 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm 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 may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week as we are doing this morning, and the recordings are then posted onto our website in our archives. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of those recordings. Both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to our other states where it's the so-and-so state library, that's us. So we provide services and training and consulting to all types of libraries in the state. So there will be things that you'll find on our show for publics, academics, K-12, corrections, museums, anything that has a library or has a library, has a name library in their name, could be something on our show. We do a mixture of things here. There's book reviews, interviews, demos of products and services, many training sessions, anything we think that may be of interest to libraries. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes do presentations about things that we are offering or doing here at the Library Commission. But we also bring in guest speakers from across the state and across the country to talk about cool things going on in their libraries or just topics to have them share. And that's what we have this morning. Online with us remotely is Erica Rose. Good morning, Erica. Good morning. And she's part of our library science program here in Nebraska, at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. And she is one of their faculty there for a while now, quite a few years. Yeah, we're excited. Yeah, and she's going to talk to us today about community engagement. This is a session that she had done previously to a group here in Nebraska, I believe, and that was recommended to me to have her come on the show to share it even with a wider audience. So we're thrilled to have you with us here today, Erica. Thank you very much, Chris. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. And good morning to everyone in the listening audience. It was so cool. Look at that map and see where everybody is coming in. It makes me really happy to think about how our library community is connected even on a national level, so I will go ahead and get started. I am so excited to talk about my very favorite topic, really, because I think at the heart of what we do is the idea of how we can make communities better and stronger. This is the bedrock of our work. And so thinking intentionally about community engagement is something that I think might be one of the most important conversations that we have. I have these quotes up here at my screen, and I thought that they were really relevant because they foster the notion that this isn't just, you know, a nice thing that we can do in our spare time, but that community engagement is actually critical as your role as a 21st century information professional. So as Krista said, I am from the University of Nebraska. I'm library science faculty there, but before I went to higher ed, I cut my professional teeth in the public library setting, and I did a lot of outreach work in the community and I did a lot of public relations work. And so this idea of knowing and nurturing my community was something that was deeply ingrained in everything that I did. So I'm going to use a lot of that experience as references throughout our conversation today. But I did think, you know, it's always kind of useful to know where people are coming from when they're talking about something. So I thought I'd share a little bit about my story. And I've seen over the years some amazing success stories when it comes to community engagement and then I've also seen and lived some really heartbreaking stories. But this first came onto my radar when I was fresh from grad school. I had my first professional position. I was so excited. I was building an outreach department in a library. And I discovered very quickly that within my community, there was this whole group of people that were meeting regularly, the superintendent of the school and the town manager and fire chief and Parks and Rec supervisor. They would all get together every six months and they would have what they called their strategic planning group. And the library was not part of this. It wasn't even on their radar that they could or should be a part of this. And that was a real wake up call for me when I heard about it sort of through the grapevine that, you know, for us to not even be considered and get the invitation to the table meant that there was a huge gap in understanding about who we are and what we did. And there was so much lost opportunity for everybody because we had so much to contribute to their initiatives and a growing community and, you know, how we could build our community up and make it stronger and increase quality of life. And so that was when I realized that this is something that we needed to be really, really intentional with. And it's something that has been reinforced for me as I've moved through my career and worked with different libraries. And unfortunately, what I have seen over and over again is that in communities where there is not an emphasis on engagement, and the library is not deeply embedded in the community as a whole in organizations throughout the town or city. There are many, many missed opportunities when funding requests are made, they're much harder to get when initiatives in which we need support in order to enhance services. That becomes very difficult to do when the communities themselves have large initiatives that play or tragedies strike or a lot of growth is happening. The library is not able to offer the kind of support that we actually have if those relationships and if that community engagement is not already in place. Now, on the other side, the success stories are equally as amazing. I have seen communities rise up to protest when their branch library in their neighborhood is at risk for being closed. I have seen communities that really understand and celebrate the role that libraries play as hubs for self directed education and creativity and innovation and they are happy to continue to throw support at libraries so that they can sustain those services. I believe firmly that thriving libraries are healthy and happy because of strong support from their communities, never in spite of strong support. So that's just my soapbox. I'll stop my soapbox. I would like to actually hear from folks in the listening audience first. So I want to know your story when it comes to community engagement. So if you would, I know you can raise your little hand buttons and I can, I believe, check out the attendees list here. Yes, I see. Oh, go ahead. No, I'll just send you up. You should be able to see that one. Yeah. Perfect. So my first question here is, how many of you feel like you have a strong idea of what community engagement is. And it's not wrong if it feels squishy to you because I think it is kind of a squishy definition for a lot of folks but how many of you feel like yes, I feel really strongly about what community engagement is. We can articulate that. Okay, I'm seeing some hands I'm seeing some. A lot of people who are just preferring not to, not to weigh in on that and that's fine too. Next question is, how many of you feel that you have the resources in your community to or in your library to be successful in influencing community engagement. So I lowered your hands from the first question so now re click again into the second one. Okay, let's