, Marco. Good to see you. Jesse, Justin and Azalea say hello. We will be beta testers. We have been working on a community skills network in our homesteading group to catalog and he quotes people's skills and experiences. So yeah, when we send Justin, I will send you Jesse and Azalea. Thanks, Azalea. A video I called take a block and make a community. I like that. Yeah, something like that. Anyway, but yes, there's, if you already. I see his email is Southern Chair Library System. Is that, so that's New York. He's in New York too. Yeah. So what Justin just said is what this whole talk was about. You already have pathways in your communities. Some of them are of mutualism. So a skill share is about building two different kinds of culture. It's both self determination. I have access to new skills and the ability to contribute those skills that I already have to a greater good, but it is also mutualism. I now have a network of people I can call on for help. I'd like to have a self sufficiency to that as well. Self sufficiency is major right now and Justin and Jesse and Azalea were doing homesteading before it was cool, but it's cool now and everyone's looking for it. So many people looking up, how do I grow a garden? How do I bake bread? So much sourdough is going to be eaten over the next few months. It's going to be insane. So much refrigerator yogurt. But I guess what I'm saying is it's when we are able to see those networks already in place and when we're able to see those pathways and act with intention on them, we're a little more agile, right? We're a little more able to work on that potential more quickly. If we're waiting for someone else to tell our library how to handle COVID, our actions are going to be too late. So start looking right now at what you have, where your strengths are and who can help because it doesn't have to be you. Everything we found was in communities that were the healthiest. It wasn't the librarian. It was the librarian who facilitated, who brought together and who helped made those pathways visible. But it's not them who does everything. I know some of our libraries in Nebraska struggled with because I talk about community needs and like I mentioned at the beginning, looking outside your library to see what is going on in your whole community. And I get a lot of comments saying, but the library can't do anything about that one thing. And I said, that's okay. Just be aware. And you never know. You might just, not write this moment, but post the meeting about that thing or connect people together who can help with that thing because you are like a community hub that people are coming to. You don't have to be able to solve everything and you won't. And that's okay. Just be aware. You are the trusted institution, the most trusted institution in your community that can bring people together. Exactly. And Susan Green, who I pictured earlier, she's not the only person who does this, but she had some great descriptors of it, which was that she perceived herself as the conduit of community talents and expertise. So she herself wasn't the expert. She's the conduit. And the other way she sort of perceived this work was that when she became a library director and realized that her job was going to be to be a conduit, was that she let go of control. So being intentional doesn't mean you have control over everything and being, letting go of decision-making power and control to others within your community also doesn't mean you're not behaving with intention. So you can hold both of those things. You can make your library more porous institution while still being intentional in the actions and decisions you're making. Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Any other questions? Yeah, let's see. Do anybody have any other questions? Type in your questions section or any comments, anything you want to share about you've done in your communities, maybe? Or thoughts? Yeah, definitely type them in there. And not a lot came in during what you guys were talking, but I think that's fine. You guys had a lot of good things for us to think on, I think. And this is, like I said, I have, when I'm talking to my libraries here in Nebraska, a lot of the trainings I do on community needs and assessing your library and your community, I have to send them home to think about it. I gave you a lot of information. No, you're not going to figure it all right this minute. Take it home with you, take it back to your libraries and your communities and look and see how you can then, once you're there, use all these resources and all this information I gave you to figure out what you're going to do, figure out how you're going to help your community, how you're going to get out there and keep things going. Yeah. Yeah, I don't see any desperate questions coming. I can't see if people are in the middle of typing on this interface, but some thank yous coming in. That's great. Well, I like y'all and email me. Yeah, we'll keep talking about it. Yes, definitely. Everybody go to the website. Hopefully you'll get a huge mad dash of people sending in that form, sending the form for you. And we have some comments here. Thank you, everyone, from Justin. Roxanne says, great seeing you, Margot Eli. Thanks. I'll try and spread the word with our Allegheny libraries. Great, thanks. Oh, somebody just, Linda just signed up. Go and check your responses. Awesome. Share, share, share. Hey, thanks, guys. Keep up the good work. