 So thank you so much for having us. We actually have the opportunity to present as a team here. I am Lindsay Vien and my co-worker Sally Thomas here. I am so inspired to be here today. And all this talk about bicycles that you guys are going to be learning about a seed lending library, what a great opportunity it might be to have a mobile seed lending library toad it around the community, right? So I've got my thinking cap on here. So today, Sally and I are going to present on what does it take to build and maintain a seed lending library? How many of you are familiar with the concept of a seed lending library? Oh, right on. Very good. So you actually were probably more informed than I was. A couple of years ago, our library director, Sean Reinhart, who is an innovator, and he approached library staff and said, I'm very interested in learning about a seed lending library and how we can develop that program. I thought, a seed lending library? I'm not even a gardener. How am I going to tackle this? So I'm going to kind of take you through the beginning stages of how to actually create and leverage resources to maintain a seed lending library. There we go. So through our presentation today, we're going to talk to you about how and why we launched the seed lending library and how we've continued to develop the seed lending library, how the evolution of seed saving is coming along, our future goals and some of the legal challenges associated with the seed lending library. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of background information on Hayward. So we are very fortunate to live in a very diverse community in the Bay Area. Hayward has a population of about 151,000. It's extremely linguistically and ethnically diverse. There was a survey done and there are 54 languages being spoken in one neighborhood in Hayward, which is extremely diverse. We are one of the lowest income communities in the Bay Area. According to the Bay Area census, the median family income is $67,000, some odd dollars, in comparison to the $85,000 family income and the $90,000 family income in the Bay Area overall. About 8% of families and 12% of the total population in Hayward are below federal poverty line, including 13% of those under the age of 18. And we are one of the lowest performing school districts in Alameda County. So there's a lot of exciting things that are going on in Hayward right now. There's a lot of interest in getting community engagement in increasing active living, healthy living, active living. And also, there's a lot of emphasis on academic programming. Project E through Alameda County Office of Education, they have a program called Project E, which is Educate, Act, and Thrive. In about, back in 2010, there was a lot of hype around the weight of the nation. How many of you have seen the weight of the nation? It's a long movie, but there's clips on YouTube if you can get a chance to take a look at it. And in 2010, over 63% of people in the United States were overweight or obese. So there's a lot of interest in how can we, as communities, engage through policy and change, how can we engage the community in getting back and eating healthier and living a more active lifestyle? So through Weight of the Nation, Project E started off by working with Oakland. I know there's a couple Oakland members here working with community leaders on really trying to talk to them. How can we implement policy to create this active living style? So I know biking is one part of this and also access to healthy foods. And I know that there's a lot of mobile food banks now and many communities that libraries are actually a part of. So the city of Hayward, this is definitely one of our priorities. It's to increase Hayward's sustainability as a community in all aspects of urban life and to implement the Healthy City program of focus on reducing childhood obesity in Hayward and to strengthen the city's urban agricultural program. So Hayward's a really exciting place. There's a lot of really phenomenal programs going on. In the past, everybody was kind of working in silos. And through the vision of Hayward Promise neighborhood we are recipients of Promise neighborhood funding, the Jackson Triangle. The goal of Hayward Promise neighborhood is to really align services with our community partners so that we can make a greater impact on our community. And I'm telling you all this stuff now because it's so important to get your people and your community partners in line if you want to be able to build and sustain a program such as a seed funding library. But the whole premise of Promise neighborhood is to build cradle to career support through access to effective schools and strong systems for family and community support which encompasses education, health, information and parent support. So the first thing you have to do when creating a seed lending library we like to say get your peeps together. You gotta reach out, you have to see who the movers and the shakers are, who is already experienced in seed saving, who's experienced in the Healthy Eating Active Living component and what are some of the other initiatives? Again, we work heavily with Alameda County Office of Ed Project EAT, they have community based school gardens at our local school sites and they work, they do healthy cooking demonstrations with students, with parents and how many of you are familiar with that program? Okay, a couple of you, yeah. It's a phenomenal program and they are a phenomenal resource. Champions for Change, so that's all about incorporating parents into the Healthy Eating Active Living lifestyle and of course our main supporters as well, the Friends of the Hayward Public Library. So if you have not heard of Rebecca Newburn, please be friends with her. She's gonna love this little pilot I'm gonna do for her. Her phone's now probably gonna go crazy from you guys all calling her. So she is the seed saving guru I would say. We were urged to talk to her at Richmond Public Library. She has extensive experience in seed saving and she actually developed the seed saving library at Richmond Public Library and what she really advises is she has this phenomenal system setup where it's very advanced. They have a huge wall full of seeds, it's categorized, it's got a huge system on being able to take seeds and they do seed saving workshops. They even have a computer where things were catalogued in the computer and you can check them out. It was very far advanced and most importantly, she was very giving and sharing her resources. They have phenomenal toolkits to get you started on creating your own seed lending library. She is a volunteer, she's