 Okay, so we're gonna get started. Hi, my name is Linda. Welcome to the NCLA government resources sections help. I'm an accidental government information librarian webinar series or help for short and thank you for coming. So today's webinar is called your city your issues civic engagement workshops for staff and students. And we have with us today one of our former presenters she's presented with us a couple of times I think Chris K Chris is the government information librarian for state local and international documents at Stanford's green library. And as of January 2017. She became the head of the library social sciences resources group. So Chris I'm going to hand it over to you. All right, good morning everybody. Thanks for being here on a Monday morning or Monday afternoon. Good morning and or good afternoon wherever you may be. I'm really pleased to see so many people have joined this webinar for this topic. It's an important topic for me and it's something that over the years of the government information librarian. I felt was important to teach but always found it a little challenging to find an avenue on my campus or in my community to teach it. So, I've actually had the opportunity for now the past four years to work on my campus with teaching civic engagement workshops. So with that, we'll get started. One thing I would ask everyone to do. If you could just type into chat, the city that you're located in. And what type of library you work at, I'd be curious to see that usually when I do my civic engagement workshops. I have everybody who comes in right there city up on a post it note as part of kind of our interactivity wow we got a lot of people. All right, so basically for the workshop today. I'm going to cover kind of the genesis of the workshop. I'll go over workshopping my workshop will do a run through the actual slides that I use for the workshop and a quick peek at the activities. I'll go over some considerations and observations and that I've had over the year or the past couple of years and giving these workshops. And I'll give you a peek into what's next and hopefully I'm planning on leaving about 15 minutes for QA and discussion, because I would love to hear what you all are doing in this area or if you have ideas based on the information that I've presented to you that you would like to share and contribute. One thing I do want to say is that being part of the librarian and government information library and community. We all do help each other out on all kinds of aspects of our work. Reference questions come to mind immediately but I feel that we can also help each other build these types of workshops and build a network for this type of work so if anyone is interested in getting a workshop like this setup for their institution or their library. Please do know that I am here to work with you and I would also appreciate any feedback input that you have for me. So I can continue to develop my workshop content. Alright, so how did it all start. I've been working with a group out at the Stanford med school it's an undergraduate class at under the community health advocacy course it's a three quarter course, and I work with the students, typically in the spring quarter. I teach a two and a half hour class on state and local legislation. Basically, I show the students how a bill becomes a law at the state level and at the local level and this is tied into their assignment and their work that they're doing students are all placed in different community organizations and doing various projects throughout the year for them. The final quarter is based is around is geared to getting them to understand how to be effective advocates for their specific communities. So the intent is to have the students understand the policy landscape and how to engage in that policy landscape. The teachers feel have felt that it's been necessary for the students just to understand the basic legislative process. So that way they can effectively advocate for their community. And so, when I teach the class, I try to get the students to understand that the skill that I'm giving them is is a life long learning skill, not just to complete their assignment. That everyone should know how our laws are made from the federal all the way down the local level. And so that's basically how I scoped this particular class. We have hands on activity, which is really great so I get students into our state level legislative portal to be able to do bill tracing. The links are live in this presentation. I'm not going to dip out at the moment, but when you get access to the slides, you'll be able to actually see my activity worksheets that I've constructed. Okay, so this is just basically been a regular garden variety class that I've taught to undergrads over the past several years. And so how did my workshop come about. So one of the instructors had a connection with someone in our be well community on campus and the be well program at Stanford is meant to help our faculty and staff. Be healthy and be well, basically so there's a lot of it's been geared towards kind of physical and recreational fitness. But in the past couple of years they've rolled out something called the commitment to community and the commitment to family under a larger umbrella of engagement. This is partially tied into the overall campus planning for being having the campus be more engaged within the community, both the local community and the broader global community. So our be well program picked up on that theme in our long range planning and created this engagement component. The workshop that I have worked on it falls under this commitment to community. And