 First up for our lighting round sessions is Amy Jo Elson, who's from our first Nebraska presenter, yay, of the day, who is from our Barrett Public Library in Rawlsson, Nebraska, and talk about how they did a library artist in residence program. That sounds so cool. So go ahead, Amy, and take it away. Tell us all about what you did there. All right, thank you. I hope everyone is warm here in Omaha. I'm in Omaha right now. It is very cold, so I'm in a school building, and I am keeping my hands clasped. It is quite cold today. Well, I am here to talk to you about the process that the Baywright Public Library in Rawlsson, Nebraska, went through to secure an artist in residence and then how the programming went and what results we saw. So we'll talk through those things. Let's see if I can control my PowerPoint here. There we go. So the first question is, if you're looking at doing a program like this, is why should you do it? Why is an artist in residence? Why is expanding access to the arts something that libraries should be involved in? So to answer that, I've got a couple quotes from the from the ALA interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights here. I highlighted the pieces that I think are really important, and I'll just mention the photo that I have here is actually our artist in residence. His name is Fernando Antonio Montejano telling a scary story for kids at our fall, our library and town fall festival. We decided to go forward with a library artist in residence in part because it satisfies some of the core competencies pushed forward by the ALA and the Children's Library Association. So learning about the arts expands our vision of humanity. It connects us to our communities, and arts is something that we're very interested in incorporating throughout our library programs. So that's where we started, and so why did our library specifically choose an artist in residence? Which if you're unfamiliar with that program, an artist in residence is an artist that stays with the organization usually for a period of time for the purposes of the grant that we applied for and received, which I'll talk a little bit about later. An artist in residence holds more than 30 sessions, and those sessions can be defined in different ways. They're generally, yeah, they're not 30 independent sessions, but it can be like one event might count as two or three sessions depending on the length and the complexity of it. So it's less daunting than it sounds like as far as programming goes. But Baywright specifically is in Ralston, Nebraska, which is in the center of Omaha. If you are unfamiliar with it, it is a 1.65 square mile piece of land in the center of Omaha, Nebraska. Well, surrounded on three sides by Omaha and one side by La Vista. So it's a weird, it's kind of an enigma. It's this little independent community in the middle of a large metropolitan area. We are landlocked, so there's no opportunity for expansion. And also the city has moved further and further to the west and the south around the city of Ralston. So Omaha has moved further to the south and west. And as that has happened, our population has changed in Ralston. So we're now part of almost the older part of the city of the metropolitan area, which is an interesting place to be. And again, our population has changed. And we know that we're missing some of those people. So we're missing people new to the area. We're missing changing demographic groups. The school district that Ralston has also has a much larger area than the city itself. So they have separate demographic needs. So it's an interesting, it's a very interesting place to be. We know that we have a growing Latinx population. The difference between the 2010 census and the 2020 census is we had 10% Latinx population within the city of Ralston. By 2020, we had 20%. The school district itself actually has 44% Latinx population. So we've gone from a predominantly older, very white identifying population to a younger, non-white identifying population, which comes with awesome opportunities. So some of the pictures you see here, I point to the screen like you can see me pointing at it. But this is from our Dia de los Muertos program. And Fernando helped with that as well. He is bilingual. His language of birth, language of origin is Spanish. So he's English, Spanish. And then he speaks a little French as well, which comes in handy with some of our other minority or marginalized populations. So it's been a great opportunity to have Fernando there with us. Our library use, as I'm sure it does for many of you as well, skews heavily older and white. So we know that we're missing part of our population. We're not doing a good job reaching them. So art is our way of reaching out and expanding. And in this context, art includes lots of things. When I talk about the programming that we've done, you'll see some of the different things, music, poetry, writing, crafts, actual visual art, which you can see here on this slide. So we've done a little of everything. We're kind of dabbling to try and we're throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. So what was our process? It actually wasn't difficult. If you're in Nebraska, I strongly encourage you to check out the Nebraska Arts Council website. I've got a link here for anyone in Nebraska who hasn't accessed that grant money before. It is a very simple application. It does require you to report. There is a community section where you require, where you're required to put in community information. So that's where things like census data or school district data, anything that can show the demographics of your community or a change over time that you're trying to meet is very powerful in that particular section. But it is probably the shortest, simplest grant application I have ever filled out. So I highly encourage you to do that. And if you're not in Nebraska, I encourage you to look for an equivalent organization in your state. So this is the Nebraska Arts Council, but there