 All right, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for being here. This is our presentation, Reaching Out by Reaching In, Outreach as Community Building, Inside and Outside the Library. OK, so quick intros. My name is Steph Yoon. I'm a PPT library aide. I work in the teen zone at our main branch in Oakland. And my pronouns are they, them, theirs. My name is Andrea Guzman. I'm a library assistant in the community relations office of the Oakland Public Library and currently an MLIS student. Hi, my name is Peggy Simmons. I am a permanent part-time library assistant working for Teen Services for the Oakland Public Library. My main task, but not my only task, is running the Oakland Youth Po-Lawyer program. OK, so real quick, just kind of thinking to yourselves, we want to do a role called Who's in the Room? So librarians, paraprofessionals, public, academics, supervisors, managers, the places that you work. We imagine maybe a lot of librarians in the room, but thinking about who do we want in these spaces and who has access to being able to come to a really cool conference like this. So just think about that, especially as you send folks off to professional development opportunities. Kind of keep that with you throughout the presentation. Raise your hand if you're a paraprofessional. Real quick. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Woo. See you. Glad to see so many. And our librarians, where are you at? Yeah, showing up. OK. OK. So we get a sense of who's in the room right now. So we're talking about outreach. And we're thinking that, as demonstrated by this gift, maybe your outreach looks like this. You give someone a flyer. Maybe they're not super juiced about it. And that's the end of your day, a mission accomplished, right? Maybe not. So we want to talk about outreach, not just as giving out flyers and kind of measuring numbers of how many people we've reached, but really building relationships and being able to kind of keep outreach not only sustainable for you and your staff, but also figuring out how you can build those relationships in community and how that will come back to you quantified in different ways that might not be as easily measured, but will really come back to benefit your community and the library as an institution. OK. So yeah. I mean, we're all in a rush. And we're all kind of trying to get things done. And there isn't all the hours in the day to build those relationships with people if you're just handing out flyers really frantically. And that's kind of the job. So really, we want to talk about how are ways that you can spend more time and energy into getting to know the people that come to your libraries and to know the people that work with you, especially your non-librarian staff who most likely represent the communities that you're serving and also have lots of skills and relationships that maybe they might not be as tapped into as they could be and making sure it's also like an equitable and sustainable and fair relationship to your non-librarian staff as well. So I know that lots of us work really hard on our annual reports. The data is very important. However, pleasing just the stakeholders or the folks who may not even come or use your library. And putting pictures of brown kids, great. Like all the optics are fine. But ultimately, it's really corny if you're not actually being authentic about their relationships that you're building, right? So the good data is gonna come from good relationship building. So it's really important for us not to just focus on those numbers, right? But the actual relationships that we're building. So we're gonna give you two different examples of programs that might not have been considered outreach but are really wonderful outreach programs that are run at the Oakland Public Library and they have been run in large part, not completely, but in large part by paraprofessional staff. I'm gonna interject right here too that I just want you all to know that we first prepared this presentation for CLA. Last year, maybe some of you saw it and we had 90 minutes and so now we're getting 90 minutes into 20 minutes. So excuse me if I start to talk really fast. All of us. So the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate program started in 2012. Steph didn't mention it before but Steph is actually Oakland's first Youth Poet Laureate. They are the 2012 Poet Laureate. We'll be starting to look for our ninth Youth Poet Laureate in January. It's for ages 13 to 18, Youth in Oakland and all kinds of kids, all kinds of poets come to the program and we're developing the program very purposefully now to be more of a community of young poets supporting each other rather than one winner who gets a $5,000 scholarship. We really naturally developed that way but we're doing it much more purposefully now or figuring out how to do it much more purposefully. But over those seven, eight years, the program has grown enormously. The 2018 Youth Poet Laureate, Leila Motley, she, so she was Laureate for one year, she had a video made of one of her poems by YR Media that got 91,000 views just on Facebook. When was the last time you did a program that reached 91,000 people? So that was huge. She performed all kinds of places. We don't have a great count but she definitely in that year was in front of more than 2,000 people. This year we have 10 finalists so we're working with this group of finalists. They were named in April and in the past six months since they were named, they have been at 21 different events around town and in addition to those 21 events, the Laureates themselves were in front of 12 more, were in 12 more events, performed at 12 more events. And so that was 33 different events just in the past six months that these young people performed at. And that was at schools, business