 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the 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 record the show as we are doing today and it will be available in our archives later for you to watch at your convenience. Both our live show and our recordings are free and open to watch to anyone so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in the show. Those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries similar to your state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the state so you may find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, museums, archives, corrections, anything and everything really our only criteria is that it's something to do with any type of library. We do book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services, products, all sorts of things. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on the show sometimes to do presentations about services or programs or things we're doing here through the commission. But we also bring on guest speakers and that's what we have today. Back again with us, Noah Letzter, he's been on the show before. He's back, good morning, Noah. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. And he's gonna talk about some great ways and he has this great website and he runs here this Let's Move in Libraries which if you're interested in anything, great ideas, cool ideas, interesting things that libraries are doing just to get people interested and involved in moving. So I highly recommend checking that out. But today he's gonna specifically talk about teaming up with your community. So I'm gonna hand it over to you, Noah, to take it away and tell us all about it. Great, thanks. Thanks, Krista, and thanks everyone for being here. I'm really glad to have this opportunity to share with you and please feel free to put questions and comments into the chat or into the questions box at any point. And thanks, Krista, for monitoring that. I'm hoping we can have this be as interactive as possible. And just as Krista mentioned, so in the course of developing this Let's Move in Libraries project, I really realized that in almost all cases, when public libraries were successful in terms of promoting health, they were doing so through community partnerships. So it wasn't public librarians necessarily becoming fitness instructors or nutritionists or anything like that. It was more public librarians finding ways to successfully work with community partners to increase access to these forms of learning. And I just want to start with an example of how that recently took place from Nebraska. So in Lexington, Nebraska, there were over 200 people in the attendance at the Lexington Public Libraries. First, community potluck and street dance on Friday, August 12th. Community members were asked to provide a disc to share at the potluck. We'll talk about it provided by El Cezanne Taquizas. The music entertainment for the dance was provided at no cost to the library by DJ Lopez. In addition to dancing, children were able to jump around in two bounce houses, provided again, at no cost to the library by Angel Vasquez, Diversiones and Chavez Saavedra and funds for the event were provided by the Lexington Community Foundation. So this is an amazing example of librarians teaming up with their community. And I think one of the reasons why it's difficult to talk about this topic is that it is so idiosyncratically local. Lexington did this super great community potluck and street dance. I'm sure you're going to do something totally different with your community. And so what we're really talking about today is not so much the outcome of the relationships, but how do you form the relationships? How could you and your community form the relationships that would enable you to similarly tap into the extraordinary power of community partnerships? And we know that this is a challenge. And I'd love to hear what your challenges are. But I happened to see on Twitter recently, this librarian said the main thrust of their role at the library is working on developing community partnerships. And all I've really come to learn is everyone wants to take advantage of the library's good will but run for the health when we ask for literally anything. So clearly, clearly a problem. This may be this may be you. It may not be you. But just just to kind of kick things off, I'd love to hear and again, Krista will be monitoring the questions. What are who are your libraries go to partners, the ones that you work the most with or the best with? I'd really love to hear who you find to be your best partners. And alternatively, what are your biggest frustrations as it relates to community partnership work? What what's stopping you from tapping in to the power of community partnerships that your librarian in your community? I'd love to love to hear your thoughts. And again, Krista will be monitoring. So Krista, feel free to jump in if people share. But type into the question section, anybody who has any comments or anything about that? Any groups, any organizations? You mentioned the the first one Lexington was Lexington Community Foundation, which is a specific foundation for their city. But it reminded me of we have here in Nebraska, which some libraries may mention, is the Nebraska Community Foundation, which is a statewide organization that will work with communities to create their local foundations, they will, they can help run that community is having trouble running their own charitable giving type place, they can do that for our cities. So for something statewide too, might be an idea to see if there's something that is available in your community, either city or your county or something too. Yeah, absolutely. Leave leave no stone unturned. And I'll just say kind of just to follow up on that. I see partnerships have more than a request for funding. So it's great if you can give people to give you money. But where the where the rubber hits the road is true authentic working relationships in which they're the context of trust. And and people feel like they're not going to get taken advantage of like like the librarian that I shared. And I think there is that that kind of lingering fear that if we get involved too much in this type of partnership work, we're going to be the ones left holding the bag. And we need to get passed out. We need to learn how to how to do things differently. So we don't we don't get stuck in that situation, which which happens all too often. And so yeah, just is that you? What what comes to mind when you think of teaming up with your community? What what what words or images come to mind? And just with the format of this, I'm gonna I'm gonna keep going. But but Krista, please please do chime in and interrupt me at any point as you did. You have some answers to your first question there. Yeah, about working with their community. One person mentions their housing authority. Community after school programs. In the United Way. I mentioned. And then see here's got a longer comment here. What I ran into when I was working in a small library, excuse me, was a lot of fatigue on the part of potential