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Those Wonder Twins were onto something.

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the importance of equality. But what does equality really mean in the context of a community partnership?

Mostly, it means power sharing. Because when we library folk enter into a partnership, particularly a micropartnership with a small, grassroots organization, there will almost always be an imbalance of power that favors the library.

I know it doesn't always feel like it, but generally, public libraries are respected organizations. They are highly visible to funders and politicians. Everyone knows (or thinks they know) more or less who we are and what we do. Grassroots orgs, on the other hand, may have less name recognition in the community at large.

Also, libraries have mad bank--relatively speaking. As thinly stretched as we often feel (and are), libraries usually have at least some small degree of budget stability. We have assets like buildings, which tend to come equipped with computers, meeting rooms, and at least a couple of people to staff them. Our partners, on the other hand, may be working with shoestring budgets, few (if any) full-time paid staff, and a whole host of other constraints on their time and resources that are not necessarily visible to us.

And more often than not, the staff who are leading the partnerships on the library’s side are often white, middle class folk (like me)—in other words, part of the dominant culture.

In order to make our partnerships truly equal, we have to make it easy for grassroots organizations to work alongside us. That means conscious power-sharing on our part. It’s up to us to create the time and space for partners to tell us what their organization and their clients need out of the partnership to make it worthwhile for them. And then of course, it's up to us to deliver what they've asked for--or to be up front about why we can't.

We also have to be serious about sharing our concrete resources: budgets, staff time, building space, marketing channels, and more. It’s not enough to show up to a grassroots organization and offer a few resources that are easy for us to deliver, or to occasionally reach out to community groups to ask for feedback on an existing plan. Partners should be working with us to create the plan.*

After all, these orgs are helping us do something that would be incredibly difficult or even impossible without them: provide quality library services to the communities they work with. Community-based orgs are well-known and well-trusted in those communities in a way the library often isn’t, and may never be.

For example, think about how difficult and expensive it would likely be to use a traditional marketing campaign to reach a population of underserved immigrants in your town. Or to convince low income teens to come to a drop-in digital literacy workshop.** By working with community partners, you can reach those audiences at their point of need. Working together, you can create services that are tailored to their specific interests and goals.

When you look at that way, an investment in micropartnerships starts to look like a screaming bargain.

* A non-profit leader in my city has a great and also very funny blog post addressing this issue from the community-based org’s point of view. I highly recommend taking a look.

**If teens in your area would show up for a digital literacy workshop on their own time and without incentive, please know that they are magical and should be treasured.

A partner brings some skeptical-looking teens to the library for a research workshop. (I'm pretty sure we won them over in the end.)

In my last post, I talked about the importance of relationship-building in outreach and community partnerships. It's not always easy to create the time and space necessary to figure out what a partner organization really needs from the library, but for a strong community partnership, it's well worth the investment.

But "community partnership" is a pretty vague term. I should probably clarify what I'm talking about.

For me, library partnerships fit into one of two main categories. The first is partnerships with other major organizations, like the symphony, the zoo, or the local school system at the superintendent/library director level. For the sake of this blog post, let’s call them macro partnerships.

Macro partnerships tend to be large in scale (duh), and are often designed to give current library patrons access to cultural or other enrichment that they might not otherwise experience. For example, a library system might partner with an art museum to provide occasional free museum admission for library card holders. This kind of partnership is incredibly important and worthwhile, but in general, it’s not what I’m talking about here.

The second category of community partnerships is the one that I engage in most often: working with nonprofits or government agencies that serve high needs, marginalized, or underrepresented groups. I would also include in this category those crucial partnerships between individual librarians and school teachers.

For fun, let’s call these micro partnerships—not because the organizations involved are necessarily small (though they often are), but because the partnerships tend to be built on relationships between just a few people, perhaps one or two library staff and one or two staff from the community-based org. The library’s goal in creating micro partnerships is usually to serve patron groups that it otherwise struggles to reach; in other words, to promote equity. Micro partnerships are the kind I’ll mainly be addressing in this blog series.

Of course, as I've said, building relationships with partners takes time and effort. It’s much easier to create our own programs and services, in our own buildings. So why not leave it at that? Our doors are open to everyone—isn’t that enough?