see we're getting folks. Okay, good. That just kind of gives me a sense of where everybody is. All right, so let's really put some parameters on this definition of what community engagement actually is and I realized that if you were just reading to get to the part where I tell you, what is my list of potential partners here what are my strategies for implementing this, but I think we need to take time to frame this because in order to think about implementing anything we have to first really understand what it is we're trying to do you have to be able to articulate it. You have to be able to articulate it to yourselves to your staff and certainly to your stakeholders. This holds true for any initiative that we ever do. And there's something powerful that happens when you can speak it you can write it, you have a really firm grasp of how to communicate what it is that you're trying to do, and planning 101 tells us we can't do anything unless we have clear goals in place. So again that clarity is something that's really necessary. In order for anything that you do, whether that's building your collection implementing new programs strategic planning community engagement work. You have to have buy in from your staff and stakeholders and in order to get that you have to be able to talk about why it matters. And I think taking the time to talk through what this is and why it is important. Hopefully also gives you some language that you can use when you're talking about this with your board when you're talking about this with your potential community partners. And sometimes that's like the hardest part about what we do we know all this amazing work that we do. We just work in the world and we know all of the benefits and we know my libraries are so very relevant in today's time. But when you get in front of people, and they ask you some of those pointed questions, it can be hard to find the words. So I hope that part of this is about giving you words that you can use in those situations. And I think community engagement is a great educational moment for all of us, putting some clear language behind it is important because it can feel wishy-washy. What is community engagement I'll ask people this and some people say oh community engagement that's outreach or community engagement other people will say that's public relations work. And sometimes folks tell me it's civic engagement. No, it's local politics. I have worked with others who said I really feel like this is about pulling my patron base. And none of these definitions are wrong. I think all of those things are part of community engagement, but they're incomplete all on their own. And so we have to be looking at this as an umbrella term that embodies many truths. And I think if we're going to boil this down though, community engagement really comes down to these three things, trust, your mission, and the access that we provide and I'm going to break those down for you. Okay, so I read some Brene Brown this summer, huge fan, everybody should read him, read Brene Brown, especially dearly in her newest book. And this though is the idea of trust and how important it is. And I think that really resonated for me because I think that trust is at the heart of everything that we do, particularly when we're talking about building relationships in our communities. And I think the truth that they just that I just gave you, and all of those things I just mentioned outreach and civic engagements and local politics, in order to be successful in any of those areas, there has to be trust there outreach programs So if your patrons don't trust you as a professional as an authority on subject matter, as compassionate and caring for them and their children, PR initiatives and civic engagement 100% backfires when the community does not believe in your community. And that same token local politics are useless to you if you are the political joke and pulling your patron base ways to time if people are reluctant to talk to you. And so building trust is really at the heart of community engagement. That next piece of it that I mentioned is your mission. And it has everything to do with your mission your mission statement and I know that not every library has or necessarily uses their mission statement on a regular basis. And whether it's a vision statement or a mission statement, or just an informal mantra that you have something like, we always do what's good for our patrons or this is about serving our community. That really gets at the heart of how you can encourage and foster community engagement as well. That's where you find your definition and guy. So let's let's just look at an example of this I just pulled a mission statement from the San Francisco public library system, because I think, why not start here when we're talking about why we need this and how we're going to go about community engagement. So here we see that this library system is dedicated to free and equal access to information to knowledge independent learning, joys of reading for our diverse community. When I look at this and I see this amazing emphasis on free and equal access to information the first thing I think is if we have community engagement as a huge part of how we do this work we are much better able to facilitate free and equal access to information you know everybody can't come through your doors. You know everybody can't get to your library when it's during the hours that it's open. So, sometimes this is about looking outside of your four walls to take our resources to people. When we think about facilitating knowledge and independent learning, why does that have to take place in your library, why can it take place in the park, or through a partner program with the museum. One of the ways that when we sort of shift from the way we've done things traditionally, we have much more ability to create these meaningful experiences for more members of our community. The truth of this is that this is going to look very, very different in every single library and I know that your libraries are different your communities are different. The barriers to access that I just talked about are different and the way that you need to build trust with your various community partners depends on who you're trying to do that with. So your definition of what this is going to look like in your communities is going to depend on all of this wide variety of factors and it has to be authentic and it has to be real to where you are. In a way, these factors are not saying it your community partners are going to change leadership in your towns and cities is going to change. There's going to be this shift in demographics and populations that we have to always be accounting for which means that your approach to this has to be flexible because what's worked for you in the past may not continue to be something you can rely on as how you approach it moving forward. So that then means we have to really think about how we get to know our communities and we have to be really intentional with that. This is really broadening our understanding of our communities. You have to commit to really getting to know the people that are there not just the ones that you want to know but all of the people who are there and then finding ways that you really can nurture and support individuals and organizations other organizations in your community that are doing supporting work just like you are. And a lot of times I say this and kind of get the eye roll and people