partners. Same businesses get asked over and over again to partner or donate or help out. And they start to lose interest. They don't see returns on their time, money, and energy. Yes, much. Yeah. That is a really good point. And I think that and so again, I mean, and I see this especially in rural and small towns, you kind of have the same that what I call the usual suspects, the usual suspects are always on the planning meetings are always the same people. And so, so there it's kind of cultivating, perhaps new new people, new finding new energy. People people that are not kind of the usual suspects. Yeah, I think that's a good point, though. Librarians can have fatigue, we can get tired and feel like it's not worth our energy. The same can be true of our partners, our partners can have that fatigue in the same way that we do. And I think one way to address that is to have honest open conversations about that. Yeah, let let let your partners know like, yeah, I know, we're asking a lot of you. But we also get asked to do a lot and let's figure out how we can work together so that we're not putting ourselves in the situation, we're retiring each other out all the time. And maybe it's that we need to bring new blood into our coalition. Yeah, how can how can you kind of address the fatigue collaboratively, rather than each institution kind of be isolated and fatigued would be one way I would I would encourage thinking about that. And just to just to kind of really put a head on that, I think this is a partner sometimes feel this way. I think librarians also feel this way. If we're kind of looking at a hypothetical program, librarians will often ask themselves, do I have the faith for this? Do I have the budget for this? Do I have the staffing for this? Can I do this? And I think a better way to approach these questions is to rather than imagine, by default, that we're going to be doing things by ourselves, to instead, from the get go, ask, who could I work with? Is there a DJ in my town? Could I just ask people to just bring food potluck style? Like, who could I work with to really do something without fatiguing my staff and the partners that I work with again and again? Because even in the smallest town, there's people out there who could potentially be turned to for for help and assistance. And I just want to so just this is part of a research project funded by the IMLS. And just just to give a sense of where where my insights are coming from. During the last couple years, I have interviewed both librarians as well as library partners and 18 communities to really understand how how librarians are working collaboratively with others and their communities on community based healthy eating and active living initiatives. And what I've really learned is that the same ways that librarians work with partners around healthy eating and active living, it's exactly the same way they can work with partners around maker spaces, workforce development, digital inclusion, educational equity. It doesn't really matter what the outcome is. I really believe fundamentally, there's there's a grammar to community partnership work that we should be learning and talking about and troubleshooting and figuring out how to do how to do better. And I think that's the real need there. And we're obviously not going to cover all of this in a one hour webinar. But my hope is that this will kind of stimulate some conversation. You can maybe go back to your shop and talk with your colleagues, talk with your friends, talk with your board about how you could potentially be doing your work fundamentally differently with work not done unilaterally by library staff working in isolation, but instead with library staff working collaboratively with with communities. And I think this is one of the fundamental bridges that we need to cross is to fundamentally change the perception of librarians as community partners. Because what I found again and again in talking with people from United Way out of school time educators, parks and recreation, local health departments, etc. etc. is that by default, these individuals do not think of librarians as partners. Someone could prove me wrong. I have not seen the data. Everything that I have seen all the research I've done, all the research I've seen others do fundamentally suggest that it's on us to change people's perceptions if we want them to work collaboratively with us. If people are not already working with librarians, they do not understand that librarians are partners. They may see the library as merely a book repository. They may, if you're lucky, see the library of the trusted resource, but a path of resource, a space that's always there, a space that people turn to that's stable and trusted. And based on that, they may see the library as again, a path of vehicle for food distribution, access to social work, access to social services, programs, meetings. They typically and only after a lot of relationship building start to see librarians as partners, as individuals that they can work collaboratively with to figure out what to do. And this, and I'd love to hear if this has been your perception. If you have a different experience in your community, but this is really what I found, is that we have a lot of work to do to change the perceptions of librarians and to really change the idea of what librarians do and how librarians serve their communities. And again, my goal, my dream is for more partners to get to stage three faster and to really see librarians as partners, they should be working with from ground zero, as it were, to really develop things. So it's not just about librarians going out and fostering these partnerships, but all partners in every community are spontaneously reaching out to librarians, because they know librarians have the keys to the Catholic that were in terms of tapping into how communities work and operate. And I'll just put a question here. As you see here, I'd love to hear any thoughts people have in the chat or question. How have you gotten the word out that your library is a key community partner? What modalities have you used to communicate that to potential partners in schools, United Way, etc? What have you found to be successful in terms of changing the narrative of how librarians work? And this is just as you're thinking and putting things in the questions either just some of the the the ingredients that I've seen can breed success in terms of doing that. One is that especially in larger larger more urban libraries, there's a culture in which library staff, including paraprofessionals are seen as the experts. Even if someone at the library paraprofessional or part time staff member, they often have extraordinary funds of knowledge as it relates to the community. So seeing library staff themselves as the experts in terms of understanding the community. They're the culture in which library staff are encouraged to dream and to take risks. So community potluck and dance party. What a novel idea. But they're the culture in which that risk taking is kind of just part of the day to day work of the library. And so rather than getting all