a math teacher I believe by day and she is a volunteer seed lending library person by night and she has just done a fabulous job with this. You can check out through Richmond Grows, up here Richmondgrowsseeds.org. I urge you to take a look at it. But you know, we saw what Richmond was doing but we said, okay, well we've gotta figure out how we can adapt this to fit what our community needs are and I urge you to think about that. Think about your population, think about what population you need to tap into, who are your community resources before actually engaging in this? Because yes, the idea of a seed lending library is phenomenal but what it comes back to in the end of the day is what does your community need from this resource? So, we took a look at what Richmond Growsse was able to provide as far as resources. It's a very comprehensive and it's very easy to follow site that Richmond has here. They have brochures that they had created, they urge you to create some sort of program goal. They talk about orientation material, how to engage local volunteers to support what you're doing. So, we took a look at all of this and mind you, remember, I didn't have a huge gardening background but I thought with my background in education, I can really start to learn about this and systematize and start to create a program, right? So, any of you can do it if I can do this. So, Sean Reinhardt, our library director on the right-hand side had a genius idea. He brought back our antique card catalog here. So, we polished and shined it up and we thought, okay, well let's start off small, let's see how we can launch this. So, we brought our piece of furniture back out and the community was actually really excited to see this back out. You wouldn't believe how many comments we actually got back on this. So, really what we need to do is we needed to create a space. So, we have an old facility and there's not a lot of space at the Hayward Main Library. So, we found space and although it was small, we were able to create its own little area so that somebody can feel like they could sit over there and look through this catalog. We organized the card catalog by plant families in plant varieties and first of all, we just wanted to first get the space actually made. Creation of a logo. So, we kind of went, we started off with the way that it was gonna look first, the way that it was gonna appeal to the community before actually really thinking about the systematizing of everything. And we actually talked to one of our graphic artists that the Friends of the Library supported and paid for and we have our beautiful logo there so that if anybody sees this in the community, they know that this is the Hayward Public Library's seed lending library. So, our motto is grow each share. So, being able to plant seeds, to grow them and to eventually save the seeds and share them. And what we really had to think about doing as we started to develop this, we had to think about community support. We needed volunteers to be able to help develop this and somebody who really had an expertise with seed saving and with gardening in general. So, we were able to reach out, so I oversee an educational program, 21st century learning centers and I actually have two Alameda County master gardeners, Lo and Behold, who I've had relationships with for about six years. So, they were really interested and were very much excited to be a part of this and to incorporate Alameda County master gardeners into what we were doing. So, it was nice to really draw in their perspective and see what their vision for this was. So, we created a very brief checkout system here because as we said, we didn't want this to be a burden on the person who was gonna be on desk. We wanted this to be maintained by the community. So, first time users, we developed a seed lending library membership form. I don't have pictures of all of this stuff, but if you guys wanna check it out on our website, all of this stuff is available and we urge you to take a look at it and to tweak it to fit your own libraries here, which Sally will talk more about here in a moment. But to fill out a membership form and there's that actual little drop box that they put the membership form in that we have a volunteer enter in the forms usually on a weekly basis. And to look into the seed catalog and see what they wanted, it's like going shopping. We didn't actually put the seed packets. We received a large donation from Richmond Grows. They were nice enough to actually give us a large quantity of some of their surplus to get started, which is what got us started here. So, our volunteers from the master gardeners came in, they sorted all of our seeds and we actually created our own envelopes because we were worried that the public was gonna come in and just take the entire thing of seeds. We had to educate them. They only need four or five seeds to get started with a garden. So we had to really start with educating the community first on what this resource actually is. So they take home seeds, two or three seeds from each of the plants that they wanna grow and to label the envelopes so that they know what seeds they're taking home to grow. Then they complete a seed lending library borrowing form. So this is on the honesty factor. I mean, really, we've had great success where they're just logging. We don't ask for a specific name. They can give us their first name. They log what seeds they took and the different varieties that they did take and the date that they did so. And we have created getting started and how to save seed brochures. So we wanted to educate the publics on a pamphlet that they could actually take home. Here's pictures of our Alameda County master gardeners, Nancy on the left and Gail on the right, who we're just phenomenal people to work with and continue to be. Here's a copy of our getting started brochure. So within our population, yes, there's a lot of people who do have a lot of experience in gardening and planting seeds and seed saving, but there's also a large population that doesn't know anything about it. A lot of families who live in apartments who oftentimes the feedback would be, well, I don't have a yard to grow seeds in. Well, let's show you how you can do this at home. You can still grow some of these seeds inside if you have the proper setup for this. So our goal was to start off with the basics. So the getting started brochure, we actually utilized an ESL dictionary to define some of gardening terms that they may need for learning this process because I found myself reading some of these definitions and maybe a little bit more confused after