as you can see here, it's basically staffer encouraged to select a community minded activity such as volunteering for a nonprofit organization. I'm not going to read the whole paragraph here, but basically this workshop what it was designed to give people kind of an inroads or an entree into doing this commitment to community. I basically have adapted my instruction session that I do for undergraduates to a new workshop. That's 60 minutes. And it's pretty much geared towards staff from all over campuses all over campus, although I have noticed that it tends to be a lot from the med school and from the sciences and my theory on that is, it's due to the location where we hold the actual workshop. So it's something to consider where you're holding your workshops in terms of people being able to travel easily to get to it, especially if it's a new time workshop. And I cover basically a civics 101 for local government and I keep the hands on activity as well. And I note here that while it's a 60 minute workshop. In actuality it's 50 minutes what I've observed is because this is sandwiched in between most people's work day. They come in anywhere from five to 10 minutes late and need to leave five to 10 minutes early. So I've worked to really scope the content to fit into 50 minutes. So keeping that in mind if you're building out a workshop like this, you know, just be mindful of how people are going to be needing to move in and out of your workshop to accommodate their schedules. So the workshop being the workshop. I highly recommend doing this. So I have to say, moving from a library instruction session for students to giving a workshop like this for staff, possibly faculty made me very nervous, I wasn't even sure if people would be interested in this. But I think the three engagement coordinator felt that yes, that the time was perfect. This. And again, I'll, this, this all started around 2016. When I started developing this workshop for staff on campus. So given the political climate. She was like no I think people are going to be really interested in this. We don't have to, you know, worry about it being super intense or theoretical or highly academic. I mean I work at Stanford and there are a lot of prominent and preeminent political scientists political theorists historians there. So I have to say I was a little nervous thinking about what can I as a Godox librarian. Give these folks that they couldn't get from some of our faculty on campus. But I have to say that I've changed my thinking on that completely. Just based on giving this workshop and the positive reception that I've gotten from it. So anyways, getting back to workshop in the workshop. As I said I was a little nervous about doing something like this, would it fall flat on its face. How could I adapt it from being just kind of an in class session to, you know, an engaging workshop. My main thing is if you're going to teach a civic engagement workshop. People should be engaged in it and they should be interacting with people. And so I put a call out to my library colleagues on campus to see if they would be interested in helping me road test basically my, my curriculum. So that turned out quite well. I had 13 people volunteer my hope was just to have about five to eight people so that way we could, you know, not have too large of a group in order to go through questions that I had for the participants, and make sure that I had ample time to have feedback on kind of what I was doing and the activities and exercises. And so I had the engagement coordinator that I've been working with to develop the workshop. Also attended this was a huge plus. She was there kind of as just a silent observer to see how people were interacting with the material. She had gone through the workshop slides and activities before this, and had identified areas where I had questions or she had questions about whether or not something would work, or the framing of a particular topic or idea or concept. So so that way she was also able to at specific points during this workshop to kind of chime in and ask questions just to get people's feedback. So that was really helpful. We did this for about one and a half hours over lunch. And we made sure we had ample time because like I said I wanted to use this workshop to really kind of think through and figure out where some of the rough patches were what needed to be smoothed over what needed to be clarified that type of thing. So that gave me plenty of time to do that. And I found that the feedback from my colleagues was really great. I got some excellent suggestions. Two of the most notable ones is that I changed the order of discussion and activities. Initially with the way I had scoped the workshop is we would cover a concept and then do an activity, and then cover another concept and then do another activity and we had three activities. I found that people as soon as I turned them loose with, you know, getting to know their city website and their city government structure. It was really hard to get them, like all gathered back to continue through the lecture portion of the workshop so several people noted, you know, given the amount of time I had for the workshop that I was going to roll out. I should really think about putting the activities at the end that way we could just let people go and that actually has worked out quite well. And so that's been the order of the workshop that I've used ever since. And also, we found that having the three sets of activities was a little too much, especially for the 6060 minute workshop. So one person suggested you know what gives that third exercise as homework to continue that engagement and