frozen up when people I mean what often happens is that people get terrified of liability. People get terrified that someone's going to through the library. Get over it. Get over that. That is not conducive to the type of work. That's not conducive to teaming up with your community if you're operating from this place of fear. Success has the ingredient of a culture in which library staff have access to professional development and resources. So the staff are not kind of locked all the time at kind of a public desk but are given the resources and time to develop relationships and then mobilize relationships. And finally this is a culture in which anything is on the table. There's not some kind of short list of what librarians can and can work on. Anything that a community is interested in is a topic that a librarian can be working on. It doesn't matter if it's health, digital inclusion, economic development, entrepreneurship. We have our hands on everything and therefore we can be working collaboratively with others on whatever communities want to work on. So this is kind of what success looks like in practice. And I'd love to hear kind of just thinking of these four ingredients. Do you feel like you have these four ingredients at your library? Where are you successful? Where do you have weaknesses? Yeah, and where do you see opportunities to grow? We do have some comments from people, ideas for how they reach out to their community partners that have come in. And a couple of different people mentioned the same thing. It's a meeting with them one on one, listening to their needs, the partners and offering how the library can help. And this is something that's mentioned by multiple people, attending their meetings, attending their, if they have open meetings or monthly meetings, or the board meetings of their organizations, or if they have an event that they're hosting, go to it. The library is interested in what they do as well for their events and programs, not just asking you to help them out with the library. It's a back and forth. Yeah. No, and I think though they're great and I love the focus on the one on one and meeting people where they are. And I'll just share kind of one of my, in my research, one of my favorite kind of examples of that is one librarian in Massachusetts. She told me that one way that she develops these relationships is she quote unquote forgets to take her name tag off at the end of the day. So she'll be walking around the grocery store or whatever like with her name tag on and and it's kind of then she's visible is kind of the the librarian and it can be kind of a conversation starter. It's like, oh, I didn't I don't know like I've never met you before. I've never been in the library in 20 years, but it's kind of, yeah, just just looking for those kind of low like easy ways to kind of be be approachable, invisible in the community of the librarian, which then kind of opens the doors to conversation about what that means. The one thing that I will say, and I think there's a lot of focus on on listening. And I think listening is important. It's fundamental, but so is talking. And we don't we don't talk enough about how to talk about your library. And again, I think so much of the problems that we face come down to the fact that we don't know how to communicate about our own needs. And we have needs. We have needs as individuals. We have needs as institutions. So listen, yes, but talk to because I think so often problems arise when we spend all of our time trying to listen and meet people where they are, but don't don't reflect on, okay, but what, what do I need? What do I need to sustain myself and my institution? Well, I'm also trying to work collaboratively. So to have that back and forth there also has to be that cognizance of the fact that we have needs. And that has to be part of the conversation. And I think it can also help as you're going out to really convey to people that that libraries can be a lot of things to a lot of different people. And this is a video that I will often use. I won't don't have time to have you watch it now. But if you have five minutes at some point, I would encourage everyone to take five minutes and watch this video. It's an amazing story about how this this librarian in California, she teamed up with her community to meet a very easy need. So there was California hot. It's a hot place Southern California gets a lot of sun. And there was kind of this nonprofit community fitness group that was looking for a space outdoors to exercise out of the sun. And that as they kind of looked around the community, they eventually found their way to the library. And they asked the librarian, Hey, you have a covered parking lot. Would it be possible for you to let us have part of your parking lot for for our fitness class? And Norma, our visa, the librarians like, Yes, of course, your taxpayers, you are our community. We want this space to be for you. So rather than worry about Oh, someone's going to do the library or any of the risk and fear that so often people get it's like, Yes, of course, come in use the library. That's what it's here for. And so it's it's an amazing example of someone who has the foresight to really listen to communities and then respond by by opening the library to what the communities need in that instance. And so just just I want to tie this to and something that's many probably on the on the forefront of many people's minds. As I'm sure you all know, everyone and their brother has been trying to start story walk initiatives during during the pandemic as librarians turn their attention to outdoor spaces. But I think there's an opportunity here. What what is the story walk? Like what fundamentally is a story walk? Is it on the one hand, it's a physical installation. It's it's pages of a typically a children's story book posted along a walking trail. So that's one way to think of a story walk. It's a convenient way to keep providing programming during a pandemic. But I found in my research that a story walk is also a catalyst to community partnerships. Because especially if you're trying to do story walk for the long term, you need to be developing relationships to work collaboratively with others to figure out who's going to maintain this installation. We can't be going out mowing grass and and kind of weatherizing this. We need our partners to help us. It can't just be about librarians doing this work all by ourselves. And and this is not a not a new phenomenon. As I've been researching the history of the story walk movement, I found this show me librarian from Missouri. Back in 2014 talking about there are many reasons why I love the story walk project. We now have a partnership with our county parks department. The picture walk walk has truly been a joint effort with the library in the parks, sharing ideas and tasks. As a result, we now have a working partnership. We know how to work together to get things done. The potential in this new relationship is vast. And this is what we need to be doing. We need we need to shift our thinking from programs. What are the programs and services that we want to