say, but I already know my community and we do in many ways we are experts in our communities, but you have to remember that we all have biases and we all have blinders. We are subject to our own narrowed perspectives and that that's just a fact of life that we all deal with. And so sometimes we get so comfortable because we are part of our community and we understand that our work is very much based in the fact and making our service area as a whole better that we forget to be intentional about looking at who it is we're really serving and how factors can affect our service design. I bet you 50 cents. I'm a librarian I can't bet more than that. I would wager that there are potential partners in your community that you just don't know about drive a new way to work and see what you discover. Just as a personal example. I had the opportunity to work in a library in the community in which I grew up. And that was amazing. Right. A lot of a lot of sentimental attachment there, but because of that I did I had a huge blinders on because I thought that I knew everything there was to know about that community. And it was very small when I when I was growing up there and then there was a huge growth in our population and I realized after somebody kind of knocked me over the head and said I'm not sure you know this community as well as you think you do. I did a few things. I started driving in some neighborhoods that were what they just weren't within my regular path and I realized that there were some socio economic circumstances there that I wasn't aware of. And I started looking at the data and I realized that statistics for free and reduced lunch for English is the second language and even just at the ethnic breakdown of the community was much much different than I thought it was and it had changed so much of course from when I had grown up there. And that was a huge wake up call to me because I was basing a lot of decisions about programming and then I was designing aspects of my collection. Just everything about service design was based on assumptions that were incomplete. I did not have all of the information. So I think it's really really important that we commit to knowing our communities a little bit better in a little more detail and we don't just rely on our instincts for those things. That's something I talked I talked to our libraries about that a lot that they need to regularly check demographic data the census data. I have too many libraries that when they talk to me about things like well yes that's the last census in 2010. No no no no that was way too long ago and I have to remind that they do updates and estimates every year you need to look at like 2017 2018 data that old 10 year old information is not doing anybody any good. It's so true and it's so I think people are amazed at how quickly it really can change. Yeah. Yeah. So I also think another huge part of this is to understand that the benefits of community engagement are cyclical. I've touched on this a little bit but I want to emphasize the fact that of course these partnerships strengthen your community. They we are intentional about reaching out so that people understand that we're here to help and we can help in many ways. And then when you have those partnerships in place the support feeds back to you when it's time because you need more resources or you need a new building or you need to add more staff or whatever it is. They want to continue to lift you up and support you so that you can feed back to them. And you know the more that you are supported and celebrated the more means you have to even grow those relationships and it just keeps growing and it's this amazing and beautiful thing. One of the challenges of community engagement and I think one of the reasons that it's often kind of a back burner issue in my brain is that it takes time and it is not an instant gratification initiative it is really a farming process. I've seen libraries do these incredible PR campaigns that last one month or six months and at the end of them they're really really proud and then they shelve it and they're like oh that was a lot of work I'm done. And that's not the right approach this is something that has to be pervasive and ubiquitous and it has to be embedded in our work every day. It really has to become kind of a mindset in a way that we frame how we make decisions for our libraries. We are not looking for short term relationships with our community partners. We're in it for the long haul we're in this community for the long haul and that means that you have to be diligent and continuous in your efforts. You have to understand that that first phone call that first coffee meeting may not may not be game changing. You have to continue to show up you have to continue to make those offers of support. There will be some rewards. There will be an increase in you know circulation and programs to statistics. I know this I've seen this I really believe that but there are also going to be sometimes when you're thinking like I keep funneling resources at this and sometimes it feels really hard and I feel like I'm just you know throwing it into the wind. But I promise you that it's not every action that you take here is planting a seed and it will grow and there will be a harvest eventually. I think we also have to remember that for every good thing you actually do hear every positive patron comment that comes to you there are 10 more that you never even hear about. It's it's just the nature of our work and what we do. I believe that you are celebrated more than you know so you have to kind of have faith in that and hold on to it. Have to go back to my Bernay Brown analogy here going back to that concept of trust. Building trust is also a farming process. It's not something that happens in a day in fact it is a series of small actions. Bernay Brown likens it to putting one marble in the jar. Every time you you know ask how are you and people feel like you truly care a marble goes in every time that you say oh yeah but I have I have a website that you should go to to find this information that you need a marble goes in the jar. And so we just keep adding marbles to the jar and that's how you build trust in your communities. The bummer here is that it only takes one significant event to dump that whole jar of marbles over and then you have to start again. So you need to prioritize this we need to really value how important that trust building is and go out of our way to take those small steps to just be a little bit more friendly in those emails take the time to say how are you it was so great to see you to make it personal to make people understand that you know that you need a marble. That you care about them that you are invested in them building relationships happens two ways talking about building this trust. Sometimes it happens organically it's like a happy accident right you meet somebody in the grocery store you immediately click you've got great chemistry it's easy. And when that happens you need to celebrate that you need to capitalize on it those that you know those regular moms those patrons who show up every day to your story time and they're so excited about it and they are ready to shout your phrases. They're just from rooftops. Fantastic capitalized on that make them your allies activate them make sure that they're spreading the word telling to bring your friends. Sometimes it's not that easy sometimes we have to be intentional and going out and building those