 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that would be of interest to libraries across Nebraska and across the country. We broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us, that's fine. We do record the show every week and it is posted to our website for you to watch when it is convenient for you. And I'll show you at the end of today's show on our website where you can access all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, excuse me. So please do share with your, share our website with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think might be interested in any of our topics we have on the show. We do a, they're welcome to sign up for a register for upcoming shows or watch any of our archives that are listed there. We do a cover a mixture of things here on the show. Basically, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for all libraries in the state of Nebraska. So we have presentations that are for public libraries, academic, K-12, correction facilities, museums, it pretty much runs the gamut. Anything, any type of library, you'll find something in our show archives that would be of interest to you. And we do shows on book reviews, demos, mini training sessions, resources and products and services we think you may be interested in. The libraries, they're doing cool new things that we want to share with you. It's all over the place, but it's good. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations for us for things that we're offering here specifically within Nebraska, but we also bring in guest speakers and that's what we have this morning. On the line with us today is Teresa Standard, who is the library director at the Parchment Community Library and Parchment Michigan. Good morning, Teresa. Good morning. And she is back with us. She was here a couple of weeks ago talking about how they were they ditched Dewey at their library. And you'll see we have that in our archives. You're interested in ditching Dewey, the Dewey decimal system at your library. Watch that one. But today she's talking about finding and fixing things, working with their community to work on things going on in their town. So I will just hand it over to you, Teresa, to take it away and tell us what you guys did there. Perfect. Thank you. And good morning, everybody. I'll be talking today about our community action group that started about a year ago and how we run meetings and what we've accomplished. And hopefully that will be helpful to you if you are thinking about starting a group of your own or if you've started a group and have run into some problems. So off we go. And here's the list of topics that I'm hoping to cover today. I'll give you as briefly as possible a history of the city of Parchment, because I think it is germane to the discussion and every city, of course, has its own special history. And it's one of those things that makes living in a small town such fun. And I'll talk about, of course, how we got the group started, how we run our meetings, and some of the accomplishments of our first year. So here's a picture of the library. We are in Parchment, Michigan. That is just north of Kalamazoo, which is in the southwest corner of the lower peninsula of Michigan. The city itself is just a square mile. We've got about 1800 people living here. And the library district is larger than that. We serve just under 10,000 people. And if you have ever met a Michigander, you know that if you ask us where we live, we will not tell you without raising our hand and pointing on our hand where we live. It doesn't matter. It's either lower peninsula, upper peninsula. We do it. So this guy here in the lower right is pointing exactly to Kalamazoo. So now you know where in the lower peninsula of Michigan, I'm sitting right now. Here is an overhead view from about 1934 taken from the water tower of Parchment, Michigan. We're looking over the very, the newly dedicated park. And you can see, I'll try to point here, there's a smokestack here there on the left. That is the Kalamazoo vegetable Parchment Company, and they made no kidding Parchment paper. And that's why the city of Parchment is named Parchment. And the mill runs from here all along to all the way to the other side. It was enormous. And that dark line you see just behind it is the Kalamazoo River. And so when the mill started in 1909, there was nothing here. And the workers had to come from Kalamazoo. And in 1909, the road from Kalamazoo to here, which was the middle of nowhere, was impassable when it got to rainy or to snowy. And so the workers had a terrible time coming to the mill to work. And they would come down barges on the river or walk on the river if it was frozen. And then they would pitch tents and live next to the mill. So it was pretty bad in the early days and it wasn't long before the mill owner Jacob Kindleberger started building homes to house the workers that wanted to work at his mill. And that's certainly not an unusual story. Many, many mill towns got started in exactly the same way. What differentiates Parchment is that Jacob Kindleberger wanted to not only build a model paper mill. He wanted to build a model city with all the amenities and have the highest quality of life for the townspeople as could be managed. And so he built a community house, which unfortunately doesn't exist anymore, but it was absolutely gorgeous and huge. And it had a full size auditorium with a stage. It had a dining hall. It had a full kitchen that the community could use at a wood shop. It had an exercise room. It was something else. And so then in 1933 he donated 60 acres of his own land for this park that you see here. And it had just been completed. And that was another wonderful thing with the baseball