provide to instead what are the relationships that we want to cultivate and leverage and in this case, the relationship was with a county parks department. But we have such potential to be out there kind of cultivating and leveraging relationships to transform our community and also to transform how how librarians are seen and perceived, which at the end of the day is going to be the good community, good will that you need if you're trying to get a bond referendum going or a new building or any new initiative that's going to require taxpayers to come out and support of the library in some way. And so again, it's about shifting our thinking from what services can we provide? What relationships can we have with with our community? And what do we want those relationships to look like? And I'm just going to skip over this. But but again, it's just lots happens in libraries. The other thing I think it's and I can't say this enough is that I think sometimes we fall into the trap of imagining that we can only touch certain things we can only be about books or literacy. But lots happen in libraries health, economic development, digital inclusion, lifelong learning that's extraordinarily vast in and of itself, cultural heritage. And just really open open open pandora boxes that were and start from the premise that anything can happen with with the right partners in place. And that's just a reality. I think we need to wake up to if we haven't yet accepted that. And so again, it's also about shifting from being all things to all people, which I hear all the time people will like I have so much on my plate, how could I possibly do anything more? And I hear that. And I think the answer is stop doing everything. Stop doing all things for all people. Stop imagining that you have to do it all by yourself. And instead, start thinking about how how you can get together with with others to to do new things, whether the story walk a community potluck and dance party, the particular initiative in some ways doesn't really matter. It's more about the fundamentally how do you how do you get out there and form those relationships? And again, like I said, it's also about being articulate about your needs. You have needs. That's that's reality. So go out there and listen and meet people where they are, but also as reflect as an individual is an institution, what do you want from partners? What do you have to offer partners? And then think about how you communicate those things. Because yes, we need to be getting out, we need to be doing outreach, but outreach is not the answer. Community engagement is not the answer. Partnerships are not synonymous with community engagement. Those are both important, but different things. And so now I want to spend just the second half of this webinar really just talking about how you can build better partnerships within your community. And this is just one person's take on this. So if we if we go through this, I'd love to hear any any comments or concerns or questions or things that you found successful. So keep keep putting things in the question box as thoughts come to you. But but I found in my thinking that the garden life cycle can be a really powerful way to think about about partnerships. And one reason why is that I think sometimes people are concerned that if they if they start working with someone, they're going to be working with that organization or individual for in perpetuity for the end of time. And that's not true. Just as in some gardens, you plant different things in different years. Just because you start working with someone doesn't mean that you're all of a sudden married for the rest of eternity. So what will so some partnerships are perennials, they may come back year after year, others are annuals, learn to recognize the difference, learn to recognize who are the organizations and individuals that you can always count on. Who are the organizations and individuals that you may be able to count on for this particular thing, but you can't necessarily count on them for everything. And also learn to let go, but also learn to recognize when hey, the Parks and Recreation Department, they just hired this new director. And this person is super gung ho about working with the community. Let's we need to we need to catch this person's ear and make sure they know kind of what we're trying to do in the library area and are interested in working with us. But just as in a real garden, there are no guarantees of success. You may think you have the perfect seeds for your climate for your local environment and nothing happens. And that's fine. I think failure is as a part of the process just as it is in a garden. Because every season we're back in the garden. And every season we're back in our community kind of beating the streets as it were to find people we can work with to make a difference in our community. And so let's talk a little bit about kind of how do we plant the seeds of community partnerships? How do we nurture those seedlings? And how do you harvest your bounty? And the fourth part is kind of putting your guard in the bed. Apologies. I left that off the off the slide. But starting with the seeds. And I really think that the fundamental seed of community partnerships is trust and relationships. You and your partners need to know each other. And you have to have some sort of trust or has to be some shared common common language. And you can start this internally by kind of reflecting on what groups or organizations you and your library may already be connected to not via not only staff, but your board your friends, even volunteers. You may you may find that you have a lot of kind of feeds out there that you can cultivate. Another great way to kind of plant the seed is to really find those kind of umbrella organizations. So someone mentioned United Way. I think United Way is kind of the perfect example of an organization that has its tentacles into a lot of different areas. So these kind of catch all organizations United Way as one Rotary is another Chamber of Commerce. There could be a health coalition or food council in your community. I mean, they'll be different from place to place, even a community foundation, but just who are the organizations that exist in part to bring people together? That's where you that's where you need to be going to kind of be planting the seed and building the trust, building up the idea that the library wants to be seen as a community partner. And I think also is we're doing this work. And I can't empathize if enough. To do it sustainably, you also have to be taking care of your own needs. And so it's not about kind of just putting yourself second in the community first. It's about really reflecting and building up for yourself, your own rationale for doing this work. So why? Why are you a library worker? Why do you continue to get up and go to work in libraries? And really, I use that kind of almost internal purpose to kind of keep you motivated and to keep you kind of beating the bushes that were when people asked you repeatedly, how did that how did that feel to be sitting around reading books all day or all the