events, churches, senior centers, street fairs, museum events, et cetera. These young people got to speak their truth, their beauty, their stories in front of all kinds of people and the hundreds of people in the past six months. So I mean when you're talking, and the library's behind all of that, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that in a second but Steph's gonna say a couple of things about. Yeah, so something I really would love to speak to you about the program is that like especially in this time and age where I hear it all the time with people, they're like, oh, what relevance does libraries have? Don't they just have books and that's it? Don't they still use the card system? And this is one way in which you can show folks, like having programs like these show folks that like, no, the library's a lot more than just books, like the books are really important. Yeah, and all the information you can get is really important, but it's also a community hub in general and us being able to go out into the community and not trying to show people into our branches, which we'd like them to go there eventually, but like trying to get that first point of contact, that interaction is really, really important. And for me, like the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Program was my first like real kind of thought and like folding into library work because I've been in the libraries like as a kid and I like used it pretty regularly, but like seeing the kind of work that they were doing, seeing them support a program like this, I kind of thought more about like, I could see myself working and wanting to support that kind of work because it's in alignment with what I wanna do. So being able to show your patrons and community, like there's so much more that's available at the library that they might not already know about that you're already doing and whatever like programs and awesome things that you plan to do in the future. And especially getting their input is really important. So that's the piece I wanna mention. Great. So the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Program that the library is running is developing opportunities, skills, communication, peer support, et cetera for these young people. That's a wonderful program for the young people. We are massively elevating the voices of these young people and again, very different young people from different parts of Oakland. We're partnering with each one of those events, those 33 events that was 33 people organizing events who now we have relationships with, some better than others, but that's an amazing way to partner with people. We're reaching new people all the time and we're building community. If again, if you think about outreach as building community, this program is absolutely doing it on all different kinds of levels. All kinds of people are hearing these young people's voices and they are out there making friends and talking about interesting things and talking about the things that they're passionate about. That's a lot of what community is about. So we're not saying, hey, this is a library event, but the library's behind all of it. And so at the same time, the library is building an amazing reputation. We're not doing it to gain, we're not running the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Program so the library will be like, hey, the library is fantastic. But by running the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Program, the library is building a really wonderful reputation. The young people say wonderful things about the library and the program. And so by building community, we are also at the same time enriching the library. All right, on to Ready Set Connect. Program I was running a few years ago. So Ready Set Connect is a youth development, tech focused youth professional development program. And really with the goal of bridging the digital divide. So we would work on soft skills with young people and they would also get exposure to the tech industry, get some work, experience, really great program. I was actually introduced to the program as an intern, so I was one of the youth in it. And kind of like Stephanie, I kind of fell in love with the library world. I ended up running the program, getting hired as a permanent staff and now in my MLIS program to hopefully become a librarian soon. So this is just from 2017 to 2018, so just one year. We had over 650 hours that were dedicated on one-on-one help with patrons to bridging the digital literacy divide. And we had over 1200 sessions in nine different branches. So what this does is you're both having young people talk about the library, be a part of the library, maybe even getting hired by the library because we hired a lot of the young people who were in that program to be library A's, library assistants. But in addition to that, you're also building connections with the community. They're seeing friendly faces. Folks are learning the digital literacy skills at the library, which we know is a really huge issue that we're grappling with now. And yeah, so essentially what we're trying to tell you is, so both of those programs were run by paraprofessionals, right? The whole thing. So we know that librarianship, librarians are not super diverse for the most part. I know it's a little different in the Bay Area, but we know the stats, it doesn't look great. So your non-librarians and your prior professionals are going to be key to the outreach you do. And so we must ask you to really examine your institution and ask yourself, who makes up your staff? Yeah, so let's talk about the D word, which is diversity. It's a big hot buzzword. I think it's great to see different organizations in different realms of the workforce and the public really catching up. But we really also