diamond tennis courts and pavilions and a sunken garden. It was a really nice place to live. And for 90 years, the paper mill was really the driving force behind the town. And families would have generations of people that had worked at the mill. And most of the townspeople did work at the mill and knew one another. So it was an extraordinarily close-knit family atmosphere in this small square mile city. But all good things come to an end. And this did. And in 2000, the mill closed for the final time after changing hands a few times. And it took our tax base with it. We have a handful of small businesses, but nothing compared to the taxes that were generated by the mill. So the townspeople had to choose what were they going to do. Would they merge with the neighboring municipality, whether Kalamazoo or the township? Or would they raise their taxes and remain autonomous? And they voted by a wide margin to raise their taxes. And we're still here. We're still struggling. We're still pinching pennies as a city. But we are still here. And so we thought, well, we'll just repurpose the mill property. And we got a developer on board. And everything was going swimmingly. We had a great design. And that was in 2007. And just as work was about to get started, the economy crashed and the housing bubble burst. And that plan fell apart. And at the same time, many of our homes were turned into rentals because they couldn't sell. And that also had something, a big effect on the family feeling of the town. Because the renters didn't feel the same kind of ownership and sense of belonging as the former residents had. And the library hosted some KVP reunions back in 2009, 10 and 11, for people who used to work the mill to come back for a big reunion and party. And that was lovely. But it just wasn't. And as the years went on, more and more people, I would hear them at events or on Facebook or at the library saying, you know, this needs fixed, that needs fixed. But the common refrain was always, nothing ever gets done, nothing ever gets fixed. And I had been paying attention to all of the libraries in community engagement type seminars, but I couldn't figure out quite how to make it happen here. And then, as I was haunting one of the community Facebook pages, I noticed there was a group wanting to start a neighborhood watch. And I went, aha, some people getting organized. So I invited myself to the meeting and that became the core group for our apartment town hall group. And then I had them talk to everybody else they knew that was passionate about seeing something happen. And also I talked to the people who I knew who'd come to the library, who had a lot of things to say about what should be fixed and I invited them to come. So we got a core group of very interested, engaged, passionate folks. And we started meeting at the library in July 2017 and we meet every month on the third Thursday. And as luck would have it, and boy I do mean luck, we had just installed a new city manager at that time. And she was and is very enthusiastic and energetic and anxious to meet townspeople and get involved. And that was just wonderful. So if you have a city manager or something similar and you can get that person in your group, or at least cooperating with your group, your miles ahead. I created a website with wix.com it's free, and it's simple. And here's the URL to it. And I'll show you very briefly what it looks like I won't go through everything by any means just to give you a quick glance at it. It's simple but it works and that's where we put all of what we're doing everything, what we plan to do what we have done what we're currently working on all the minutes of the meetings all the agendas, everything's there. And I decided not to make a Facebook page for the group. Instead, I talked to the moderators of the existing community Facebook groups and they all agreed to allow me to post freely what this town hall group is doing and that's how we're getting the word out and I think really that's more effective than if I just made my own Facebook page and hope that everybody found it. So your town already had a Facebook page for itself, several, several, we have parchment living we have parchment then and now we have the city city government Facebook page also, and there are a couple of neighborhood pages to that I occasionally throw that makes sense and yet not everything I mean Facebook is very useful for a lot of things but that's actually a great way to do it you don't always have to create your own for something, especially in this kind of a community based program, right, get into their pages yeah. I like how you also you phrase that you invited yourself to the neighborhood watch meeting. I think a lot of librarians need to do more invite yourself to things that are going on in your town. Yeah, yeah, and it's it's quite wonderful, and I was welcome, and I think you would be to everybody would. All right. This might be a point to just quickly glance at that website I won't take any time at all for it. Yep, there it is. So it says who we are what we're doing. When we meet. And then as I say we've got, as you can see the meetings current projects completed projects community survey that I'm going to talk about and of course how to contact us if they want more information and a little further down a list of accomplishments from our first year, which I'll show you in a little bit. And then our local public access TV station heard about the group. Well, I told them about the group and they agreed to send a film crew, and did a lovely little piece about our town hall group early on and and I thought, great, I'll link to it. So as long as that exists on their website, then I'll, I'll show it off so people want to see what