other nonsense that we know people are going to start saying when we when we start communicating about the vast potential of librarians as community partners. So build up your armor, build up your your strength to go out and be like, actually, that's not that's not how any of this works. And and but yeah, let's let's talk about how how we can actually work together to make a difference. And confidence is a key ingredient in the process of building relationships. Yes, we need to listen. Yes, we need to be meet people where they are. But if we are not confident fundamentally, we are not going to go very far. If you're only listening and kind of absorbing what people say, you're going to get burnt out. You're going to feel like you're being taken advantage of. And part of that is on you. Part of that is because you haven't been articulate about your needs and you haven't built up the confidence. So be confident, be bold, be brave and be aware of of all that you and your library have to offer the community. If only the community would work with you to do new things. And so just we don't have time to do this. If I were doing this in person, I'd have people break into small groups and just use a little kind of what's your networking introduction. So and this can be a great thing to do at if you have staff development days or committee meetings, just have people go around the room and say like, how do you describe to a potential partner what it is that public librarians do. And yeah, so and just the alternative another way to think about that is how do you respond when someone says, gee, it must be great to sit around and read books all day. And so I think this is really critical. So again, we don't have time to do this, but I would love to hear if someone has something they want to share. And as a question, what do you use? What's the language that you use to communicate the idea of the librarian as a community partner? What have you found to be successful? I'd really, really love to hear if people would be willing to share. Yeah, we hear that too much of what they assume we do as in libraries and what actually happens. And it's, I mean, for years and years have been trying to explain it. And it's still is disheartening. We have so many surprised faces, you say, well, libraries do and all of the things and all the everything involved in and how it actually works in a library. So if anybody has any like, cool tips or tricks or how you've been able to get that point across, please share. We need more ideas about how to get that word out. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say it's it is kind of it's in a way, unfortunately, I mean, I think the reality is that it is kind of a never ending process. Even if you establish that, I mean, the staff of your partnering organizations may change, you may have a go to partner in parks and recreation, who retire and then they bring on a new staff member. And so it's you have to be actively doing this on an ongoing basis. You have to be planting the seeds permanently, just like in a garden, you can't kind of plant seeds once and expect to get watermelons for the rest of your life. You have to be you have to be out there doing it on a regular basis. Great. And somebody say earlier, that was a great analogy about that. Yes. And so someone here does say, I tell people, my job is to take the library to the people out into the community. And when people say it must be nice to read all day, I just say I wish. Yeah, the things I do that I don't have time to read. I like that. Yeah, and I like that idea of taking taking the library to the community. I think that's really great. So good. Yeah, great. And so just just to kind of keep thing moving, moving things along. So we've talked about planting the seed. But what do you do with those seeds? So you have trust, you have relationships. What do you do with with that trust in those relationships? How do you how do you kind of? Yeah, kind of help help those seedlings kind of come out of the ground and and start to produce something valuable for the community. And and and again, again, so and I think someone kind of hit the nail on the head earlier when they talked about active listening, basic small small talk. But but again, also telling the potential partner about you being articulate about your goals. What's what's the vision you have for for your community and for your library in the community. And then that's kind of first date. But when we're talking about nurturing the seedlings, we're really talking about that second date. So you've built up that basic trust. You have a modicum of shared understanding. And then be bold, pitch an idea like I saw this library in Lexington or Omaha or anywhere. I saw this that this library did did something. Yeah, I mean, do you think we could do that? And and I'll give you an example of how this works. And again, I think a story can sometimes go a lot way. So this this process literally happened. And that's in a community called Seabrook, Texas. And so I interviewed the librarian who did this. So to kind of take take a step back in Seabrook, Texas, the librarian there, she saw other libraries starting community gardens. And she thought we have this green space in our library. We have this lawn space. Wouldn't it be great rather than just have grass that nobody uses to utilize this space to start growing food and teach people about how to grow food. And and she knew she knew there was literally no way that she and her staff could do this by themselves. So that's a non starter. So rather than kind of say, OK, we don't have the staff time to do this, we're going to let this idea go by the wayside. She very smartly said, OK, every time I go out in the community and talk about the library, I'm going to also tell people we have this great space and would love to start a community garden. And she did that. She went to the Rotary, talked about the library. She went to the school, talked about the library and tell people to sign up for your library cards. And she'd kind of weave into that. Oh, and by the way, we would love to start a community garden. And so she did that for for a couple months. And at one of these meetings, the city manager was in attendance. And then a couple weeks later, a completely different organization came to the city manager and said, hey, city manager, you know what Seabrook, Texas needs? We need a community garden. And the city manager is like, oh, have you talked to your librarian? And they're like, what? No, of course not. Why? Who and their who who on the planet who thinks about starting a community garden would talk to a librarian? I mean, but but but because the librarian was out there kind of hitting hitting the pavement, talking up this idea, they were pitching their idea on the city manager knew to connect the librarian to this organization. They started meeting monthly. They organized a whole plan. They started small. They started with an herb garden that's a lot more manageable. That expanded to vegetable garden. And most recently, they've started having a fruit fruit for us. So so native trees that don't work well in