relationships. And I'm well aware that this is easier said than done, but like anything else, it gets easier with practice. And I think at the at the heart of this is the idea of emotional intelligence and I'm always amazed because I think we are a profession filled with highly emotionally intelligent people. We understand this we're very empathetic. We're very compassionate. And so we just need to take advantage of those skills and be intentional with reaching out to people to have conversations to show up to their meetings. I'm going to go through all of this in more detail here in a minute, but we just need to, again, take advantage of the fact that we are service oriented individuals and we want to help and so we just need to rethink how it is that we communicate that other people and be intentional in making it happen. Part of this is about critical thinking. Figure out what other people need and how you offer a solution for them. Sometimes it's the right time to be the person with the solution. Sometimes we just need to keep our mouth shut and really engaging those critical thinking skills and knowing when we just need to be there showing our support when we need to be offering solutions. That's very important. And then more than any of these other things I think when it comes to building trust and relationships you have to be sincere. And again, I don't think that that's an issue for any of us, but sometimes it is important that you go the extra mile to make sure that that sincerity is coming across. And so, you know, obviously I feel pretty strongly about all of this, but I think that all of this is so important that it truly is a survival skill it is going to be the difference between how our profession continues to thrive or whether or not we become stagnant and irrelevant. And so, you know, I think about this in terms of in my work with students we really pride ourselves on working with candidates who will possess skills that allow them to succeed in 21st century libraries. And a lot of that has to do with developing people who are digitally literate and skilled researchers. But I think that this aspect community engagement is of equal importance and as a profession we are doing so many amazing things we are doing so much good and important work but sometimes we forget to tell people. A lot of times I think we forget to tell people and I think how it's so important to remember that you can have the best collection in the world you can have the most dedicated staff, your programming can be the most dynamic that there is, but if nobody knows about it, and your community doesn't understand that right. It's irrelevant. It won't matter. And so thinking about how we can ensure that people understand that all we're doing all of these things we stand for all of these things. We really are hubs. It's important. It's vital actually. Alright, so so there's our context right there's our framework let's talk about where we get started. This is a really simple approach to this kind of the scruff McGrath sleuthing formula here who what when where why and how. And it's really just our way of unraveling the mystery of community engagement. So that's how I'm going to kind of walk you through this and this is how I would suggest if you're looking for a starting point about how to build a plan, maybe start here. So who is supposed to be involved in this. There's kind of two parts to who really you don't have to own community engagement in fact you can't own all of community engagement yourself if you happen to be a director or a manager, maybe that's your goal is community engagement library. But it cannot just be your initiative. This belongs to every single person in your library relationship development happens at every level. It happens inside your library it happens outside your library, and each and every single person is going to make a difference. You will make a huge difference if you're the only one who's doing this five people on your staff who are doing this exponentially more progress is going to be made. And you don't need to worry about how to start this. So I think some people are like, I'm going to have to research all these people in my communities you should you should actually do that. But you can start with the low hanging fruit you can start with the obvious people you can start with the folks that you already know and have relationships with and build from there. When you're thinking about who your partners are that you might reach out to think about what your work looks like where your passions are where you think the easy partnerships are going to be and I'll talk about how to do that here in just a minute. I think it's really important that we don't box this into just thinking about outreach because sometimes community engagement is actually about inviting people in reframe your expectations of what this might mean. So it's not just that our doors are open it's not necessarily oh maybe I could be open a few more hours a day this is intentional invitations this is why don't you bring your rotary group here and we'll do a special event after hours. This is, I have incredible meeting space and I know that you need one so why don't you bring your group here and take advantage of that. Or I have early childhood development experts on staff that I think could provide amazing training to your group. Let's work that out. Capitalizing on the resources that you have and being creative and how you might be able to offer that to people. Those are very, very important invitations. So then we need to go back to this idea of who is in our community. So we need to stop assuming, and then as Chris appointed out we need to start making data based decisions. And we need to marry our instincts to the research that we do and I'm going to give you some tools for this. You know she mentioned the census data, and data of course can be both qualitative and quantitative and we need both of those things. You also need to be gathering hard facts and figures, and then you also need to be gathering stories and testimonials from your patrons and staff. So thinking about gathering data. You know the first place we go is to that census data to the American fact finder and yeah every year they're doing you know forecast and sort of approximations that give you more accurate up to date information so you don't have to rely on 2010 because at this point that's a decade old right. And if you've never used the census data, shoot the American fact finder shoot me an email I'd be happy to walk you through it I'll sure. It's so, so easy. If you know, I mean, there's a lot in there but when she stood in there just start clicking things like look at all the numbers. Yeah, get. Yeah, you want to walk off some time because we all go down around. A couple of other places where I think you should look for data. The Chamber of Commerce and your community will often have a lot to tell you about things like what's driving the economy. What's healthy is are the employment rates, you know why are people moving there, what are the school ratings, anything that's going to help your community look attractive to people who want to potentially go there Chamber of Commerce is all about featuring that and so you can often get some good talking points and some good information from there. You need to become friends with your town manager or planner and have some intentional conversations with them because they have access to some numbers that maybe you don't. They have some ideas