we're all about they can watch that quick four minute video, but completed projects. As I say it's just a dead simple wicks site I just have what we did and when and what happened so it couldn't be simpler but it gets the job done. I hope to slide show. Yep. There we go. All right, so you've got a group and you're going to meet and you suddenly realize you're sitting in a room with very opinionated vocal passionate people. What are you going to do with that. And I thought about it myself before the meeting I thought okay now I know who's coming and gosh it's not true a meeting. Not because they're bad people because they're energetic and vocal and they care deeply about the town and they are anxious for, you know, a place to, to be listened to. And I think that's key, don't be afraid of those energetic vocal people I am the world's biggest introvert look up introvert in the encyclopedia, there's my picture so I'm not the one who would normally lead something like this but it was up to me so I And I found that what you do is of course you let everybody say what they need to say. But then you give them something to do. So don't shut them out give them a job and you I have not had a single one say nope I'm sorry I can't be bothered they grab it and run with it and it's something to see. So, don't fear the energetic folks they're, they're going to be your best friends. And I announced at the beginning of every meeting that everyone present will have a chance to speak but I reserve the right to intervene if I think the point has been made and we need to move the meeting forward. And now they all know me. And so I usually phrase it as, if I stop you it's not because I don't love you anymore because you know that I do it's because we need to keep going and everybody laughs at that. However, you want to phrase it is fine but make sure they know that if you step in and you will step in. It's nothing personal it's because you're moving the agenda forward. And announced that the meeting is going to be an hour if people know there's a time limit they tend to police themselves with their comments, by and large, and that we've we've never had an hour meeting yet it always runs over. But the longest has been an hour and 45 and that was because it was a monster of meeting had a huge amount of things to deal with. And typically there an hour and 15 maybe an hour and a half latest, but announced it's going to be an hour. They don't need to know it's you're going to cut it off at an hour. And, and that'll help them also those people who want to go on and on they might be thinking about that and it won't go on quite as much. The most important thing, keep the meeting from getting derailed with someone who's on a rant is to always focus everything into an action. You're going to make change happen. You're not going to talk about changes that need to be made know, you're going to change things. So as the discussion is going and this works over and over again I can't tell you how well this works. But with the problem most recently they were saying you know we still have a bad speeding problem in town. The police are doing what they can, but there are a couple of roads that frankly we're worried about some some kids going to get killed, because the speeding is so bad, what can we do this is really bad. And everybody's nodding yeah it's really bad and so I that's my point as a moderator to say okay, we've got a speeding problem. We've already been to another city that seemed to be handling it really well. And there were a couple hands went up yeah and we talked about that and I said anybody else got any ideas for what we might do or who could we talk to get ideas about this. And so people are singing out and that's when you say, okay, who wants to be in charge of the speed committee speed comp we call it speed comic who wants to be in charge of the speed comic committee we got a couple of co chairs anybody hands went up instantly. Okay, what are you going to start with any, and then then we have a little brief discussion about what they're going to start with who you're going to talk to. And I, I think that's, that's fantastic bring it back to the next meeting and boom. There it is. So if you have somebody who's complaining about something. Acknowledge it say yeah and then take it. If they're on a rant break up the rant so okay we hear you thanks so much anybody else seeing this problem also and if you get a lot of, or any even a couple of yeah we see it too. Okay, how are we going to fix it. How are we going to fix it that changes the tenor of the conversation. It starts things moving in a very positive direction and you don't have somebody on their soapbox ranting for an hour and a half. Keep a laser focus on turning complaints into actions and you're going to win every time. Here is an example of the agenda that I put together for our last meeting. And we have a lot of regulars now, but we occasionally have new people to and I want them to know what we're about so I always have our mission, which is as simple as it can be, but it needs to be clear. And then that little welcome that I've just been talking about it's going to be an hour everybody's going to be heard no one voice will be allowed to predominate. We're going to focus on defining prioritizing and solving problems. And we are tasks oriented there's our motto that I've seen before we find and we fix that's our big motto. Meaning we get it done. We don't just talk about it. We have to send a meeting with a to do list and agenda for the next one, but we keep things rolling and we have everyone fill out an attendance card if they're new. And on it I get their name of course and the date they attended but I also get their phone. If we're allowed to send