once people leave. And that's actually worked out quite well as well. And then as I said, this first initial workshopping of the workshop really confirmed that people would be engaged with the material and with the topic. I always have these like second guesses of this type of information and this type of work that I do. So what I'm going to do next is basically walk you through my workshop slides and the activities but in an abbreviated way since we don't actually have a full hour to kind of, you know, give the full workshop. But mainly what I want to do is show you how I've created the workshop, the thinking that went into it and kind of offer suggestions if you want to develop something like this. Now I noticed we've got people from all over the US and Canada. And so one thing that I like to point out is everyone's civic landscape is going to vary from state to state from locality to locality. So if you're going to work on a workshop like this, you know, I'm going to give you kind of some general guidance, but you really will have to dig into your own particular area. And many of us probably, you know, you've already do that you probably already are engaged as certain to a certain degree with your local governments. And so you just build upon that and put in some extra research to pull together all of the materials that will be appropriate for your municipalities and counties. So I thought it might be helpful just to run through kind of what my room setup and supplies are for each of the workshops. And I find that having a room and that's actually one of the classrooms that I teach in. It doesn't look too flexible but it actually is we can move the chairs about. I have a whiteboard and wall space to be able to do kind of some of the workshopping and thinking out loud exercises. I bring my Post-its and Sharpies and as I noted what I do is I have people write down the cities that they live in and then we use one of the big open spaces on the wall to cluster those Post-its together because what we do for the activities is we get people to group together by their city that they live in. And thankfully we've had enough participants usually I get anywhere from 40 to 60 people who show up for these workshops. So we typically get most people have at least two people per city to be able to group them together. In some cases we have folks who are, you know, from a city that there's only one person. So we'll group those folks together. If there are people who live in unincorporated areas, we also will group them as well. Yes, I know I was and the attendance level was quite shocking to me. I don't know why I should be surprised that I, you know, people are showing up for these topics, but I honestly thought that I would get, you know, maybe 15 or 20, you know, people showing up, but our Be Well coordinator did a good job of promoting it. And I think part of that was just the timing was right. I think people are really interested in engaging at the local level and trying to make a difference and grasped onto, you know, this type of workshop and are interested in this type of information. So yeah. And so basically what we do, as I was saying, as we as we move into the activity portion of the workshop, we would group people according to their cities because one of my kind of takeaways for this workshop is to get people to talk to other people in their city. And that is a form of engagement, especially if they've got issues that they might both be interested in. You start to build up a network of like-minded people to work on these issues. And so that's actually worked quite well. People get to meet people that they didn't know that they worked with that also live in their same city. A lot of issues that end up coming up in the workshop are, you know, people's challenges with things like commuting, a development project that people are concerned about, things like that. Of course, some pens and pencils, copies of the activity worksheet need to be brought, and then laptops, tablets or mobile devices. This was a little tricky at the beginning. I was schlepping 10 to 15 laptops with me over to this room. So the first time we did that and that was just a little too much for me to deal with. So thankfully, as we do the reminder emails to folks for the workshop, we asked them to bring a laptop, a tablet or a mobile device. Most people, I was impressed. They do show up with an iPad or a laptop, but we do have a few, quite a few people who use their mobile device to do the activities. And that's quite impressive because we talk about how accessible their city's websites are. And I remind them, you know, you can also talk to your city about the fact that it's hard to find information on their website and that their website isn't very usable in these different settings. So we get some usability testing of the city websites and when we do this as well. But it is key. You do have to make sure that you have some way to connect into a city website and have an internet connection. I didn't note that you need, you know, Wi-Fi, but that is important because the activities are all about going online and working with the city website. I have a look at the municipal codes and have them look up a variety of other pieces of information about their city. So you do need to make sure that they can connect to the internet in some way. Sorry, there we go. Alright, so workshop goals. I have three main goals. And it's, they're pretty simple straightforward, basically just to gain a better understanding of the local government decision making process. I think that there's a lot of information at the federal level on how a bill becomes a law. But I don't