about what growth is going to look like. What initiatives are coming down the pike developers that are thinking about coming in. What initiatives that could impact your community and having those conversations with them is important because it gives you an idea of what's in the future for your community and then it also allows you to be part of things. So you have a role to maybe play in some of those initiatives. In addition to, you know, the staff in your town and cities, board members and leadership is important. It's important to know who is the decision maker who are making the votes that impact your community. So, of course, you know your library board members, you need to get to know your town board members, they need to know who you are, they need to say oh my gosh the library is here. And that's really, really important because that support is going to come back to you. The other place where you might want to look are community organizations. So if you're specifically looking at, gosh, I really would like to know how I can help be part of the solution for the homeless population in my community. Look for organizations that are focused specifically on that work as well. Have conversations with them, figure out what they know, what kind of data they have, and then think about how you might be able to be part of the work that they're doing and support it. So here is your first step. It's so easy. Step one, just think of three potential partners and write them down. Part of this is making the commitment to who might your potential partners be so it might be gosh that literacy specialist that comes into the library all the time I know she loves us. I know that she feels strongly about the work that we do. She might be a good potential partner for you to have some intentional conversations with. Maybe it's, you know, the obvious, maybe it's, you know, I've never introduced myself to the mayor. I know I need to. I better try to get to that coffee morning session that he runs once a month on Saturdays, whatever it is write them down and make them feel realistic to you to start so that you're not putting off sending that email because it's intimidating for you right down three very realistic potential partners. Okay. So how do we do this. Yeah, you've identified these potential partners. How am I supposed to actually connect with them and, you know, get them on the library cheerleading team. And so I think the first step is obviously you just have to have some awareness about who these potential partners are and what they do. Don't, don't expect them to tell you who they are and what they're all about. If you're interested in partnering in another community organization, you need to find out as much about them as you possibly can. You need to know what their mission statement is you need to know what their biggest initiative is you need to know what their needs are, and what their values are, because that allows you to connect with them. It's huge in building that trust that's so important for this. So one of the easiest ways to begin to add marbles to that jar is to show up. So if they're, you know, an open public organization, go to their meetings. And again, this is where I get some my rules because people are like, you know, how much free time do you think we have lately. And I know we're very, very busy. But I think it is worth it to reorganize time to become an active participant and show up because we make a huge statement just by showing up. You know what it feels like when community members come to your meetings. It is incredibly validating. Depending on a community member I know sometimes that can be scary because you know they've got something to say, but you know that they care about whatever conversation is happening. It's a very powerful statement. After you show up, you can then start gathering information about how you may or may not be able to be involved how your library can offer support to whatever initiative it is that they have. What are your research expertise. Is it facility. You know, is it funding if you've got programming that you could maybe jointly work on something. You have to become involved and really understand what they're doing to make those decisions. After all that's in place, then you make the offer for support. We have to say how can we help. We have all of these things. Let me list them for you. How can we help make sure that you offer that support. You're going to hear me go back to that a couple of times here. I've kind of referenced this already but I think it's very, very important. This is really about finding out what is important to them. That's kind of the secret sauce here. If you know what's important to them. That's how you strengthen that trust relationship if you know that they are working hard on trying to find a building a space for their organization. That's huge. If you know that they're really, really working hard to bring down some statistics for drug use or increasing retention in high schools, whatever it is that is their big initiative you figure that out and then you think long and hard about what the library can do to support it. Again, secret sauce. So there's a picture of spaghetti. But here's the tools for this right. You have more than you know to offer. And it's not that you're limited to this there are many other things but I wanted to give you some hard and fast examples here so first and foremost I think we have to think about worse facilities can play into this I've already kind of mentioned that. We have materials we have research expertise, a few things that I haven't mentioned yet. We have neutrality and objectivity, which makes us very strategic locations for fostering civic engagement for facilitating healthy dialogue for offering a space for constructive debate. It makes this very important part of the political process in our communities and I think we need to keep that in mind and capitalize on that more. You also have a robust knowledge of your community. I, you know, my whole don't rely on just your instincts yes that's true, but because you do good research and because you do see a huge sampling of your community you do have robust knowledge and so you can offer your perspective, and that's very very valuable. Your community expertise and all of this. I think that I think that one is something that I know a lot of my libraries struggle with. We have our libraries do community needs response planning. And a lot of the times I get the question of but what we know what we do what do we have that they want I mean they know everything we can do here and getting them to think outside the box but anything is very difficult yeah. I agree with that. You know it's funny. I actually went to my neighborhood Funko night earlier this week and I heard that it's like the phrase we all hate hearing a couple of people talking in the corner. My husband says libraries are dead you know nobody's using them anymore. My gosh, I have a million statistics that I can give you to show that that is not the case that the perception is still there. The minute you say download music for free from your library, people will go nuts. No idea. So, you know there's so much to be better about being more intentional and articulating all these things we have to offer. So the next piece of this. I want to go back to this idea of mission because I think this is really important when you are having those conversations with with folks in your community organizations that you think are