I read the definitions. So, you know, we collaborated and we tried to really develop some vocabulary in common language around what we're doing. We also gave them the seven steps on how to plant your seeds at home. You know, just don't go throw them into the ground. How deep are you supposed to actually plant these seeds? How often are you supposed to water them? So this was just the basics here. And so when somebody fills out the library membership form, they're also taking this brochure with them. And then we have the how to save seeds brochure. So something that I really wanna emphasize is when you're launching a seed lending library, you're not gonna get people to save seeds right away. This is a process, this evolves. And we're still in the process, which Sally's gonna talk to you about in educating the public on what seed saving is. You know, so our first steps that we focused on the last year and a half are getting people actually acclimated to what the system is and to plant seeds, right? Because sometimes you can just go to a nursery and buy the little seedlings and get started already. We're encouraging them to use the seeds. But we created just from the master gardeners and some of their knowledge and their resources, giving them ideas on how to save seeds, wet seeds versus dry seeds. And with the goal of that is actually all around. So the seed lending library, we had to create some sort of goal, right? To put on all of our brochures and something to really work off of here and to educate the community on. So we did a call to action piece. And the goal of the seed lending library is to increase the capacity of Hayward's community to feed itself wholesome food through education that fosters community resilience, self-reliance and a culture of sharing. So we did a press release and we thought, okay, we have our regular library patrons that come in and who've already stopped by to check out this resource. But how can we engage the greater community? We're very fortunate. We have a state college up on the hill. We have a community college. We have our very large school district. So we said, how can we engage the greater community? We need to think up an interesting launch event. So we did. So the big read, we're all familiar with the big read, correct? We put a different twist on things here and we did a seed read. And we waited actually until spring to do this. And what the goal was, we incorporated one of the well-known authors, Janice Ray who wrote The Seed Underground. And we tied that into a seed read kickoff event. So this is a whole health stable that we did here. And what the goal was, this was a five week program where on the first day we did the kickoff event and we brought all of our community partners. So remember when I said something about getting your peeps together? We got all of our peeps together and we had about 25 different organizations that came down and was available to talk to the community about mental health, about physical health, about emotional health, about, we had exercise classes. Cal State came down and led Zumba classes. We had laughter yoga going on, the different ways to engage in healthy living, active living as well. And most importantly, we did a community planting upstairs. So we created a rooftop garden outside of our library window on the second floor. And what we did is we chose seven different seed varieties that the community could choose from and plant. So we got the freshman day of service students from Cal State down in 100 volunteers here to work with the community. We got everybody who came to the kickoff event registered with a seed lending library membership forum. They got to go through, we had the little biodegradable cartons that they can actually plant the seeds into. And then in five weeks, when they came back to pick them up, just put them into their garden and the seedlings will continue to grow. So it was very successful. We had a lot of response. We brought, we partnered with Hard Heroed Area Recreation Park District and we had the bouncy houses out there. So we're just trying to put all of this emphasis on health and how it can be fun and how gardening can be fun here. And then throughout the five weeks, we did programming related to the seed underground. We did book discussion groups with that, which Sally can speak more to. We did gardening workshops, the beginner workshops. You know, everything is on this flyer here. We did cooking, healthy eating workshops. We had a Project Eek come in and they actually showed how to, through the vegetables that they were growing through the seed read kickoff event, they were given recipes on how to utilize what they're growing into their own kitchens, which was really exciting and very successful. So you're probably asking, okay, well, is there any funding available? So Kaiser, Kaiser gives back. Kaiser gives back big time in the Bay Area. So I urge you to check out the community benefits program. So we actually, we didn't think we were ready yet to apply for the grant, so we applied for the sponsorship and we actually got the sponsorship. So Kaiser donated $2,500 to this seed read kickoff event, which we used to purchase more of our gardening supplies and some more seed. Also, the friends of the library kicked over another $3,600 to support what we were doing so that we could really bump up the amount of workshops that we were gonna be offering, the supplies that would be sustainable supplies. But in 2013, Kaiser Permanente invested $1.9 billion in the community benefit programs, so which was huge. And Kaiser actually came down to our event and we had the bicycles that made the Jamba juices, which was really exciting. Here's a little bit more about Janice Ray. We had the Skype discussion. So this actually drew in another population who attended our book groups that really wanted to learn more about this seed lending library as well. And then here are some other pictures here on some of our other events that I told you about. Our cooking classes eat fresh food, Italian style. We did it geared towards teens, so we were trying to inundate all of the populations that we work with at the library. And there is our space. So we actually worked with the graphic artists as well and created a backdrop. But as you can see, it's very basic, but this very basic model is sustainable. And obviously there's staff support and Sally has been an integral part of making this program continue to grow. But the system works. It's a basic system and it continues to work and it continues to grow. So which Sally's now gonna tell you a little bit about the evolution of what we're now working on.