want to emphasize and examine, what does diversity mean? What does it look like? How do you know your staff is actually diverse? And in the context of a library system, does your library value your paraprofessional staff? Do you recognize and really think about the different skills that they bring, especially given the rich life experiences that you have a lot of thinking about where especially the racial and ethnic diversity, where is it concentrated in your staff? Is it primarily your paraprofessionals? Are they coming up to the librarians as well? And thinking about how do you measure that and how do you know you're not just potentially using people for optics? Even if you don't intend to, look at how diverse our staff is, but really looking at them as full people to develop, folks that you can go to who have knowledge, who have wisdom, and really folding them into the planning and work processes sooner. Not like, oh, can you help me hand out more flyers? But thinking about what perspectives they bring. So how do you know that your staff is diverse? How can you measure it? Who shares your views? How do you value them and making sure that those folks feel supported as well? And it's a reciprocal relationship and not potentially using them at opportune moments. So yeah, and how do you know that they find their work meaningful? And not just like, oh, I like my job, but whatever they're bringing to the table is fully recognized that you see them as a whole person. And that, especially, I work as an aide and a lot of the things can be clerical and that's part of the job duty, sure. But it's really exciting when people ask me about other opportunities that align with my interests and skills and areas in which I have expertise, but are we asking that question to everyone even if people don't know about me? Are you asking that of all your staff and really thinking about, do I know who my staff is? Do I know them as people outside of the library? So there's a diversity of your staff because I hear it all the time. Oh, our library is so diverse, it's so diverse. But where is the diversity concentrated? Is it that all of the lesser paid folks is that where the diversity is and all the folks who have full compensation, less diversity there? Thanks to ask. And something we hear all the time, not just in tech, but also for librarians, it's a pipeline issue. Is it really? So some things, again, to ask or push or advocate for, do you provide mentorship? So OPL has informal mentorship opportunities for people who are interested in the MLIS and that's been a huge source of help. Hassan, I see, helps to run that. Do you allow for flexible scheduling for students, right, students who are embarking in the MLIS degree? Do you have money to make that happen? Because money is obviously also a racial in class issue who gets to have wealth and not. And do you have job shadowing opportunities? And then if I could mention one thing that all three of us talked about in our CLA presentation, but each one of us had also people in our corner, like people to support us, not just in these very specific, like library specific ways, but like folks we knew would have our back that we could talk to, that we could troubleshoot, that we could like vent to and like being that person for your non-library and staff has been really key, it can be really key, especially for retaining your staff, for keeping them in the work, for keeping them happy and just, you know, knowing where folks are at. So again, to point out, are there real chances for development? And the reason that we're focusing along the prayer professional staff is because a lot of that stuff belongs to the community that you serve, right? A lot of times they're local to that neighborhood, local to that city and oftentimes the librarians are not. So this is why this is the focus. And so, yep. Oh, is that me? So, like Steph was saying, there was always somebody who got us into this work that we have loved and developed. In 2012, when the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate program started, I was volunteering for it because I had been working with young people for decades and I had been working, doing community writing workshops in Oakland for years and so I jumped on the bandwagon and was doing this even not as an employee. And it would have been kind of crazy to, as opportunities developed, to not plug me into them. It would have not been taking advantage of my skills and my network. And but we need to be doing that in a way that's not just to put a name on, like if you're doing a project with, I'm just gonna throw it out there. Let's talk about, no. If you're gonna try to go back to something that was said this morning, but I think I want, if you're developing a program, for example, there's a lot of Guatemalans in your community and you wanna be doing a program with Guatemalans, if you invite somebody from Guatemala to come to the program, but you're not developing that program with them, then it's gonna be hard to get it right and to really look at what those folks need. I was just throwing an example out there. And so me, as somebody from the writing community being a part of this program, it made sense, but you don't wanna tokenize anybody either. It's not just to look good. It's not just as Steph said earlier, the optics of it. So really looking at if you're tokenizing or exploiting your paraprofessional staff, I think we can. Compensation is a big one, just putting that out there. So how do you know the depth and diversity and skills of your paraprofessional colleagues? Again, like Steph said earlier, there was a couple people who really advocated for me. Librarians who were like, Peggy needs to be doing this and with a lot of patience on all of our parts, we made it happen. And so eventually I was