good partners are important partners. I think you should compare your missions. I think you should look for the common ground there. If you can figure out how your mission aligns with theirs and speak about that that gives you a lot of credibility and it also helps you make some good decisions. And so just to kind of give you an example I thought it would be useful for you to see how much commonality there is between these two mission statements so we already looked at the San Francisco public libraries mission statement. Here's their school mission statement, and there's so much overlap here. And so you can see I've kind of color coordinated it my highlighting here. The public library is all about free and equal, just as the school system is really focusing on developing the promise of each student. So, equal opportunity for everybody. The public library is all about access to information knowledge independent learning and of course the school system as you can imagine is all about you know nurturing that passion and inspiring learning for their kids and then they both use the exact same word to communicate that value on diversity. And so there's so much they have in common and pointing that out to your partners. That is powerful. That is a wake up call. That is you saying, I'm not on the fringe I am strategically aligned here to support your work. And in fact I'm committed to doing it it's in my mission statement. So if you can find those those commonalities, I think that's really really powerful. So big question that I get when when talking about this sometimes is when do you want me to do this because I'm short staffed and I have to do story time and budget, and, you know, get the building open and help all people and put out all the fires and I completely understand that we do work where we're required to be all things to all people and that is no small task. But I think we have to commit to this if we're going to make it move forward and I hope that at this point I have articulated why this is so so important it's critical it's not, it's not optional for us. So you just, I think you have to do some time blocking. That's my recommendation is if there's something, you know, that you know needs to happen, you just have to put the time on your calendar. And so, find however many minutes you can dedicate to this so for some of you that literally might be 15 minutes on Wednesday. But that's enough time for you to send an email it's enough time for you to make a phone call and schedule a coffee date. If you can dedicate an entire morning to it. That's fantastic, but block it off and make it sacred time don't let anybody schedule over that. Okay, I need to talk a little bit about I'm sort of classifying this as where I get a lot of people who want to see the cyclical benefit back to the library. They say well, you know if we're going to do outreach I need to see that increase in my gate count. And I understand that because those gate counts or statistics we like to report to our boards and that's great. But I would challenge you to maybe rethink that a little bit, you know, go back to your mission if your mission is to provide equal access to information. It doesn't matter where that happens. If it happens through a story time that you do in the park. If you're nurturing that love of reading there instead of in your library. That's not a second class statistic that's not less meaningful for those people. So, good community engagement will lead to an increase to those in in house statistics 100% it will but I would also tell you, it doesn't matter. Because outside your library is really as important as whatever is happening inside as long as you are true to your mission. I think that part of that is changing your definition of what are your statistics. It's not just the gate count people coming in it's when we went out into the community and went to this location to the park this many people were there. Just take your counts there and that all needs to be reported just as much as what's happening inside the walls of your building. You know that is such a great point Krista and I think, as you say being intentional about gathering up those statistics. That's very, very powerful when you show up and say, you know, you did a joint program with the school, and you automatically had a target audience of all third graders in the district. That's a pretty impressive number to share with people that's another very big piece of this thanks for bringing that up. If you take nothing else away from anything that I said today. Hope that you remember this because I think it is incredibly important and that is that we show up. We build that trust. We make offers for support, we give and we give and we give before we need to ask for something in return. Having this foundation laid having people trust you know that they can rely on you for research expertise for their facility for great programming. We know they're going to see you at, you know, community events in the summer. If that is something that's foundational and people have known that and they love you and have for years. It's not nearly as much of an ask when it's time to make that request for money when it's time for the building project. When it's time to add staff or whatever it is. They know when they trust you and they believe in what you do. That's so much different than. I don't use the library I just drive by the library I you know I don't know I know libraries are good but I'm not going to pay more taxes to this organization that I never use it's it's an uphill battle if that's the scenario that you're in. So remember that farming process and remember that this really is about giving before we expect anything in return. I mentioned the schools it's kind of been like a sneaky theme in here, but I cannot leave without emphasizing this strategically support your schools in every way that you possibly can. And here's why I feel so strongly about this. Your schools provide you with access to every single child, almost. I know there's a few exceptions with the homeschool community but they have access to the majority of children in your community, and their caregivers, which means it is that low hanging fruit that I talked about. I think this might be the most important and the easiest way for you to have a huge impact on many many folks in your service area. They become a strategic partner for advertising events that are targeted towards literacy and education and kiddos. They become an amazing way for you to build critical allies with the teachers and the administrative staff who will then be key political partners for you. And they are an amazing way for you to introduce yourselves outside your library go to the schools, let the kids see you. And take those opportunities for them to, you know, develop affection for you and understand that you're fun and cool and that you have so much to offer. They are the easiest way for you to do this and sometimes in many communities unfortunately there seems to be sort of a disconnect or a divide between school and public library and we have to bridge that. And so those offers of support. Again, I say get really creative ask the teachers you know when are you doing that biography unit in third grade because I'm going to order a whole bunch of biographies and make sure that they're here. They will love you for that. Do you have educator cards. Do you bring you those kiddos in for tours. Are you willing to go there and facilitate a book club. You know