Well, not really. Because as we all know, it’s harder for some people to get to our doors. Some groups of potential patrons face barriers of income, language, transportation, and a whole host of other factors. So we have to do a little more to reach them.

For example, a library might open its meeting room to host a college application workshop that’s open to everyone. That’s equality, and it’s not a bad thing.

But it's often the case that the students who are most in need of programs like this one aren’t the ones who attend. We might end up mainly serving students who already have a lot of support in their college application process. Maybe those students were told about the event by their English-speaking parents, or their guidance counselor, or even their hired college admission coach. They may have their own transportation, and fewer after school and weekend responsibilities.

By also hosting the same program at an ethnic community center or in partnership with an organization that serves the rural poor, the library eliminates some of the barriers for underserved students. We commit resources in an attempt to “level the playing field" and promote equity.

Tell me how this looks at your library. What kinds of micro partnerships are you involved in? How are your partnerships helping you reach target audiences? I want to hear all your success stories!

School Library Journal came out with their Diversity Issue a few months ago and it’s been on my “to read” pile since then. Their lead article Children’s Books: Still an All-White World? tells a depressing tale of under-representation of black children in US children’s books (they are the only ethnic group mentioned, I am presuming this goes doubly so for groups with smaller representation in the US) and ends with a call to action for librarians to make sure they are creating a market for these titles to encourage more books by and about all kinds of people.

I grew up in a Free to Be You and Me sort of world where my mother actively selected books for me to read with a wide range of ethnicities represented. I had dolls representing many backgrounds. My mother wrote textbooks where there were strict rules about being inclusive and representative and, living in a small town, I assumed this was the way the rest of the world worked. Not so. Reading this article drove home the point that while I may have been a young person during a rare time of expansion of titles and characters of color, that expansion slowed and the situation is still stagnant even as the US is becoming more diverse than ever. Another article in the Diversity Issue highlights research which indicates that “the inclusion of these cross-group images encourages cross-group play“. Sounds like a good thing. We should be doing more.

By Edward Zelinsky

Public pension plans should not invest in private equity deals. These deals lack both transparency and the discipline of market forces. Private equity investments allow elected officials to assume unrealistically high rates of return for public pension plans and to make correspondingly low contributions to such plans. This is a recipe for inadequately funded pensions, an outcome good for neither public employees nor taxpayers.

Ben Bernanke. Source: United States Federal Reserve.

In this low return environment, public defined benefit pension plans generally assume that they can earn annual investment returns in the vicinity of 8%. Such aggressive return assumptions allow governors and legislators to authorize smaller tax-financed contributions to such public pensions on the theory that anticipated investment gains will fund the retirement benefits promised to public employees.

A primary defense of this practice is that plans’ assumptions should reflect long-term experience. From this vantage, the current low interest rate environment is an historic anomaly. For the long run, the argument goes, public pension plans will earn higher returns.

Whatever the theoretical merits of this approach, it is troubling in practice, an invitation to push into the future the problem of inadequately funded public pension plans. That problem exists today and needs to be confronted today, as the Baby Boomer cohort retires in unprecedented numbers and places corresponding demands on public and private retirement plans.

A second defense of high assumed rates of return is that public pension plans can earn aggressive gains through so-called “alternative” investments such as private equity partnerships. Publicity about Mitt Romney’s IRA has focused attention on the often lucrative results obtained by at least some private equity investors. Many public pension plans have effectively become addicted to private equity deals and their promises of outsized investment returns.

It is, however, doubtful that these promised returns are generally obtained by the private equity industry or that such returns are obtained on the scale sought by public pension plans. Private equity is, by definition, private. Much of the good news we hear about this industry comes from the industry itself. Since there are no active markets for these investments, investors in private equity deals are ultimately dependent upon valuations by the sponsors of these deals.

In a recent paper, Professor K.J. Martijn Cremers of the Yale School of Management concluded that private equity investors have in the last 10 years done no better than investors in the stock market. Others, such as Professor Steven Kaplan of th

The Society of Authors, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and actors' union Equity have jointly sent letters to both BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten and director general Mark Thompson, asking them to stop the BBC Radio 4 cuts to the short story.

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