know how many of you have run across from your city, how a kind of bill becomes a lot in the local arena. I know when I worked in Los Angeles, I was able to ask the city clerk for such a thing that was great. They had a really nice graphic that they could share for me. I think it was not readily available on a website. So that was something that I had to kind of dig out. I don't know, I'd be curious if others out there have found this for their cities or for their counties, and if you have just kind of drop that into chat because I'm curious about that. Yes, Jennifer, I found keeping it local is was more. Yes, I would keep it local and I'll go into that and at the end when I go over my considerations and observations. The other goal is to make sure that I explore way or that we explore ways to make your voice heard and connect with your city officials and agencies. In developing out this workshop, the one thing that the community engagement coordinator emphasized is she's like, we're going to have people coming from all different backgrounds from those who have never, you know, they maybe they voted, but they've never had any interactions with their local community to those who may be on boards or commissions or activists in the community. So we had to make sure that we could offer a wide range of opportunities for people, especially, you know, given everyone's kind of life circumstances. Not all people are going to be able to run for office so we didn't want to be putting out, you know, just a very narrow set of opportunities with a high level of engagement we wanted to make sure that people could feel that they could be engaged, even if it was just in kind of measured ways like tuning into your city council online or submitting comments to an article about an issue that you're concerned about, or even just signing up for your city council's agendas and their newsletters. Lastly, we talked about some resources for staying on top of the issues in the community. And those are pretty much the basics, you know, how to, you know, identify your local news sources, consideration of using Facebook or other social media to follow issues that are pertinent to your government. So the workshop outline is basically have three components. We have a discussion of what is civic engagement. I give a civics 101 a very brief civics 101 lesson, and then we break into the activities. So here. What's really open is what does civic engagement mean to you. I have folks just break into small groups where they're sitting so one or two people. This gives everybody an opportunity to introduce themselves I asked them to say you know their name, and what department they work on and campus, and also say which city they live in, about that. And then I asked them to come up with one or two definitions for what civic engagement means to them. And what are the opportunities and what are the challenges. And this is a really great. Again, I usually give about five minutes for this discussion and then we do a share out, depending on the size of the audience and kind of the, I don't know just the kind of overall level of engagement that they have sometimes this is run even longer because people really, you know, dig in and start discussing this topic. I find that a lot of people have an easier time coming up with challenges to civic engagement and opportunities, which is not surprising to me because I know that it can be rather, it can be very challenging to be civically engaged, especially if you have, you know, again I was talking about those life circumstances you have kids your caregiver, you know, work life. There's all kinds of things in our lives that can make it difficult to really be engaged with your local government so that's, I find that's a good way to kind of set the tone for the overall workshop, and also to let people know that yes, there are challenges and that's okay so you have to do. You have to be mindful of where you're coming from and do what you can and feel good about that. So typically, after we get everybody to share out a whiteboard all that as we do the whiteboarding. One of the responses will resonate with the rest of the group. And, you know, people we can start checking off things that will that, you know, are common across all the different groups that they were talking about their definitions. One thing I wish I would have done with that portion of the workshop so I've taught about half a dozen of these I wish I would have taken pictures of the whiteboard to collect that information. I think it would have been really rich for me to use both for this workshop but just out of general interest and potentially presenting on this topic as well. So that's just something I would say if you do any type of whiteboarding or, you know, breakout, try to find a way to gather that information. I've not been so good with that myself. So if I'm actually going forward I'll make sure that I integrate that into, you know, the workshop that I do. So typically what I, after we kind of have that discussion, I'll break out and give some definitions of civic engagement and I'd like to open up with voting. As you guys, the first couple of workshops, nobody mentioned voting. And that was a little, not shocking but surprising to me because I always think of voting as kind of the one of the easiest ways that you can be civically engaged. And so I made sure that I spend some time on kind of talking about how voting is an active civic engagement. I actually love this image. It's a friend of mine at one of the women's marches. And I was so happy to see that she was photographed for one of our local news outlets. And this also just resonates