are many of those across the U.S. Yeah, so the first thing we needed to do was find an artist. We chose Fernando specifically because I had seen him present at an opera preview. At one point he stood up and talked about the themes in the opera and things like that and read a little bit of his writing. And he just is very approachable. So I reached out to him. He was happy to work with us. We came up with an agreement. I filled out the grant application. We met to go through scheduling, worked out payment, and then started the program. And then all I have to do at the end is report, which is also pretty simple through the Nebraska Arts Council. So again, if you're in Nebraska and you haven't checked them out, please do. It's a great way to get some quick funding. So what we've seen so far, I've got a list of programs that we've completed, and then we've got some upcoming programs. And again, we've got 30, basically 30 units to divide among different sessions with Fernando. A side benefit that was not planned was the reader is an independent newspaper in, it's kind of a news magazine in the Omaha area. And Fernando happens to write for them part time. So after talking with us and learning about some of the other programs we had going on, he went back to the reader and said, I would like to do a story on this library. And we ended up being the cover story. So that was a great side benefit. Yeah. And it brought some new traffic, new people into the library, and actually opened up some new funding avenues for us as well, which has been a phenomenal side benefit. Yeah. So here's Fernando. This is his headshot. He's a great guy. So far, we've seen an increase in attendance at events, an increase in requests for our Spanish language collection, which was not very large, but we're working on it. It's getting bigger. We've also connected with arts organizations in the greater Omaha area. So we have free tickets to the Omaha Symphony. I'll have some for Opera Omaha this spring. And a couple, they've come and done story times. We give those tickets out free to families who come and request them. That's been a great connection for our community. And then the new funding, if any of you have people in your community who invest through Thrivent, which is a, I think it was, I think it was originally a Lutheran organization. I'm not sure if that's still their connection, but they are a faith-based organization. So because of their, the way it was explained to me is because of their tax structure, they have giving that they're, the people who invest through them, they have a certain amount that they can give back to the community every year. So if you know of people in your community who work with Thrivent or have investment available through them, they have a little bit of money every year that they say, I want it to go to this organization. So that's something I learned. And that's been a good thing for us. We're building a pollinator garden with some of that money. We're also doing another program with the Nebraska Arts Council this spring. And I'll wrap it up really quickly because I want people to have time to ask questions. So those are the steps that we went through. If anybody has questions, I'm happy to share my email. But if you're in Nebraska, tap that Nebraska Arts Council grant. It is, it is a great opportunity. We definitely promote them from our side to have had lots of success with libraries using it. Yeah. That's not something you necessarily think of because it doesn't say libraries in the title, but they want to work with libraries. That is, yeah. Yeah, they do. They do. Yeah. So if anybody does have any questions, please do type into the question section of your go-to webinar interface. I think this is such a fun program to do. And just so much you get out of it, so many different sessions. It's not just a one-shot. Right. Right. And it's been great to have that. He's very connected in the community, which a lot of artists are. So that's been a great opportunity for us to kind of reach, to expand our reach as an institution. Absolutely. Yeah. Just, just reading what's coming in here. So did you, one question here, did you have, because there's so many different things, is, I know libraries are always looking for programming, but this seems like so much for, especially a small library. Did you have any trouble trying to get it all done? I mean, get all of these things scheduled? I mean, it seems to be so many different sessions. It is a lot of different things. I only work 15 hours a week at the library. And, and I, I do some circulation coverage during that time too. So if I can do it, believe me, you can do it. Yes. That would be the first thing, but also we piggybacked on things. Like the Fall Festival was a larger event that we added our artists to. He's doing a bilingual story time for us. So it's our regular scheduled story time. And we're having him come and do it. As a presenter said, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you can do something that's the same thing or similar. Yeah. Right. Right. You can kind of tag it on to other events that you already have planned. We did a, a, so we have movie nights and we had Fernando come in and do a, he's a movie buff. And so he came in and talked about like some of the themes that were in the movie and some of the, the different things. We had a great community conversation about the movie, everything, everywhere, all at once. All right. Awesome. All right. Sorry, we're going to have to move on to the next. Perfect. Yeah. Perfect timing. I want to make sure that all of our 10 minute lightning rounds get done here. So thank you so much, Amy. This is an awesome program. And definitely people will be reaching out to you. We will have links to all emails and whatnot available too. We'll have it added. I don't know if you had it in the slides, but you can put it into your slides for when they do get shared when someone was asking about that. Okay. Yeah. All right. Great. Thank you so much.