schools very much like us are trying to do everything on a shoestring budget and everybody's strapped for time and expertise and you have resources and expertise to bring in and offer them and so if you go in and you make those offers. I think you can build that partnership and so I hope that I hope that you will consider that I've just seen the impact of this of a healthy school public library relationship time and again and it's very, very meaningful. And most importantly, the people who really went from that are the kids and caregivers in your community. We have a comment from someone in the audience to about their particular community. And this might be a resource if you're trying to figure out how to do this. This person says that our community has about 350 people in town, very small, and they are both the school and public library combined. We have a few of those here in Nebraska to that are the same. It's one location where both the public and the school libraries together. And I love that. I think that's amazing that your community and library, put that in place that's a great lowest wrong partnership right there. So I did want to give you a few other resources beyond just this discussion today if, because a lot of this I know is sort of generalities because it's so different for each one of your communities but if you're thinking, yeah okay but I want to work with my Boy Scouts organization but I'm not quite sure how to do it. There's some other resources here for you and hopefully these are useful for you first and foremost I wanted to point out Web Junction has a great just sort of compilation of various professional development tools on this topic it's worth looking at this link. And I'm, you know, Krista will post this and you have access to all of this stuff. But this is a nice reminder of all of the various ways that you can be really effective and implement good community engagement because you really do offer all of these things civic education. This is just a different articulation of much of what I've already said but it's good, it's good language, you know, the conversation starter in helping identify community issues and and being part of those action strategies. So I would recommend that you go in here they also have some other webinars and some more kind of funnels narrowed approaches to various aspects of community engagement so be sure to check that out. I have some more here and I wanted to oops kind of crazy with my screen and I actually brought these ups that I could show them to you. So, Krista help me know they can actually see these things. Let's get you should be able to go to the. Yeah, we're seeing your browser now yep. Okay. So the Harvard Institute is an incredible organization that I just happen to have it up to some of their free resources that actually give you some planning documents that I think are very useful, especially if this is something that you really want to implement as sort of a large initiative and reframe your thinking as organization. You can check out these things they have featured case studies but again will provide you with ideas for your own unique situation, and also that language, just the more talking points that we have the better off that we are. What I believe is the American no PLA has a wonderful section on outreach strategies, including the link to the Harvard Institute which I've already given you and web junction but then also to the LA PDF cool kit here, and then to some other documents about how this might be useful for you. The final piece here I think it's really really important is that you do celebrate the good stuff, because it can be easy to just see this as an overwhelming initiative and think about all of the things that we're not getting done, but you are doing great community engagement work all the time. And along that line, I want to bring up the fact. I know where I put it, but it is, here it is, your frontline staff, your frontline staff, we are the most powerful PR campaign that you have. They are the touchpoint they are the face of your library and sometimes community engagement if you want to start small and you want to start in house is about empowering your staff with this, and then helping them understand that the way they deliver customer service the way to go above and beyond people is creating work effects go out into the community. And so thinking about your customer service thinking about how folks are greeted at the door thinking about, you know, we're getting to know people so that we can offer sustained support in other ways. Very, very, very important. And then just lifting them up all the time, because they're in the fire right there in the fray. And it is such amazing important work. So celebrating those victories with them, I think is really, really important. And you need buy in from your community and your partners, but you need it even more so from your own staff so they know what you're trying to do what's going on, why this is all happening. Exactly. So really, that's kind of that's kind of the meat of what I have for you today but I did I wanted to leave some time to see if there were any questions about this and you know any question at all is a good question. Yeah, anybody have any questions go ahead and type into the question section of your go to webinar interface. We have another comment that came up earlier about the whole school. Public library connection that at this library that their library catalog and the school systems catalog have merged. So they have the same online catalog and has worked out great for them. That's an amazing way to get more bang for your buck and sharing resources. That's great. Yeah, and let's see you know and here's another idea this is the same town that has the combo. We're all frontline staff here we have to full time and three substitutes. Today I'm going to lunch with the senior citizens to be able to meet and greet. We have about 50% or more of our population that are seniors. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, I'm so glad that you introduced the idea of those older populations as well because that is really as important. And there's a lot of the opportunities there as well. Yeah, and that's the thing you were talking about when we do this how do we do this. I mean this is a perfect example of it's not even something special I mean you got to go to lunch. So you got to eat. So make your lunch date or make your morning coffee be something you mentioned and I know some of our towns here in Nebraska have their morning coffee hour or somewhere that's for the community. And I've had some of our smallest libraries be the host for that. You know every Tuesday morning it's come to the library and the mayor will be here and the city council people and whatever and if you want just come and chat. But yeah just make that your your regular thing you got to go get your coffee got to have your lunch. Absolutely. Why not do it with a friend. Yeah. See was this one of the most difficult demographics to engage are the younger adults. Mid 30s to 20s she says and the teens. Oh yeah teens of all are always a trouble working adults and then teens that have the sports church for a child of things that there just so many other things that in competition with what you're doing at the library. Yeah I agree with that. I also think that that might be one of the reasons that I think outreach in the community can be so powerful. You know you can't they may not show up. So you may have to