with a lot of people and generates some fun comments and discussion. I'm also an international government information librarian, and so I was really pleased that I was able to call upon the United Nations Development Program for a really good solid definition of civic engagement. It's succinct, and I think really kind of covers, you know, the definition quite well. And I also bring in from the Caroline Institute, this is a really good publication, as well as it offers a really good definition for civic engagement. And I'd like to use this as a resource for folks who are interested for more information about civic engagement so I built in both the definition but also this publication into the workshop content. And I also drew upon the youth.gov civic engagement rubric here. One of the things I did to prepare for this workshop is I attended two of the other workshops in this particular community commitment to community set of workshops. So they all offered kind of a framework for either community engagement, or whatever the other types of engagement that they were talking about so I was a little hard pressed to think of okay well what would be a framework, a framework for civic engagement. And with just a little bit of digging I found this from youth.gov which I thought really outlined and framed civic engagement quite well. So once we go through kind of our definitions of civic engagement, I launch into what I consider my kind of civics 101. And one of the things that I lay out and is basically what are the jurisdictions that we're talking about. And I want to make sure people are mindful that even though we're talking about city or municipal engagement. Cities don't just exist in isolation they're part of larger counties they're part of larger regions. There's special districts that they're part of. So oftentimes decisions and issues that are of concern within your city are also of concern in the larger area so for us in the Bay Area. So you can see we've got about a nine county region region. And we're very close geographically speaking. So oftentimes issues dealing with environmental impacts with development with transportation. So it's not going to impact not just your local city, but because people travel to work, long distances in some cases, or, and they live in different counties, a lot of these issues span, you know, across all these different jurisdictions. So it's something to kind of help frame and contextualize and kind of where folks are and how some of these issues will be similar across these different either cities or jurisdictions and the image on the far right on this slide is basically San Mateo County. Let's see how close the cities all are together so you know in the past couple of years topics on housing and homelessness have been very important to the region. But a lot of the cities have also been working in close collaboration on these topics. So that's just something to show that you know, and also to get the point across that if you are dealing with an issue in your city. You can also go to another city that may be dealing with the issue, you can show up to another city's city council, you can engage those city council members. Most definitely that's actually been a question that I've gotten in the course of this workshop is, well if I live in San Francisco, am I able to go and provide public comment at a, you know, a Palo Alto, or a San Carlos. And the answer is yes. So this is just a way to kind of emphasize how you can be engaged not just in your very local community but in a regional way. And then I turned to using the National League of Cities to also kind of lay out the kind of formal definition for the various forms of municipal governments. If you aren't familiar with the National League of Cities, I highly recommend spending some time on their website. They have a lot of really great and useful information on just kind of local governance forms of governments. This is not the kind of material that is typically I find in any kind of textbook. They've done a really good job of putting together primers and just kind of basic guides on all of this. And then I talk about the two types of form of governments in California, and I don't know for those of you in other states, how your kind of cities are organized. In California we have a charter city and a general law city. And so I'm able to pull from our state constitution in terms of how these, what these definitions are, and give this is actually one of the activities that I have people do is to figure out are they a general law city or are they a charter city? And then we talk a little bit about the differences in terms of how laws are developed and what laws are used in terms of governing if you're a general law versus a charter city. And an interesting question I've gotten from this particular slide is what happens if a city passes a law, if you're a general law city and you pass a law that's in direct conflict with the state statutes. And that was a good question that I didn't have, I had an answer for, but it wasn't off the top of my head answer, which I was able to do a little bit of research and get back to the person on. Basically, that's when they go to court, if they need to. And that's where I use the kind of assistance of our law librarians to work through that particular question. So, you know, I would also recommend that when you're preparing for this type of talk, you kind of think about all the different kinds of questions that might come up in terms of helping people understand these cities and how they work and develop their laws. The other thing that I point out to people are the key offices in their cities and