Seabrook. And it all it all started by by building relationships and pitching ideas. And and and I think that's important. The idea pitch is so important. It's not about librarians saying we're going to do x, y or z. It's about pitching something saying we could do this, but we need you. We would love to do this, but we need you and being being a little bit even stickler about that being being upfront about what you need and capacity is. Don't over commit yourself. Don't don't promise people you're going to do more than you can. But do be do be pitching things. Do be out there saying like, hey, we'd love to we'd love to work on this. Let's let's figure out how to work together. And but to get that to get to that place, you need to have a strong foundation. So so in Seabrook, Texas, the library and this nonprofit, they didn't immediately start picking up shovels and building the garden. They met many times. They met monthly for over a year before they actually started planting a garden. And they work together to figure out who else they could bring into their coalition. Who else do we need? Oh, we probably should check with public works. Oh, we may want to consult with parks and recreation. But they kind of built up that foundation to figure out how they could strategically fill in gaps and also figure out, hey, do we actually as partners have the capacity to go and do this? They took the time to build that foundation. And yeah, there's there's a lot of ways. So sometimes it's like, do you want to put a ring on it? So it's in a small town, a handshake maybe enough for that trust. You may want to firm a larger inter institutional partnership, you may want to consider a memorandum of understanding, possibly even a contract or or a formal proposal. So so and again, this is kind of I want to say you have options. When you're nurturing your seedlings, you have options that you can pursue. If you feel like you really trust this person or organization, a handshake may suffice. In other cases, you may actually want to have some sort of written agreement, which can be really helpful, especially if the staff turnover. What if what if you lose your your go to partner in parks and recreation? It can be super, super helpful to have written agreements in place, especially if you're talking about larger initiatives. And I think it's key to just recognize that there's there's different options and different different scenarios. I think it's the same way for the library, too. We have sometimes you have lots of turnover in library staff. Yes, we direct come in who reach out to us here at the Nebraska Library Commission for, Okay, what do I do as a director? Can you help me? What are we involved in? And sometimes there's not a lot of paperwork or communication from the previous director, or if there's been conflict between a director and library boards and the city. And so nobody passed on the information to having something they can go and find. Yes. And just know that yes, this was a project that was happening and here's exactly what was done and what needs to be done. Very important. You don't want to get left also holding the bag where you know, you did a handshake with some some business and then they backed out on you. Yeah. And that's actually Krista, that's kind of exactly what we want to talk about and harvesting your bounty, because part of harvesting your bounty is exactly that documentation. How and I think sometimes documentation doesn't get done because it's seen as just some bureaucratic black hole. But I actually think documentation can be done in a different way. You could you could approach documentation as a way to celebrate your successes. We want to keep track of the partners we work with because that's good for our bottom line. And so it's a really seen documentation not as kind of just something you have to do like eating your fruits and vegetables as we sometimes get told to do. But instead thinking about it like, Oh, it's awesome. I get to eat this broccoli and because I learned to love broccoli. So yeah, thinking thinking of it is not just some bureaucratic process, but something that you want to do because you want to celebrate your successes and you want to document that work so that you can tell that story, which again, is extraordinarily useful both for building future partnerships, but also for sustaining them. And that documentation can also be that says and putting out those press releases are just announced and saying, Hey, we did this thing with this group than other groups may other part potential partners may see that and say, Oh, really, we can do that library like that. This that we talked earlier, they said, Why do we even contact the library? Well, the news we've been spread that you've been doing things. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it helps to build buzz. And then also, I think it can also really be helpful for for funding. A lot of funders, a lot of community foundations, a lot of kind of organizations that want to give communities money, they don't necessarily want to give money to a library, at least not a library working by itself. What they really want to give money to is community coalitions. They want to give money to efforts that have the buy in of a diverse array of community partners. And by by kind of harvesting your bounty, celebrating your success of and documenting what it looks like, you are setting yourself up for lots of funding opportunities that you probably didn't know you had access to. And I've seen that again and again, your your partners, they also have access to funding streams that you do not. And by working with them, you can tap into the funding sources that they may they may have access to. And so there's just so many ways that you can you can harvest your bounty and but taking the time to do it. And then the fourth whole year ahead talking about the Nebraska Community Foundation was talking about the many of their of those foundations do actually have on their applications. They want to know who are you? Who is your who are your partners? They want to know not just this is just this one entity trying to do this thing. But is their community support and who is that community support? They want to make sure that you're going to be sustainable. And if you have those partners, that will help you get those grants and get that funding that you need. Yeah, absolutely. And then then just the last last step and then we'll have time for kind of just Q&A and discussion is at the end of the day, you've kind of planted some seeds, you've nurtured those seedlings, perhaps into a specific programmatic initiatives. You've harvested your bounty and really celebrated what's come out of your garden by documenting it and sharing it. And then at the end of the year, you kind of reflect. You take the time to say like, wow, that partnership was great. I can't wait to do that again. Or alternatively like, that partner was awful to work with. They expected us to do everything. We are never going to work with that organization again, although never say never because they yeah, they may have some new staff a couple years