them a text message or not, if they live in the city or not, and their email. And I don't use the text message but I keep it in my back pocket in case there's a hot button something that happens and I need to get a text out to everybody saying we need you now. And the email is great because I built an email group for this and before every meeting a few days I sent out a reminder that we've got another monthly meeting coming up hope to see you there so that's very useful. As you can see from this agenda we had a presentation about recycling we normally don't have a presentation but it was nice so we may have more as they present themselves. We talk about notable events in town since last meeting. But here's the crux of it and I want to point this out to you. It's the follow up from the last month's meeting. Take notes or have volunteer take notes of everything that's brought up that needs addressing and revisit it without fail at the next meeting. And you'll be amazed at the number of things that get crossed off the list in in a month in just one month they are found and they are fixed in one month. And if they're not you get a progress report and and still moving forward so that's key if you're not doing it I suggest that you do it if you haven't started your group do please consider this particular item on your agenda is the follow up line by line no matter how small. And you can see some of these things are kind of small doesn't matter they get fixed and they make a positive effect on your town and people notice. With all of it. No small task I can tell you. Yeah, every little thing matters in this in well in any town there's always that you never know who is most concerned about the little thing that you might think isn't important but it will. It will affect someone's life and make things better for them and that's what matters. Exactly. So as it's not what you say it's what you do just what your mama said it's really true. Keep those projects coming. They not only make the people in your town happier they attract positive attention to your town. And it could be neighboring municipalities it could be people who might give you a grant intent might notice that you're doing cool things with your town and they'll be positively disposed to give you that grant. It could be and if somebody might think your town's a good place to live now, or to put their business I mean it's all good. Nothing's bad about keeping those projects going and keeping them in the public eye. So publicize it any way you can, whatever you got, use it. We don't have much of a city we don't have a city paper here in parchment and the Kalamazoo paper is greatly reduced. But I do to let them know and we're having something special happening and then occasionally send a reporter. I do the same with our local Kalamazoo TV station they will occasionally rarely send a film crew but it has happened. In our local public media access station public media network that they've been wonderful in covering what we do. And again, all of those Facebook things we occasionally let our churches know that something's happening that might affect them so whatever you got. Use it and keep it going keep if nothing if it's nothing but Facebook keep something at least twice a month about your group on those Facebook pages, so that you're never really out of everybody's thoughts that they know that group is still there still doing something. And one more time. Pardon me, as I've been ranting about keep everything task oriented. You've got every problem you've got, you've got somebody who wants to hog the meeting it will derail them. If people are wondering if this group is worthwhile they'll realize that it is, and then everybody who's not attending meetings will see what you're doing and that is positive, all the way around. So keep everybody busy and engaged. I suggest if you haven't done it do a community survey. I did one with survey monkey, which is really easy to use. It can be free. I decided to pay the $30 a month because I wanted a few more bells and whistles for this one. But it won't we only ran it a couple of months so at least I only paid for it a couple of months the survey itself took six weeks. So it's not that much money out of pocket but you can do it with the free one. And we also ran paper surveys and gosh if you can do it please do because then you're getting face to face comments with residents and there's nothing finer than that. So we had volunteers from the group go out to local restaurants and they would with the restaurant owners permission, sit at a table and they would have a stack of paper surveys and assign announced what they're up to. And I recommend a bowl of candy, because nothing gets people to come up to your table like free candy sitting. Chocolate works every time. So, then, then you get to have one on one conversations with people and it's great. So we have the data from the paper surveys, put it into Survey Monkey manually so Survey Monkey was our go to resource for correlating all the data. And we got 100 responses total, which doesn't seem like but but those responses were so valuable and so thoughtful and so inventive. I thought it would be really I was expecting to get a lot more Facebook kind of rants where people just grump because they can. There's a couple of those but most people really sat down and thought, huh, what would make this town better and they wrote it down it was amazing. And then once the surveys done. You'll get the raw data and I've got that posted on the website, but it's a lot better if you take some you or somebody else takes that data and groups it into subject types, get all those answers correlated and make it really easy to scan through and digest for the reader. And then