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This is a guest post from Perla Casas, a 2015 high school graduate. She will be part of the panel speaking on Sunday June 28th at 4:30 pm as part of "Empower Your Teens! Civic Engagement Strategies That Work."

The Youth Leadership Council (YLC) is a youth-driven advisory board for the Oakland Public Library. The YLC creates support strategies to improve its service for patrons and promotes the library simultaneously. The YLC is made up of twelve individuals from the ages of thirteen to eighteen. I was sixteen years old when I first stumbled across the YLC application at the TeenZone in the Main Library. I have always enjoyed reading and I am passionate about libraries, so I thought this group would be a perfect fit for me. After a nerve wracking three month application process, I was finally accepted as a member.

The YLC meets for two hours every third Saturday of the month at the Main Library. After my first official meeting, I was given the opportunity to facilitate the next meeting. I received training and multiple handouts on how to properly run a meeting while being respectful towards my fellow members and being an effective communicator. I became more comfortable with the other Youth Leadership Council members after I facilitated my second meeting and I had a better understanding of how we function as a productive team. I was able to identify and recognize the strengths and talents of my fellow members. It was a successful meeting.

The third annual Culture Festival held by the YLC allowed my creativity and organizational skills to shine. I volunteered to be the decorations and activities director alongside my best friend, Julia. After seeing last year’s decorations, we knew we had to completely revamp them. We brainstormed all of our ideas and I created a decorations schedule in order to materialize all of our ideas. Recreating the Great Wall of China for the Oakland Public Library was our greatest accomplishment. Over 100 hours were spent on creating various cultural decorations and we made sure every culture was included. It was an arduous process but at the same time extremely rewarding. Being able to see how our decorations transformed the library was fulfilling and gratifying.

During my time as a member I feel like I have formed a bond with the Youth Leadership Council members (some of which are alumni now), the supervising librarian of teen services, Lana Adlawan, and my amazing moderators, Amy Sonnie and Jeanie Austin. Amy Sonnie gave me the confidence to join the YLC and accomplish things that I thought I never could do before. She taught me how to prosper inside and outside of the YLC. Jeanie Austin, who I have only known for a short time, has become a good friend and has given me support throughout the entire process of my last few months with the Youth Leadership Council. I am thankful and truly blessed for these wonderful, dedicated, and hardworking people in my life. My experience with the Youth Leadership Council has been unforgettable and I am proud to become a YLC alumni in the fall.

Many librarians spend a lot of time plotting and scheming ways to get teens in the door. It is sort of a “develop the programs and they will come” mentality. That is nice, but let’s be honest. What we really dream is having our teen spaces be hangout places; spaces teens feel comfortable spending free time. The main way to make this dream a reality is to build a sense of community within your teen department. There are several ways to jump-start the process:

1. Create a Welcoming Space

The first step is to create a place in which teens will want to gather. Often, our library buildings are older and were not created with specific teen spaces in mind, so spaces have been carved out of nooks, corners, and crannies. If you have a teen specific space, Hooray! It should be easy to make your department teen friendly. If not, here are two tips to help make your space appealing to teens: Make sure teens can be a little loud, without disturbing other patrons and make sure teens have a feeling of privacy. Notice I said Feeling of privacy, not complete privacy. While teens need to feel comfortable enough to relax, it is probably unwise to give them a closed off corridor far away from any adult eyes.

2. Build on Existing Communities

The simplest and quickest way to develop community is to build onto an existing community! Several YA authors and books have sparked interest groups that have developed into powerhouse communities. Though there are many such communities, two in particular are Nerdfighteria  and the Harry Potter Alliance. Nerdfighteria sprung up around the YouTube vlog of John Green (2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award and author of Looking for Alaska and other best-selling titles) and his brother Hank Green. Nerdfighters are people who try to decrease “world suck” and increase awesome.  The Harry Potter Alliance mission statement says they take “an outside-of-the-box approach to civic engagement by using parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights.” You can let teens know the library has meeting space available for their group, or, depending on your libraries policies, your TAG could recruit other teens to help start a chapter of HPA or other group.

3. Use your Teen Advisory Group

Another way to build a sense of community is to use your Teen Advisory Group. Of course, you should meet to develop programs and plans for world domination, but you can also meet just to hang out. Get your teens to bring a friend to a meeting. When the newcomers see how much fun everyone is having, they will want to be a part of the group too!

4. Create a Common Goal

Whether it is a reading challenge, a fundraising activity, an outreach plan, or even a fitness challenge, having a common goal is a great way to create a sense of belonging.

5. Give them a Voice and Listen

All of your planning and hard work will be for naught if the teens in your community don’t feel like they are being heard.

If you have tried everything and you still can’t Pay teens to linger in your fabulously designed department, Don’t Give Up! Keep trying different ideas to see what resonates with the teens in your area. My hope is that by creating a sense of community among the teens in our libraries, we will create a greater community for our cities and towns.

As always, I would love to hear what You are doing in your library. What things have worked for you? What has failed miserably, but you think would work for someone else?