from now. But yeah, just be aware that not every partnership that you work when it's going to be an annual or a perennial, there may be instances where you decide that for the time being, we're not going to work with parks and recreation in our town because for whatever reason, they're just a dysfunctional organization. And they're kind of bringing our dysfunction into bringing their dysfunction into our organization. And yeah, just just being aware that you have options taking that time to reflect, yeah, what worked, what didn't work, what are we going to do different next time around? I think that's a really important part of the process. And yeah, I'd love to hear I think I when I when I gave a version of this at the Association for rural and small libraries conference last October, I asked this question, have you ever had to let go of a partnership? Or have you ever had a partnership that really did not work the way you thought it was? And it was amazing because like everyone had stories to share. And it was clear to me that people are not finding opportunities to talk about these challenges. So I think of the way to kind of wrap things up. I'd love to hear like, yeah, have you had struggles? What where where have you had instances where we're things have gone off the rails for one way or the other? And what have you learned from that process? And that's something that we don't. Well, haven't in the historically talked about enough, but it's becoming more of a thing. And there's been over the last, you know, 10, 15 years in at, I've seen it conferences, learning from failure. It's okay, you don't have to have everything be a success. Learn, you know, what you did wrong, what the partner did wrong. And you can just read, you know, reset and try something new. And that's okay. It's okay to have things work out. Yeah, if anybody has had any partnership that didn't work out too well, let us know. We do a comment from earlier, we're talking about doing the PR for what you're doing, sharing it, this is make it a win win for both groups. And it helps both sides, not just but that partner who can benefit from the library sharing and saying, Hey, we did this great thing. The library did it. And this was our partner. It makes that partner looks good too. That's a selling point to them. I think that, you know, they get good PR out of the helping this wonderful, you know, community service, the library. Yeah. Yeah. And I think when you when you're thinking about kind of that win win and kind of, yeah, PR. I know sometimes it can be really helpful to think very strategically and deliberately about this. So so I talked with the library in Maine, kind of small town Maine. And and for them, it was strategically politically extremely important that they have a good working relationship with the local school district. But the school district is hard to work with. They're very insular, they're very bureaucratic in this town. And so the librarian said it's fine with me. If I'm doing the lion's share of the work, because we're getting at the end of the day, we're getting the publicity of being associated with the school district. We're saying, Oh, the school district is working with the library. And even if I'm doing most of the work, I still see this as a valuable partnership to keep working out because in my small town, it's politically extremely important that it be seen that the library is working with the school. And just having those those candid conversations like there may be some partners that politically or strategically, even if you're doing most of the work, it's still worth doing because of what you get out of that. But just yeah, what what are the wins? And how does your partner benefit? How do you benefit? And it doesn't always have to be 50 50. Yeah. But but yeah, this is and just I'd love to just to kind of wrap things up. What have you heard that is new to you? What do you need to better understand this topic and take what I've said and shared and put it into practice? And fundamentally, how can how can we or how can I do this presentation better? Because I'm always learning as well. So I'd love any any feedback. And if you feel like you'd prefer to put it in an email, you can email me just my last name lester at uncg.edu. And I wanted to share. So I've been, I'm not just kind of talking with librarians. If I do this work, I'm also trying to really talk with partners. So how can we shake up common partners to get them to see librarians different? And so as part of that, I'm actually speaking at the Kansas Department of Health, the statewide Public Health Department in Kansas, working with a faculty member at Emporia University, as well as a librarian in Southeast Kansas, to do a webinar on closing the gap, really focused on what what are people working in the health sector need to know in order to work better with with librarians. And so to kind of do this, it's not enough to just talk with librarians and tell them to do things differently. We also need to be be having analogous messages put out there with people in the health, education, technology. It's really about and so if people are interested, you're more than welcome to join us September 8th. And I think we're about at time. So yeah, any any other final thoughts or questions people have? And like I said, if you have any feedback, I would love love any any feedback, the good, the bad, the negative about how things went. It really means a lot to me and I take it very seriously. Yeah, definitely. I was actually looking, I was just noticing on that that you're doing in Kansas. Janet Reynolds, she was a presenter at one of our big talk from small libraries online conferences. I was just looking at her 2020. And she spoke about fitness, food and fun with seniors, that is. Yeah, no, I love Janet. Janet's really she's the best and she's really like I see Janet is kind of like an amazing model of kind of this this collaborative librarianship. Because literally everything that she does has some sort of community partners roped into it. So it's like, I mean, she's she's got and she leaves no stone on turn. She's like, OK, we want to have some some exercise classes for kids during our summer reading. I can't do this. But I know the retired PE teacher. Let me go see if I can get the retired PE teacher to do fitness Thursdays for me for the kids coming to summer reading. And she's just like so so great at kind of building those relationships that allow her library to be a center for learning and so many different modalities. See, that's something that's interesting that that's awesome. Just I know I know a guy basically is that that's a partnership. I know guy who's this kind of thing. Unless just as it doesn't have to be like a official an official organization or business, it just could be. I know somebody. Yeah, very, very organic. I mean, that's why I love the garden life cycle is that I think it works best when it is organic. And you have some kind of safeguards in place to kind of document how things went. But at the end of the day, it's an extraordinarily organic process. We do have a couple comments that says thank you