share it everywhere. I mean it but that link to the survey results went on all the Facebook pages. You can back as soon as it was ready and the library's website as well. And, and I will say keep the survey simple I'll reiterate that we asked what are your top three ideas to make parchment a great place to live how simple is that. And for the paper surveys we only asked them for one, because they were just walking up to a table so we didn't want to burden them with too much. And even a simple question like that can yield wonderful results so don't make your survey overly complicated or people won't take it. And then once you've got the results use them. And that's where we started as soon as we got those results we grabbed a few to start with as our first projects our first big projects. People were complaining about the feeling that the family feeling of the town was was was dissolving. And they were mourning that loss and they said we need more community events beyond the big summer event that we always have every year we need more. So we gave them more, and they were well attended. They wanted a city wide garage sale we'd never done it. We had one and we had a huge response was fantastic. And our park which is the gem of the city in fact I think it's a gem of the county has a sunken garden which was in fact the gem of the park. And it's, we just don't have the resources anymore to really keep it up so it was languishing and people were mourning that as well saying can anyone fix up the sun garden so we took that on as a project. Here's just briefly, there's the sign that we put on our tables. When we were doing those in person surveys at the restaurants and parks and other events. And there's an example of the paper survey card. And I used it to promote the group you can see it says we meet the third Thursday every month at the library please come. So use anything you can to promote the group anywhere you can. I've got a link here on this slide to the survey results that are on our town hall website. I also created an instruction sheet for the volunteers who are conducting those in person surveys I've got it here. Link to a Google Doc in case you would like to do that yourself and might get some handy hints from those instructions so when the slides go up later today or tomorrow, you'll be able to click that link and get to that Google Doc. Yeah and I'll just while you're mentioning that trees I'll just let everyone know yes when we do put up the archive of this. We will include these slides as well. So you'll have the links to everything that's within here. We also actually to the town hall page from the session description already. But when you get notified of the arc of the recording, you'll have both this video and all of the slides and everything that Teresa has here available to you. Yep. Okay, and here's a list of what we accomplished for last month's meeting it was our one year anniversary so I put together this synopsis of what we'd accomplished, and we were really rather surprised at all we had gotten done. I would say we have about 15 regulars who come and sometimes we have up to 20 people which is great we'd love to have as many as want to come but that's our group so it's not a huge group. And a lot of this. I can thank our city manager for because she will put it on her to do list and talk to the powers that be that need to get it done. So that's been a big help also and getting so much accomplished. At the beginning we decided to divide up our our focuses into several main groups community engagement, which people were calling for in the survey, how to help our government work more efficiently get more things done. beautifying the town and supporting our local businesses and encouraging more to come. So those were the main groups and so that's how I grouped our results here. And under community engagement I'll point out a couple of winners. The party for the park was in June it celebrated the 85th anniversary of the dedication of our number Park, and we decided to recreate that 1933 event in that we had an ice cream social. And we, it was one of those things that works out so well you don't you hope that it will and it did. And the church ladies built built baked dozens of cakes, dozens of cakes for this but we had cake and ice cream for everybody and 500 people came. And when I saw this mountain of cakes piling up I will never get rid of all this who can we donate these cakes to at the end of the event well they got eaten, they got eaten. And we recreated the speeches that were given we had somebody impersonate Jacob kindle burger and the town may our current mayor impersonated the original mayor back in 1933. And we had bands playing in the gazebo that live music we had painters, the plein air artists group from Kalamazoo County came, and we're painting the park during the event people just walk up to the painters and stand behind them and watch the it was the best event. And that has had ripple effects. The public media network came and did a promo for the event ahead of time. Then they filmed the event and did a lovely eight minute synopsis film of it and they were so taken with the history of our town. It was a beautiful celebratory feeling that happened that day that on their own they created a 30 minute documentary of the history of parchment and have now given me the rights to it so that I can distribute the DVDs I can put it on our website. And that was all charged to us didn't ask for it. We just got it, because we had this event. What I'm saying is, you never know what's going to happen when you do something like this or who's going to see it and who's going to take it and run with it and what good things might boomerang back to you. So, and then the citywide