that these are offices that they may want to be aware of one for if they need to engage in any way if they've got an issue that they want to talk to your city council members, city managers. I point out the role of the city clerk and the city attorney. Also talk about the different boards and commissions, especially those that are like the citizen commissions, many people may not be aware that there's blue ribbon commissions and citizen commissions that they can serve on that they're, you know, short term and they're usually around a particular task or issue. And those are often really good opportunities for them to be involved with their city. Yes, Robert, it's dependent on the laws of each state. Yep. So, again, showing you what I cover for California, you're going to have to figure out what that looks like in your own state and in your own counties and cities. Thanks for pointing that out. So then I go into kind of the how a bill becomes a law at the city level. And basically this is how local agencies make things happen. This I got from the Institute for local government, which is an organization here in California was really great. I'm not really thrilled with the slide it's text heavy I'd actually like to develop something that's more graphical. I've not had the time or the skill set to do that. So if anyone has those skills and has ideas and suggestions, or like to work on that with me, please get in touch. But this just is basically just walks people through kind of, you know, how policies are made at the local level. I do point out in California, the brown act and open public meetings. I think it's important for two reasons. One, I want people to be aware that attendance at open public meetings, as well as the ability to provide public comment is in the statutes and that people are guaranteed that right by law. But also, if they are working on a particular issue, and they want to meet with their city council members or their county supervisors, they have to be aware of the open public meetings law or the brown act. So it's important that you can't meet with all of them in one sitting. If you do that means they have a quorum that's been called and that constitutes a meeting that then falls under the brown act. So a strategy that they have to be aware of if you're going to be working with your local lawmakers is you will be having to meet with them one on one and individually. And I remind them that in some cases, depending on the topic or the questions that they bring, they may not actually be able to comment on or respond to some of those questions due to some of these particular brown act laws or brown act. And then one of the things that I've brought in to kind of illustrate the process of people being engaged in a particular issue is an example that has actually come up several times. So these workshops several people have been involved with this issue in one of our cities where there was a gun store that was opening and the city, a group of people in the city kind of rose up to block it. And I show this for as a demonstration of a couple of different issues. One is the amount of time it takes. As you can see here, this issue first cropped up in 2017. And as of January, March of 2019. The city was working on adopting the firearm regulations. So it took a couple of years. And then I also, you know, point this out to show how local coverage of these issues is made. And then how they can use these type of articles to, you know, figure out who they might want to talk to. Are there other groups that they might want to align with if they're interested in this particular issue. And then we move into kind of remember I said that kind of spectrum of engagement so from kind of very easy what I would consider easy, you know, low barrier of entry engagement opportunities up to very high level of engagement. And so this is just kind of a checklist that people can run through. I should point out that the organizations linked in the bullet, the last bullet here goes to the League of women voters who do some really good policy briefs for the local community on particular issues. And so I would also recommend that for those of you if you're looking for other groups to tie into this, look for your League of women voters, especially if they have local chapters, but the state level chapters can also be really great as well. And then we move on into, you know, more opportunities and getting involved. And lastly, I do put the the kind of I try to plant the seed of running for office. I have to say I've heard of one person who has run for their local school board after coming to one of these so that was, I thought that was really cool. And I know that this that the workshop was necessarily the impetus to do it but I'd like to think that at least if they were thinking about doing it this maybe help to kind of push them over the edge and really, you know, take that leap into community service in that way. And for the local area I just point out some of the different opportunities for training. San Mateo County does a really good job of teaching a civics 101 for the county level. I've taken that and found it one to be very useful for developing this workshop, but it's also they teach it every. Every other year so I've encouraged people to take that as well. And then reminding people about getting out to vote. And this, you know, past year we've got census 2020 efforts. So encouraging people to get involved with census 2020 complete count committees and working with their local organizations to do that as well. And then just a long laundry list of resources for folks. And then we dip into getting to know your city. And so