go make your presence in other places you know why can't you drive the Bookmobile to the football game and have it set up there on a Friday night. Sure. You know however it is that you can kind of connect with them maybe on their territory I think those are key age groups where we see that maybe working more. Yeah. So anybody else has any questions about how to do this or ideas about tips and tricks as we've been getting here from your libraries and organizations where what you've been doing. There to share. While we're waiting to see if anywhere come in I'm going to bring up my screen. Now here. Let's see here and mention. This is the session page for today. But something that actually just came out. Well it's been out but it's it's deadlines coming up that we're doing this session that caught my attention. So what I'm interested about it again is there is a LA has a libraries transform community engagement grant available right now. The deadline to apply is February 3rd. So if you are trying to come up with a project or have a project and you're trying to figure out what to do this might be something perfect for you to apply for amazing. It's kind of it's yeah they I think they announced it just in December. Yeah. So very coincidental timing that it's come due right after doing the session today so you got some ideas now you got between now and next Tuesday, Wednesday, Tuesday. I think you should take that timing that was pretty smart on your part. And you know put an application get your ideas in there put it together this weekend and send in an application you got till Monday to get in there and $2,000 available to do some sort of project that is specifically about community engagement. And this is actually if you notice here at the very beginning of their announcement it's a new annual grant. So this isn't a one time deal. If you don't get it in by next Monday don't panic. It's going to be available again next year. Again, I'm assuming at the same time frame, I would guess this one when it became live in December. So I keep an eye on that side doesn't look at anybody else has typed anything in what we're talking about this any of their last minute desperate questions comments, anything you want to say, get it typed into there. Thank you so much for being here with us, Erica this is great this is lots of great information I think that libraries need to be thinking about. We here in Nebraska do, as I said community needs response plans that we have our libraries do to become accredited public live accredited libraries, and this feeds right into that. I'll tell you now they're going to be hearing about this presentation when we do our training this spring. It's going to be very important and useful to them. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for having me Kristen my one final thought here is that really appreciate those of you who made comments and shared some of the things that you're doing I think that's another very important aspect of this is to just talk about what you're doing that works and share that with your fellow libraries and professionals because don't take it for granted that everybody knows that this might work. That's really how we get our best ideas is just by listening to what other people are doing, so just networking networking networking. Yeah. Thank you. Absolutely. All right. All right, so thank you everybody for attending. I am going to this is a session page for today, but I'm going to get back to our encompass live page. So you can find our page on our library commission website so far and compass live if you just use your search engine of choice to look up and compass live the name of the show. So far that's the only thing called that on the internet. Nobody else is allowed to use the name. So you will come up with our website. These are upcoming shows but to want to show you where your archive will be for today's show at the bottom here we have a link to our archive shows. And here is the list here is the most recent ones at the top of the list. So this is the one from last week and the one's all going back. So hopefully by the end of the day today as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me today she'll be here linked to the recording. If you want to send me your slides or link to your slides Erica. Yeah. And we'll have that as well. Everyone who attended this morning and registered for day show get an email from me letting you know that when it's ready. We also push out on our Twitter and Facebook or social media out there as well. And I have a comment coming just want to give you before we go. Thank you for doing this webinar. I got some excellent notes for use in our branch. We'll look at doing the coffee time. Cool idea being implanted already. But while we're here in the archives I'll show you see we do have a search feature here we can search it you can search our entire archives or just the most recent 12 months. That is because encompass live premiered in January 2009. And if I scroll all the way to bottom this list and do that really quickly right now. We have all of our archive shows here on this page. Going back to the very beginning so we're 10 years ago. When you do your search on here and look at things. Pay attention to the original broadcast date. Some things may be old outdated expired links services and products have changed or maybe don't exist anymore. Certain things will always be, you know, of you know, eternal. Some are reading program reading reads or teen reads and things like that. But pay attention here when you are looking through our archives. But if you do want something just current and don't want to have to worry about coming up with something old. Just limit it to the most recent 12 months and your search will only search the last 12 months worth of our shows. So that is where our archives will be. Like I said, I'll email everyone to let you know. We also have a Facebook page. You can see I have a link here to it. If you are a big Facebook user, give us a like over there. You get notifications two, three times a week about shows. You're reminded to comment for today's show information about our presenters, promoting what our shows are coming up when the recordings are available. We post on here. So here's one from last week's recording being available. So if you'd like to use Facebook, give us a like over there as well. So that will wrap it up for today's show. Hope you join us next week when our topic is another one that could be useful at any time. Best new teen reads of 2019. Sally Snyder is our coordinator of children's and young adult library services here at the library commission. And this is her annually, every year she does a, at the end of the year, best new books she's found over the previous year for both teens and children's. And next week is the teen version of that. So definitely sign up for that. Her children's one, if you noticed on the archives, was just the week before last best new children's books of 2019. So if you're both do children's way, there's the two companion shows, best new children's books and teen ones next week. So sign up for that. And here are other shows we have coming up here. So I've got February filled in, March getting filled in. I'll keep it on schedule as I confirm things. So that wraps it up for today. Thank you for coming. Thank you, Erica, for joining us today. Everybody survive the snow wherever you may be. And we'll see you another next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.