garage sale I did mention was a real big success for us. Now government I want to point out the first complaint that we got first meeting. One of those energetic folks said I have been yapping at that city commission to figure out what to do with this mill property. Other towns around us have lost their paper mills and they're doing a better job than we are. Why don't they get over there and find out how they did it what they're doing. And I said, that's a heck of an idea that's a good idea. I said, I think we should. What cities do you think we should ask and we got a list of six, and I said, do we have volunteers to put together a list of questions and then go visit those cities. And then we'll bring all the data back and present it to the commissioners, because our city commissioners are just folks with day jobs I mean they don't get paid. This is a small town. So these people are working at least 40 hours a week they don't have time to go visit other cities. And so our volunteers did and we went to five of the six cooperated with us and had really wonderful generous meetings with us. And we brought back all the data, correlated it put it into beautiful binders and handed one to every commissioner and the city manager at the February meeting. And they thanked us and then in May I get this beautiful letter back from the city mayor and the city manager, telling us it was a laundry list of changes that they had already taken based on the data we gathered. And how much money the city is already saving in three months from the time we presented that to them. So we had a really positive substantial significant effect on the life of our town by doing that, and it all started out with a complaint. So like I said, and the person who made that complaint was the person who did most of the interviews. He was on it. He was on it 110% and really put a lot of time and effort into it and he was the one that you know you might think oh he's going to go on too long he's going to get on his soapbox but no he didn't. He took he was given something to do to make a positive change for his town and he was all about it. So, another win for us. Another one that if you can do please do. We had a meet the candidates form in November, and we had three seats open on the city commission. And we held a forum for the candidates and it was run really nicely I thought it was a success and again the public media network came and filmed it. So for those people who weren't able to see it I was able to link to their film and post it on all the Facebook pages so people could watch. Before the election they could watch the forum if they cared to. At the end of that what we have our three new city commissioners who have a lot of warm fuzzies for the town hall group, and they come to our meetings quite often. So it's a win for everybody it was a win for the candidates it was a win for the community to know what the candidates are all about before the election. And it was a win for town hall because now we have a city commission that is positively disposed toward the group. As far as beautification goes we're doing a lot of it we're getting we have weekly cleanup crews that go through a particular section of town that tends to collect a lot of trash. And we are getting new benches in the park and along sidewalks downtown that are mostly donated. And the sunken garden is getting refurbished, our garden club which is an active garden club contacted through town hall they contacted the county master gardeners collective, and they're volunteering their time twice a month. Local residents also come to the group twice a month to work on the sunken garden. The soccer team came last year on invitation and the kids did a lot of the heavy lifting that the older folks couldn't. And this year they asked us if they could come back please. We said yes, yes you may. And they came back bless them the soccer team came and it was gorgeous. And then we've had a local greenhouse donate plants and mulch and delivered it for free. We've had the daisy scouts help with planting which was a sight to see you can imagine. So anyway it's all good, all good and I'm going to show you a little bit later more on the sunken garden. And we lost our police force because of the budget and now we're contracting with the neighboring township police force, a lot of bad blood on that I mean people were complaining a lot about that, because they knew our policemen and and love them. And now here's a new crew that we don't know. And the we've we the township police are coming regularly to the town hall meetings and through that, they've come to our events, and it's simmering down there. And we're getting to know these, these officers, and the officers are getting to know us. And it's really smoothing out what was quite a rocky thing for the town. So that's good too. And then we're getting a few new businesses in which is just absolutely lovely and we are continuing to contact our local businesses to see if there's anything that we can do for them or the city can do. And as you can see there are a lot of found and fixed things tiny things but they make a difference. And the guy came in and said, you know, every day on my walk I pick up trash between this corner and that corner to always trash there. Could we get a trash can at either end and maybe that would take care of it. The city manager said of course and within a day, there were two new trash cans there, and that and the litter problem is gone. Now it's a clean block. So little things can make such a difference. And we're still working on things and I never let the group forget that we have things we haven't accomplished yet. And we'll get there. Okay, so anyway do do please as your group goes on. Whenever it's