there are two activities that we cover in classes the city structure and getting to know the issues before you in your city and I'm going to hope that this screen share will work. Yes, it did. I hope everyone can see that. So this is basically the worksheet that I give them. I worried it was too much and the amount of time that we had to work on it but actually through the workshopping exercise and then just teaching this workshop. I found that people got through it people were doing the bonus questions that I gave them. Many people had never really kind of had a chance to kind of dive into their city council website and look at what they had there to look for the agendas. Sometimes this was the first time people have ever looked at the municipal codes for their city. So that is, you know, something that people find really interesting and it's really cool to see how once people get in there and look up, you know, I had them looking at marijuana laws or smoking regulations that they started thinking about what was important to them and they're like well what is in the municipal code on this particular issue that I'm concerned about. And then I have some additional and forthcoming content so this isn't really prepped and ready for prime time, but it'll give you an idea of what I'm thinking about adding and it's based on questions that I've received. And then of course of these different workshops. So kind of giving people a better idea of how cities, counties, special districts, kind of all work together. And this was something that I found through the civics 101 class that I took with the San Mateo County. So just kind of giving people more overview of counties and county governments, a discussion of unincorporated areas because we do have people at least one to two at each of the workshops who are living in unincorporated areas. So I'm interested to find out how does that, how does all this work for them, going over regional governments or councils of governments, special districts, and then just other types of boards and commissions. So in conclusion, I have some considerations and observations. And for this gets to your point of, yes, you can do this at any jurisdiction. And the federal is what I've always seen it covered I taught that I don't work on federal government documents in my current position, but in previous positions I did. And I think that the focus on local is is just it's timely right now people are interested in it. And it's also, I think, easier for people to be engaged at the local level. You know when you're working up at the national levels, there's a lot of other different challenges that can be presented that people may not have the time to travel and such. I found that resources for local level aren't as ample as at the federal level, and I would say also for state level so you know you've got everything, you know, pro quest has, you know, tons of things that they can kind of hand you to do this type of work at the local level I found I had to really scramble to do it. So make sure you're weaving in your professional or your personal civic engagement experiences into the workshop. I do that. I talk about a group that I worked with that was trying to save an ice ring from being closed down. I was able to kind of weave that in. I've also we've been some of the other work that I did down in Los Angeles. It helps to personalize it and also show that you know how you're involved in your local community. As I mentioned before, cultivate good working relationships with your campus or county law librarians. They're great to talk to about some of these issues because a lot of this is dealing with actual laws and regulations. So I relied on my law librarians to ask them questions to help me find specific case law or find things in our state statutes or in municipal codes. Definitely do not skip out on activities and getting people working together in this in this type of workshop. And I know this is going to be a challenge going forth in the zoom environments that's something I will have to work on. And as I noted, this may be the first time that some of your participants will actually look at their city's website. And I find that just really thrilling when people do that and they're like, wow, and then you just kind of see this light bulb turn on and they are really interested and they like I didn't know this. I didn't know that I didn't know, you know, this that my, you know, city council was structured this way. I vote for these people but I never really think about who they are and what they do. And I would also make sure that you use and incorporate participants experiences with local government. You'll find that you'll have people who have been on boards and commissions or our community activists that show up and really incorporate their work and their insight. I also try to make sure that I temper the discussion with with temper this discussion to let people know that, you know, not everything works out as you hope. A lot of times if you've got an issue that you're trying to, you know, get before council or that you're advocating for. Sometimes you don't come out on the winning side and working with governments can be very challenging. It's very easy. So when you have people who have actually done the work in your workshop. It's great to be able to incorporate and give them some time to talk about what they did and what they found challenging and what they found rewarding. And lastly, this is just something I have to remind myself that as librarians we are very well equipped to do this. We know how to find the information. We know how to convey it. And I think we know how to work with