so much, Noah, great program. And then someone says this has been wonderfully thoughtful. I wonder if any of these steps could be transitioned into templates, almost a workbook of sorts to help libraries proceed. Thank you. And that makes me think about wondering you said this some of what you're doing is part of the IMLS grant. What is what is going is that grant still coming and being worked on is there more to come out of that? Yeah. Yeah. And thank you. Thank you for whoever answered that. We do have a project website. It's kind of part of the broader Let's Move in Library. Probably the best way is just to subscribe to our monthly newsletters to get key updates. And if you email me, I'll add you. But we are planning and so we're in our in our last year now. So we are hoping to put together some sort of hand walk or play walk playing around with the vocabulary, but something that would take some of this content and put it into kind of a more action oriented format that people could peruse either physically or online. So I really appreciate that feedback. And stay tuned for more. Because it's definitely something I want to want to work towards creating. And yeah, so thank you. Nice. We'll look forward to that. Absolutely. And I say I am signed up to the newsletter. So I do get all the announcements. It's not overwhelming. Like you said, monthly, you know, just updated what's going on in the less moving one library. So it's good to get ideas too for what other libraries are doing. Great. Well, I know we're about at time, so I went a little bit over. So I want to thank everyone for a little after 10 o'clock. So that's not a problem. Yeah. All right. So all right. So thank you. I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen here. Yeah, thank you so much. No, this is great. I'm so glad we're able to have you on the show again. As I said, he's been on before. And we highly recommend is the less moving libraries page. And I will link to that on here on the well, actually, let's just use your page. OK. And thank you everyone for attending. We got some more thank yous coming in on the chat as well. Thank you so much for this great information. So I think we'll wrap it up for today. The show has been recorded and will be available on our website. I'm also going to show you here. I'm just going to jump over here quickly when you're talking about Janet Reynolds, our big talk from small libraries online conference that we do annually. It's always the last Friday in February. I'll be and I just looked up here to see that. Yeah, if you want to watch recording of her session, fitness, food and fun with seniors. And then actually, she was in previously two in twenty eighteen. You were talking about the summer reading program more than summer lunches, social, cultural and healthy connections. So she did a couple of things on a couple of sessions on big talk from small libraries. If you want to check that out and watch her recordings for any of the other recordings coming up from that and will be in my sometime next month plan is open up the call for speakers for big talk from small libraries twenty twenty three. So if you're interested in that, it will be the last Friday in February is Friday, February twenty fourth twenty twenty three. So soon this website will be updated for our next one. But whoops. So we'll wrap up for today. Our archives I'll show you here on the main Encompass Live page, our upcoming shows listed here. Our archives are right after that. So you can look in here today show will be at the top of list should be processed and ready by the end of the day tomorrow. Everyone who attended today and registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know that it's ready. And then you can go here. I have a link to the recording and a link to the slides that Noah will send to me at some point. And I don't think you sent it yet. Yeah. Yeah, I'll send I'll send those. OK, no problem. So that'll be available for everybody here. You can also search a show archives and mention we have so many shows and lots of different topics you can search for anything in here. You can search the whole show archives or just most recent 12 months if you want just something current. That is because this is our full archives. I'm not going to scroll all the way down because as you can see, this is really huge. This is our show shows going back to when Encompass Live premiered, which was January 2009. So we've got going on over 10 years, 12 years worth of show archives here. And we'll keep them up as long as we have a place to help host them. We're librarians. What we do keep things for archival and historical purposes sometimes. So just pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything if you do watch and are recording. Things may change resources and services. Maybe you can be different. Some links or things may no longer exist to. So just keep an eye on that when you know some things do stand the test of time and are still good, useful accurate, useful information, but some things will become old and outdated. So just look at that date. We also have a Facebook page rank up us live. If you like to use this, use Facebook, give us a like over there. We have reminders. Here's your reminder for today's show information about our speaker. When our recordings are available, we post on here as well. So if you like to use Facebook, you can do that. Also, we post on Twitter and Instagram. We have the hashtag and come live a little abbreviation for our show. If you like to keep up with us there. So that'll be it for today. I hope you would join us for next week show when it is pretty sweet tech day. The last Wednesday of every month is pretty sweet tech. When Amanda Sweet, our technology innovation librarian comes on the show to talk about something tech related. So. We do tech shows other times in the month, but you can always count on her to be here at the end of the month. And next week she'll be talking about WordPress layout walkthroughs from the blank page. So she's got a lot of questions about how do I customize my WordPress so it just doesn't look like everybody else's. So she's going to take us through some and there has been update recently. I know two word press. So this will be helpful to a lot of you. Maybe we've been struggling with figuring out what do I do now. So please do sign up for that show and any of our other upcoming shows. We've got September dates getting filled in here. Note October 5th. We always take the week off for our Nebraska Library Association annual conference. This year it's October 5th and 6th. So we will not have an encompass live on that week. So other than that, thank you everyone for being here today. Thank you for joining us again. Noah glad to see you. I'm sure we'll have you on again sometime. Maybe when you wrap up this project you can come back and report to us on how it all went. Yeah, thank you. I'd love to and thanks. Thanks everyone. And I just sent you the slide. So have a good day. Yep. I see the email right there. Awesome. All right. All right. So thank you everybody. See you on a future episode of Encompass Live. Bye bye.