Gretchen came up with the idea of visiting Erin when we found out that our libraries (in southern Connecticut and southwestern Massachusetts respectively) are not terribly far from one another. We were looking for a cultural exchange: to see what was new and exciting in each other’s libraries and teen programs. It’s also just fun to meet Internet friends in real life. (Thanks for introducing us, YALSA and Twitter!) Here’s what we found.

Gretchen’s visit:
I asked Erin if I could visit for one of her anime club meetings because my manga club is one of the most consistently well-attended programs I run, but I feel like I need more ideas and a better sense of how more established clubs work as mine finds its stride.

Erin’s library is beautiful both outside and inside, with tall ceilings, pleasant lighting, and wood accents everywhere. Their children’s room is downright magical.

After giving me a tour, Erin walked me through their summer reading club: participants log the number of hours they read, earning prizes for reaching different levels. They’re also automatically entered into weekly raffles for bigger prizes. I really liked how she has the raffle prizes on display in the teen area, and I liked that raffle winners selected the prize they wanted from everything that was on display, rather than having specific prizes given away on designated weeks. I also love that she’s giving away a couple of ARCs, billing them as “not even published yet!” That makes the prizes–and reading–more exciting and cool.

Erin’s summer reading program runs on Evanced’s Summer Reader, and she showed me how kids log their reading, how the service desk staff members help teens collect their prizes, and how she selects raffle winners using the software. Since my summer reading club is in its first year, I’m doing everything online by hand using forms on my library’s website and spreadsheets in Google Docs. It’s worked reasonably well, but it’s been more complicated and time-consuming than Erin’s program. I’m hoping to make the case to my administration for  summer reading software next year, and being able to see it in action helped.

Teens had gathered outside the room before the anime club meeting, some even coming to the library an hour early just to hang out and read. Once everyone had arrived, Erin unfurled this big (like, the size of the conference table big) collaborative drawing the club had been working on. My manga club has a lot of aspiring artists in it, so I am definitely going to bring this idea back to them!

We watched the first episode of America’s Greatest Otaku and an episode or two of Black Butler, and then, for the last few minutes of the meeting, Erin announced it was Random Stuff on the Internet Time, where teens could show their favorite anime-related things, so long as they were library-appropriate. Lots of kids had anime music videos (AMVs) they wanted everyone to see. I like that her club isn’t just about passively watching: it’s also about finding cool things and sharing them with others.

Erin’s visit:
I went to visit Gretchen’s library last week. She works in an older building, in a well-off suburban town. The older building requires a bit of wandering to find things, but I found that as

Have you ever planned and implemented a program for the young adults of your library only to have a handful of teens show up or worse, none at all? There is nothing more disheartening than to pour your time, expertise and heart into a program only to have it go thud. To paraphrase Mr. Burns, the poet not the Machiavellian owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, the best laid plans of mice and young adult librarians oft go awry. So what’s a librarian to do? One solution that has worked remarkably well at our library is to create a Teen Advisory Board (TAB).

A Teen Advisory Board is a win/win situation for you and your library. It incorporates your teens as direct stakeholders in their library, instilling a greater sense of pride and responsibility for the programming and collection, and by having a monthly meeting with your TAB, you are granted a direct link to the inner workings of the teenage mind while also fostering deeper relationships with your young adult patrons.

So how do you get a Teen Advisory Board going? The first order of business is to create an application. The application that I use is pretty simple, I ask for their name, age, grade, school and email address plus a few easy questions like “why do you want to be a part of the teen advisory board?” and “what is your favorite book?” or “what would you like to see occur at your library?” Initially the board started out with only 8 members, but now our ranks have swelled to 20 teens. We have members from a variety of private and public and home schools, representing all grades from 7^th through 12^th. Our board has become so popular that we only take new applicants during the month of August.

Our TAB members gather together on the first Monday of each month to talk about programs, books, music, movies, Summer Reading, etc. This past summer they decided they didn’t like the theme of Make Waves @ Your Library. Instead they came up with Pirates vs. Ninjas @ Your Library. We had great fun building graphics and programs around their homegrown theme. Sometimes I find myself in a programming rut, and I can always turn to my Teen Advisory Board to give me new ideas. For instance, one member suggested we show college football at the library on a Saturday. College football is probably the single greatest uniter (and divider) of the citizens of Alabama. We served barbecue and rolled out the widescreen television and the kids loved it. I would have never conceived of something so simple and yet popular despite the prevalence of Alabama and Auburn t-shirts, bumper stickers, flags and hats staring me in the face each day. I can also run program ideas by the board for a thumbs up or thumbs down. They are far better judges of what will motivate their peers to visit the library. As an added incentive, I hold a lock-in at the library once a year for Teen Advisory Board members only. Plus membership looks great on a college or job application! So if you find yourself in a programming slump or you just can’t seem to please your teenage patrons throw the ball back in their court and form your very own Teen Advisory Board!

YALSA is sponsoring a contest, “Thinking Big About Advocacy,” wherein your good ideas can turn into cash money for teen programs!  The Thinking Big About Advocacy Contest is being implemented as part of YALSA president Kim Patton’s “Thinking Big” theme. It is