community members with staff with students in a way that maybe faculty or kind of experts in the field. The one piece of feedback that I've gotten consistently from my in class workshop so working with the community health advocacy group as well as this workshop was the just actually getting people in to the databases or to the portals to look up a piece of legislation or to have a city council agenda and read the minutes or to actually just figure out oh this is where the city code is and this is how I search it and this is how I actually find something in it. And then what's next I have an upcoming workshop that will be on zoom it's going to be 90 minutes this was actually developed before our shelter in place orders came out. It's actually supposed to be in person. So this will be interesting I see somebody's asked about how. And then it convert this for online. I had that is what I am working on this week. So stay tuned, I can let you know how that works but I'm looking at doing. Break out rooms, figuring out ways to get people to be able to share out so possibly using whiteboards, it will be a true experiments and I've not done something like that before, hopefully going to do a run through. At the end of this week just to kind of road test out some of these these options. And the other big thing is I want to make sure that I take into consideration the impact of COVID-19 and what's going on right now and being mindful of that. So, I think that's it. I know I went a little over time I went way over time. I wanted to give about 10 or 15 minutes at the end for questions and comments. I think it's probably about five minutes so I apologize for that. But let me see what we've got in chat if I missed anything. Jennifer had a question about assessment tools. Yeah, okay so for the staff and workshop. I think it was the actually the be well group they send out an assessment. It's very lightweight. So just basically, you know, did, you know, kind of the common questions was the speaker knowledgeable. What are your expectations that type of thing and so those have all been really positive. And the comments have all been very positive. So, but I haven't done anything myself, I probably should do that. And that would be something and be good to work on. So, you know, some anecdotal, you know, information about how effective this was but that is going forward something I would like to do. I should note that currently the be well classes like this are on hold, given the current situation so we'll see when I get this back up and running for that that particular community. Great, thank you. And there was a question content of civic engagement in a pandemic link. Yes, there is. That's basically if that is a very quick Google search but there's some really great articles on there. There's one from political science calm that I would recommend. MPR actually has done a story on this and then not surprisingly World Health Organization UNICEF have some resources for this. There are Stanford Innovation Lab has an article about it as well. Clearly people are thinking about this and there, there's a lot of resources that are starting to come out so that's what I'm trying to make my way through at the moment to kind of read through all of it and then compile kind of the things I think that will work best for the this upcoming workshop. Great, thank you very much. Any last questions that we missed in the chat we had a lot of good questions today. So, I have carved out for the activities 30 minutes. So, basically, I do about 25 minutes of kind of talking on the civics 101. That includes about five to seven minutes with kind of the discussion on what civic engagement is. And then, like I said, because of the way the staff workshop has been run. See here sorry, my cat is on my keyboard. The way the staff workshop has been run, you know, people will leave early because they've got to get to, you know, their next meeting, or they have to get back to work. So sometimes you know they can only spend 15 or 20 minutes working on that. But it really just depends on you know how much time you've got for your session. If you've got a 90 minute session, you can give a little bit longer time. I feel it's better to give more time to the activities. I also walk around during that time and answer questions and see what people are coming up with. So that's a chance for me just to kind of mix and mingle with the groups. Jennifer was asking to have your attendance increased or decreases is now part of a bigger event on campus. Um, no, actually the participation has been pretty stable. I would say, you know, the first time I did it, I think we have 40 people and then we moved to a bigger room. They had to cap it at 40 people. So when we moved to a bigger room that could accommodate 60. It inched up a little bit more. So, like I said, I think the maximum I had at one point was at one of them was 60, but typically it's about 45 to 50 people. I just want to say thank you again Chris for for doing this is a great topic and a lot of really good off of the information. Jennifer is asking how often do you offer the workshops. So, hey, Jaina, who's the person who runs the component of the be well engagement series. She would like for me to teach it quarterly a couple times a quarter. I just can't do that, given my schedule so typically I teach in our, like winter or spring and quarters and I do one or two workshops per quarter. So right now, not that many. And, you know, I would I would love to have more time in bandwidth to do this more frequently but I don't. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing. Thank you everybody for coming and I think that