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So I am going to pull back, present your control to my screen here now again to show this is the website that they were just showing on the slides. And the link to sign up is right. It's just, you know, rurallibraries.org. It's pretty quick. And there you are. You have your form. The library you are, how many people says on April 1st, but it'll be whenever, as you said, right, Margot. And this whole closing on April 30th, I assume, is a... Yep, we're going to change that too. I'll get there, guys. Everything's delayed now, and it's all fine. No problem. So definitely go there and sign up. So thank you, Margot Eli. Here with us this morning. This is great. Thank you, everyone, for attending this morning. As I said, here is the session on our Encompass Live website, where I do also link right to that webpage. So when the recording goes out to you guys, you'll have this same description here with a direct link to the website. And I also believe, Margot, you're going to send me your slides, and we're going to post them as well. So you guys have all those nice charts and graphs that you can look at afterwards. So these are our upcoming shows. But here I wanted to show you, Archive Encompass Live shows are here right up beneath our upcoming shows. And the most recent ones are the top of the page. This is the one from last week, our monthly pre-sweet tech with our technology innovation library. And so this is the same thing you'll get for today's show, via link to recording, link to presentation, and then from the description link to the slides should be done by the end of the day today, as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me, if not tomorrow. And while we're here in the archives, we're talking about the different topics that we have. You see we have a search feature for our show archives, where you can search the entire run of the show, or the most recent 12 months if you want to. That is because this is our full archives of every show we've ever done. Encompass Live premiered in January 2009. And we've been doing the show almost every week. It's been a few weeks here and there when we've had to delay or had technical issues or went out. But since then, we have like over 10 years worth of recordings here. You're welcome to search the entire thing if you want to, to find things on a certain topic, but do pay attention. You see as I scroll down here to the date when something was originally broadcast. Potentially many of these things will be good. Well, you know, some of this information is always eternal, you know, good books to read, things that have been done, programs you can follow, but some of them will be come outdated. Links will be broken, services and programs may may change or no longer exist. So just pay attention to the original broadcast date. But we are librarians, we do archive things as long as we have the ability, we'll keep providing our full show archives here on our archives list. But if you do want something just to search for something very current and recent, just limit it to the most recent 12 months. We also have a Facebook page, Friend Compass Live. If you do like to use Facebook, we do post reminders there. Here's a reminder to log in for today's show. When our archives, when our recording is available, we post on here as well. There's a recording from last week. So two or three times a week. So if you do like to keep up with things on Facebook, do give us a like over there. I'm sorry to just one last thing. If you're on this call and you'd like me, if you'd like to talk more about any of the topics that we brought up and just like talk through what it could look like in your library or community, just send me an email or use the contact form. There's a separate contact form on the website. And just like say, hey, by the way, I want to, I just want to like, this is what I'm thinking about how I use this in my town. I want to get some input from you. Sure, absolutely. I'm going to have a suggestion too that either we can do this on the slides where I can just add it as an extra length in recording. Hannah suggests that maybe you could include the IMLS study link with your slides since when you referred to me out to everybody. Yeah, Hannah totally will. Yeah, either if you want to add to the slides before it's sent to me or just send me the link, I can link to it as well, whichever great way you want to do. Yes, we'll definitely include that for you since that is, it definitely I've looked at myself a very good resource. Absolutely. Yeah. Awesome. All right. So that will wrap it up for today's show. I hope you join us on a future show. Next week, our topic is how to add movement to library programming. This is Noah Lundstra. He's always been on the show before for other things. He runs, he's directed this Let's Move in Libraries movement. And he has some great ideas about things that you can do. Some of these things will probably be done remotely now, which is still great. We've got like just doing here through video. And our show after that is Implified Advisory with Video Book Talk, something else very good for now, what's happening now, rather than doing book talks in person, something on video. And you'll see I've got some dates to the fill in here. I'm working with people to get more things on the schedule. So as I do confirm topics and presenters, you'll see near the upcoming dates fill in. So please do sign up for anything else we have coming up on the show and share with everyone. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Margo and Eli. This was great. And hopefully, we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.