Have you been looking for a way to get involved in YALSA but not sure where to start? Try volunteering for a taskforce. The nice thing about a taskforce is the work is focused and is carried out over a shorter period of time than a committee. It also gives you an opportunity to work with and get to know some of your fellow YALSA members and increase your own professional skills at the same time.
This is my second term serving as Chair of the Mentoring Taskforce and I found it to be a very rewarding experience. The taskforce reviews the applications submitted for YALSA's Mentoring Program and matches mentors and protégés. I couldn't have asked for a better group of people on the taskforce and I enjoyed learning about the people who applied for the mentoring program. I also gained a sense of accomplishment by getting involved and giving back to YALSA and knowing these mentoring program participants will learn from each other.
So what was it like being on a virtual taskforce? We did most of our work through email. This allowed us to work at our own pace when we had time and eliminated time zone conflicts. Even though our taskforce worked asynchronously and we had a very short turnaround time to complete our matches, everyone was quick to respond to communication and we stayed on track. In early July I asked the committee members to introduce themselves to each other via email so we all had a feel for who we were working with. By the last week of July we were reviewing suggested tasks and matching protégés with mentors. We only had the information provided in the applications to decide who would make the best matches. We turned in our final matches by the second week in August. I feel good knowing that we were able to work so efficiently without ever meeting face-to-face.
If you are thinking about getting involved but haven’t wanted to make the commitment, I would highly recommend volunteering for the mentoring taskforce, or any taskforce, when you see the call go out via the weekly YALSA e-news. It’s a great way to give back to YALSA and meet other like-minded professionals without making a huge time commitment. You don’t have to commit to travel, either, since virtual members are not required to attend ALA conferences. Who knows? Maybe it will inspire you volunteer for more committees or even to run for the YALSA Board! Check out the different ways you can get involved at: http://www.ala.org/yalsa/getinvolved/getinvolved
Gail Tobin is Branch Coordinator at the Schaumburg Township District Library. She is the current Chair of the Mentoring Taskforce and a former YALSA Board member.
This is a collaborative blog post written by a protege and mentor in YALSA’s mentoring program. Jennifer is the protege and Linda is the mentor. We’ve been working together over the past several months talking about how to effectively gain support for teen services and how to work with administration to let them know all about the great activities and work being done by teen librarians. As our conversations developed we realized that what we were talking about made for a great blog post, or series of blog posts. Our first post is on how to gain support from administration for teen projects.
Jennifer Gets Things Started
When I get a chance to request support (professional development funding, support in expanding programming across the system, etc.), I know I need to make my case clearly and concisely. Often, I find the best way of doing that is connecting my goals with the ‘big picture’ goals on which administration focuses their work.
Highlighting community collaborations is one tactic that works for me. Sure, admin might be impressed that your Teen Art Club is well-attended. But they’ll be even more impressed if your Teen Art Club is connecting with the teens at the neighborhood recreation center, gaining support from a local gallery or museum, and being promoted by educators. Demonstrating that YA services help connect the library with other community organizations gets straight to the big picture that admin works toward on a daily basis.
Another reason for administration to get excited about teen services: library advocacy.
If you’re collaborating with other community agencies and organizations, making connections and networking with educators, you’re also establishing the library as a cornerstone of the community and demonstrating its relevance and value. Getting the public excited about your organization’s teen services is a fantastic way to advocate for your library, and for libraries in general. If you can prove to your administrative team that selling quality teen services to the community highlights the library as a neighborhood destination, and drives the organization toward its larger vision (as a cultural center, a learning hotspot, whatever the goal may be), everyone wins—teen services, admin, and the public.
Finally, it all comes down to serving teens and instilling a love of information and learning into their lives, which is something everyone in the library should care about. Working with administration to sell great teen services isn’t difficult as long as everyone’s goals are being met and you know how to speak to your administrative team’s needs. The bottom line is that bringing teens into the library, and engaging them with great services, makes the library a better organization—and administration will happily support that.
Linda Adds
I love Jennifer’s approach for gaining administrative support for library teen services. I think this goes a long way to gaining the support needed. One thing that I see teen librarians struggle with is working with administration when there is a problem that needs to be solved. For example, maybe a teen services staff member notices that other staff members are not providing high quality service to teens. I’ve seen that in some instances teen services staff approach administrators with that problem, bad customer service to teens by some staff members, but nothing more. A teen libraria
Earlier this summer, Melissa Rabey reflected on her experience so far on the Printz Committee. While I think a number of us one day aspire to serve on a selection committee, we may not be ready to make that kind of commitment yet, or we might feel like we don’t have the experience within YALSA to do so–but there are other ways to begin your involvement within YALSA. For new members especially, a task force can be a good way to try out professional service, so I thought I’d talk about my experience on the YALSA Mentoring Program Task Force.
The call for task force members went out a few days before I graduated. I’d been looking for avenues for getting more involved in YALSA, and a task force seemed like a manageable way to start. I’d applied for the mentoring program itself, too, so I made sure to mention that in my task force application. When I was asked to join the task force, I was told I just needed to recuse myself when my own application came up, but that I could still evaluate the other applications and help match proteges and mentors (and it turned out that one of the other members of the task force was an applicant to be a mentor!). Soon after the mentoring program application deadline passed, the chair of the task force emailed all of the members asking us to introduce ourselves to one another, and we began our work.
One thing that makes a task force a good place to start for people who are looking for their first way to get involved with YALSA is that many of them conduct their business entirely virtually. We did all of our work by exchanging emails and chatting via Skype, which was a great way for a group of people across the country with varying schedules to be able to collaborate. Of course, there are pitfalls in communication done primarily by email, but it opens task force work to people who can’t afford to travel and lets members work asynchronously.
Since task forces have a specific project to carry out, task force work is also usually done over a shorter timeline than a selection or process committee. We began our Mentoring Program Task Force work in early July and submitted our final recommendations at the end of August. If you’re anxious about how to get started with your YALSA involvement, a few months is a great trial period to see how you like it.
Joining a task force–or serving in any capacity with YALSA–is also a fun way to get to know your fellow YALSA members. Especially if you’re a new member, I think that trying to jump into a huge crowd of people you don’t know to make connections and friends can be intimidating. A task force is a good way to narrow that crowd to a friendly few and to start to put personalities and faces to the names you may have seen on listservs. While I’m not going to be able to make it to Midwinter this year since I’m going to the YA Lit Symposium in November, I’m hoping I’ll be able to meet up with some of the other task force members at future conferences.
I was a little nervous heading into my first professional involvement experience, but I had fun and I’m proud of the work we d