running the program or mostly running the program. So acknowledge skills and experience of your paraprofessional staff, honor their input experience and perspective. You have to know them in order to do that and recognize and credit their efforts always. And again, not just by tokenizing them so you can say, oh, yeah, I asked my aide about that, but really see what that person has to offer. And this includes, it's not just paraprofessionals, librarians of color have to deal with this all the time. So for white librarians, please also be very mindful about the ideas that you're stealing from people and not crediting or supporting fully. Cause that's a big one. Go ahead, Andrea. Again, so opportunities, the whole purpose really is like, is it meaningful or folks are actually developing in their positions? Yes, we have mundane, everyone has mundane work that they have to do, but we have to be extremely mindful about how folks are developing because if they're not really developing, they're not gonna talk great about the workplace and that's gonna reflect on the community, especially considering if the bulk of your paraprofessionals are from the community that you're serving, people aren't quite when they don't like their jobs, they vent and that does not reflect very well because those peoples, moms, kids, sisters, brothers come to the library. Yeah, I think it's, if we could go back one slide real quick, it's also important to recognize that while we want more opportunities to offer professional development to folks, if they're also not down with it, then you gotta kind of leave it at that too. Like respecting if they decline, like cause there's so many different factors on like why they, it might not be a good fit or why they don't want it and like, I can speak from experience, it's really hard to manage up. I think like if you can go back to any work experience you've had and you've had to try to talk with a supervisor or talk with someone and just the power dynamics in play, it is so hard to say no and not feel like it reflects badly on you that like you're gonna, like it's gonna mess up your chances. So don't make any assumptions about what they want or what they need, but don't make assumptions also about their backgrounds and experiences too. Like this is why it's really key, not just building relationships outside the community, but within your community and the community of the library, your staff, your team that you see every day. So we recommend both uplifting and collaborating with your paraprofessional staff, setting up support systems. Everybody needs somebody to be advocating for them and listening to them and advocating them. Just, you know, again, one individual can make a huge difference, advocate for paraprofessionals, especially if they're usually part of the communities that you are aiming to serve. Yeah, and to speak on the point of setting up support systems, again, like you want to be able to get input from those folks, have them part of the conversation and making sure that even if you have a system in place, it's not inaccessible, it's not hard to get to, it's not hard to approach and that people feel like they can go to it. Like it doesn't mean much if you have something in place and no one feels empowered to use it, you know? So for those of you who are lucky enough to grab a zine and sense lots of your librarians, you can know how to make a zine or you can look it up. This is a zine. We have some, this is basically these two slides that we're not gonna go through are basically some hard questions to ask yourself when you're designing a program or serving a particular community and for those who want a PDF, please email me because I can do that. Oh, oh, we have time, okay, cool. Oh, I mean, that was really... Well, we're gonna do questions. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Yeah, just, I guess I'll... Please email us if you have questions. Again, if you want copies of the PDF, the zine as a PDF, you know, strongly recommend it. Yeah, and I guess a little more context for this amazing zine that Andrea put together and it's really cute. It's an asset recognition exercise that we had in a previous version of this presentation that we can't go over in depth today, but you can take it home with you, fold it up. You have to make at least one cut and get a pair of scissors, but those are in the back also with some postcards. Not the scissors, just the zine. Not the scissors, the zine template. And there are also postcards in the back kind of talking about the Open Youth Polaroid Program. Peggy and I also can tell you more about it, mostly Peggy, because she's like running the program. Yeah. Because ultimately, community is the asset, right? Without community, without folks actually believing what we do, libraries are nothing. They're just a bunch of people working in a building feeling really great about themselves. So we have to be real loving and also very critical about how we conduct our business. Yeah. We got questions. Yeah, Q and A. Two questions. So there was something in the, an early slide that said outcomes or experiences, not outcomes or something. Do you have, do you evaluate any of your outreach events or programs where it's, you know, someone says to you, you say, we had a great event, we talked to 30 people and they say, only 30 people? Yeah, you're not doing that next year. Like, is this measured and how do you measure it? Because I find like a lot of times with outreach events it's like, well, did you issue new cards? Well, did that person come into the library? Did they check out a big old stack of books? And that's how they measure outcomes. Do you have a way of measuring your outcomes or? Yes, so that's a hard one. I work at the community relations office and that's something that we think about all