appropriate. Take a moment to reflect on what you've accomplished it was an eye opener for us, how much we've gotten. To recap all of this. Keep talking keep networking. Keep looking for a path to yes, when there's nothing but no in front of you. Be the world's kindest bulldog gently close your teeth on that ankle of no and don't let go. And eventually you're going to get to a yes. Keep telling everybody you know about your group keep keep it on Facebook as I said just keep it out there and talk invite people that you think would never come. Invite your governor, invite your state senators, invite your county commissioners invite people you think just wouldn't ever show up. And you don't need to do it every week but say quarterly, send them an invitation, let them know what you're doing. And that they're always welcome. And we would, we would love to have them visit and you'll get surprised. We've had a state senator show up. We've had our county commissioner show up a couple of times. And hot diggity dog I mean that's all to the good, and also contact your local police, your school teachers and administrators, your business owners, and of course all the city government people. Make sure they know they are more than welcome to come, because you never know. They don't come. They know about your group and they know they're welcome and they know you're doing good things and that's still a positive, even if they don't show up at a meeting. So, they know they're, they're constituents their community members are concerned about what's going on in the town. If they're not coming to it and things they know that this thing is happening. And they probably should pay attention if they aren't. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So and as I've said ad nauseam so I won't read through the final paragraph but keep it keep it in front of every local media you've got whatever that may be. Just keep it out there at least twice a month on Facebook if you can't do more than that do that. Alrighty, and you I've been talking about our sunken garden here's the before picture. It's vitally overgrown the flowers were gone. A lot of green and I can tell you that a lot of that green is poison Ivy that you're looking at there. And that's one of the things the soccer team was kind enough to help us figure out but everything is horribly overgrown and this was taken just before the town hall group took it on as a project so that was beginning of the summer last year and here we go here's the after picture this was taken last week. Hey, how about that. Oh, look at that. You can see color and you can see the border stones they're not so overgrown. And there are, of course, it's an ongoing project but this is an awfully good start. And as I can tell you everything that you see here was done by volunteers, all of it, all of the flowers were donated and planted by volunteers, the mulch was donated and delivered. It's it's just an amazing story and I'll show you the close up. There we are. Wow. Of course in the background but look at all those beautiful flowers that didn't exist last year. And, and the daisy scouts put them in and a soccer team help. And even though the daisy scouts being daisy scouts needed a lot of supervision. What those girls and their moms and dads now have is a sense of ownership. It's their park. It's their sunken garden. They don't live where there is a sunken garden, they own it now because they helped work on it and all the citizen volunteers who show up for these work sessions. It's their park now. And that's what we're getting toward is rebuilding that sense of this isn't the place that you come to after work to sleep. This is your home, and it's up to you to make it a better place. And the gazebo here you can see it's not looking too good but this is again a town hall project someone mentioned it last month they said you know that gazebo really needs some work. And the city manager bless her got the public works guys on it and they've sanded it which is what you see here and any day now they're going to come out now that it stopped raining. They're going to come out and put a fresh coat of stain on it so it'll be beautiful again. So just don't give up. It may be slow going, but once you get a couple of successful projects on I think you'll see the inertia will be moving in your favor. And some good things will be coming to your, your town and it's all because of the library and nobody is more perfectly positioned than a community library for hosting these meetings for coordinating things. There's a new correlation for a living so when you get the survey results it's up to you as a librarian to correlate that date it's what you do with your eyes shut. So, make sure people know how valuable the library is, and that everybody is welcome, and that change is going to happen. So, that's all I've got for you today. Here's my contact information and again that link to our website. Do contact me please if I can help in any way I'd be very happy. Thank you for your attention. Yeah, and I was just thinking about that the community garden there the sunken garden there. Yes, I think to some of these projects are not a one off either. That's I mean you specifically mentioned there on your side that the annuals that were planted. So these Daisy Scouts and the soccer team and whoever they did this one year that's going to have to be done again next year. So it becomes a regular thing that they're constantly, you know, have you coming back to do something it's not just that we did the one thing and now you know we're done. It's, you know, making a planting day or something every year. And, and we're also working on as another town hall project we're working on creating a special fund for the upkeep of the park. Right now we're, we've got wonderful donations but we can't bank on that forever. So, we're coming up with the how to build the right way to build a community fund, or that. So if anybody has any questions comments you want to share type in your question section. I'm curious is anybody doing this kind of thing in their community. Do you have this kind of a program or organize or organized type discussion going on. I'll let us know how you've pulled it off or handled it in your towns. Teresa so this was great. As we were chatting at the beginning before the show started that this is, you know, something that some, some towns maybe doing this. Some larger ones but I, you know, here in Nebraska, we have most of our communities are on the smaller side, as in less than 2500 population. So, and they do struggle that as you were describing in your community and parchment with is the town dying is everyone moving away. Are they, you know, I think you described the end here, they just think it's a place to come home and sleep and we do things elsewhere. It doesn't have to be that way. And even the smallest town can do something like this in the library being the center of the community which it very often is being the, it may not be a community center or somewhere where people can gather to do things like this. Like a no brainer, I think, as you kind of described, being the ones who can spearhead this. Yeah, I think most towns don't have, you say a senior services center or a community center of any kind it's the library that's it. Yeah. Well, nothing any urgent questions coming in at the moment. Okay, people may be thinking about what they want to do and get pulling, you know, taking this to their town. So there is Teresa's contact info so if you do have any questions, or anything you want to ask her more about or get some tips and tricks and more in depth information about anything she did. They did in their town, reach out to her. There's the link to their town hall web page. And I'm going to actually. So definitely reach out to her. I'm going to pull back to my screen now and show you we have this link as I said also on. There we go. On our session page for today's show. There's a link here to the community, the library's website as well. We've got the actual town hall page with all the resources and information that Teresa was talking about, must be able to quickly get to it from there. As well, when the archive is up, we'll have the slides so sometime later today, Teresa, you can email your slides. Okay, okay. And then we'll get it posted up there so. Yeah, no, it looks like don't have any questions right now to ask of you but hopefully they'll reach out to you later we did have that happen with previous session. So I think we will officially wrap up for today. Thank you so much for being with us Teresa this is great to hear about all the awesome things that are going on in your town I'm really excited about it I'm glad you'll be able to share with us today. Thank you I had fun. Yeah, and thank you everyone for attending. As I said the show is being recorded and we posted on our website. Our main page here for encompass live where we have our upcoming shows listed here but right underneath them is a link to our archives. And this is where our recordings go up. The most recent ones first are at the top of the list and then it goes down. And actually here's one that Teresa did first few weeks ago ditching do we so today's show we hosted the same way. It will have a link to the recording in our YouTube channel and the presentation posted onto our slide share page to be able to get the slides and the archive. Probably later this afternoon, I should have it ready and posted as long as YouTube cooperates with the uploading and editing and all. And everyone who attended today or was registered for today show will get an email from me letting you know that it's available. We'll also post it to our various social media and mailing list as well Twitter Facebook the whole gamut and compass live is also on is on Facebook. We have a link here and each our sessions I've got the page open over here. So if you are a big Facebook user, give us a like over there we post reminders here's your reminder to log into today's show. When our archives or recordings are available we post on here. Excuse me. So if you do keep up with things on Facebook. Give us a like, and you'll be notified of what we are doing. So that will be for today show I hope you join us next week when our topic is the great American read. Is everybody participating in this. I don't you do anything at your library related to this Teresa, I don't put any on the spot. We don't have an event but we have been publicizing it heavily. Yeah, it's a great program that pbs is doing. You can vote right now for your favorite novel out of the hundred that they did as a that they came up with from a surveying American citizens. Next week we are going to have Martha Florence is from our local Nebraska PBS station and AT television and Katie Murtha who's from our Lincoln City libraries just up the street from our offices here to talk about some resources they've available for libraries. Share ideas and activities they have and things you can do to help promote it. This is a program that is actually going into it's been going all summer for voting. But next month is when they finally have the start the actual eight part series talking about it and the final wrap up in from to goes up September and October. So next week, join us to get some tips and tricks and ideas about what you can do to help work on that. So that will wrap it up for today's show. Thank you everyone for attending. And hopefully we'll see you next time on encompass live. Bye bye.