the time. But again, it's having to make the case that the relationships are what's gonna pay off in the end. But I know that can be very difficult to make because people do look at the numbers. So I mean, I think that's why a lot of folks rely on a lot of them, the qualitative data, whatever stories that you can get from people, especially if you do evaluations and folks say something or if you can find a way to ask a question that highlights kind of the work that you're doing. But ultimately, again, the more you focus on those relationships, it takes time, right? But that's how you're gonna get more people through the doors and that's how you're gonna see, really build that trust with the community. I think another thing to mention too is giving out flyers being present and available and visible at events is still really important but we don't want people to fall into the trap of that's the only type of outreach we're gonna do, the only ones that we can measure because again, you don't know whatever's going on outside of that moment of you giving them the flyer or like a lot of things in my experience and others that I've talked to is through word of mouth. Like even just me working at the library and me telling all my friends and family, like look at all this stuff we have, none of us knew about it, I didn't know about it before I started working there and they've been telling all their friends, it's amazing how much information travels through the community but we couldn't exactly capture that but knowing that there are ways in which it'll come back to you and at least having a good reputation and being like in good standing with your community, like there's isn't much of a way to really quantify that in my opinion. Yeah, let me piggyback on that real quickly. With the two examples that we gave you, the goal was not outreach, right? The outcome is outreach but not the goal and so it's not really being measured in that way either but at the same time you can see how many people we reach but if you think about outreach as a relationship building that signing up people for library cards shouldn't be so much about how many library cards, it's what kind of interaction did you have when you were signing them up? Did you start developing a relationship? Did you get to know that person? Did that person get to know anything about the library in that process? It's about that opportunity to engage with them in my opinion, much more than it is about them walking away at the library card that they may or may not use if they don't feel something new and exciting about the library and feel welcome there. Good question though. Hi, great presentation. My name is Magdi and I'm a library aide at Oakham Public Library and I'm wondering how do you, as a lesser paid person in this library how do you work with that while also doing extra labor and having that on your shoulders as maybe being the only person of color in your branch and having all these great ideas but they're not really reciprocated and then also where do you find your inspiration or are there people that you follow online where you get creativity ideas and things like that? I know you work with the community as well but what kind of online communities do you work with to get inspired? That's really good. That was a lot. That's a great question. I actually, I struggle with this all the time, a lot because I do a lot. I think a lot of the onus is like how making the right kind of partnerships within the library especially as a person of color is really crucial. So like joining committees or going to people outside of like your specific bubble getting involved with your union. Things like this can really help because if you are like in a certain case where you are a little bit more isolated it's really hard to do that especially if you're the only person of color the likelihood of your labor being exploited is extremely high. And so going out of your way to really reach out to folks who you don't already know especially other librarians of color because there are far and few and librarians of color are the ones who have been helping me for example like make it through and help me advocate for myself and figure out like what's appropriate for me to do what's appropriate for me not to do and where do we draw those lines? Where is it going to be beneficial to me as much as I want to do everything for the library I also want to be compensated for the work that I do and if I'm doing more than some of my peers who get paid way more than I do it gets to the point where it's like so we have to also always analyze that it's like how much am I gaining how is it going to help me in the long run obviously also helping the community that I'm serving but I mean making those connections especially with other people of color is kind of like at least in my personal experience super crucial. Yeah something that I kind of want to bring back to is like having folks in your corner and like knowing who you can go to as well and this will serve like in multiple ways whether it's like I have ideas for things that I want to do and maybe they're not being super well received where I'm at but knowing maybe there's other folks than go to and then yeah being able to just get the experience of like I just figuring out how you can say no to things and like what supports and what systems and just how it operates in place where out of time it looks like but definitely just having those folks that you trust and you can come to and they have other resources and other folks that can connect you to is really vital. Twitter and Facebook have lots of real snarky great groups full of really loud people who have lots of inspiration and programs. I'm happy to share some of that with you yeah. Oh yes thank you again so much for having us. Thank you.