How to use this Page

One of my favorite sections of the Teen Programming Guidelines (is it nerdy to have favorite sections?) is "Align programs with community and library priorities." But you have to be deeply involved with community agencies and activities in order to be ready to act on the community's priorities as they arise. This sounds obvious (and it is!), but it's taken me a few years to figure it out.

Several years back my coworker and I began working with the Seattle Youth Employment Program (SYEP). SYEP is a city agency that places youth with barriers in paid internships in a variety of environments in city government and the private sector. It also provides them with job training and academic support. We worked with SYEP staff to design a curriculum that would build the interns' digital and information literacy skills. We were sometimes surprised by the needs identified by SYEP staff and the interns' employers: touch typing, for example, and basic MS Word. We learned a lot about putting our own assumptions aside.

Over the years, we continually evaluated and adjusted the program. We dropped some pieces and added others to make it as relevant as possible to the youth's needs and the needs of their employers. 

This year, Seattle's mayor put forth a huge Youth Employment Initiative in which he asked SYEP to more than double the number of youth placed in jobs over the summer. Suddenly, the community had spoken: youth employment was a major need. Because we already had an ongoing relationship with SYEP, the library was poised to expand the partnership to serve more youth with our trainings. We also helped in other ways, like providing meeting rooms for SYEP staff trainings. Next summer, the mayor intends to make the program five times larger than it is this year (eep!), which will present a huge opportunity for library involvement.

Of course, being in the right place at the time is always partly a matter of luck. But you can't be lucky if you're not out there.

Last spring, a couple of coworkers and I did some outreach at an event called Girlvolution. It was a completely youth-led conference, with sessions on social justice issues ranging from foster care reform to sexual identity. The teens leading each session mixed statistical and factual information with their own perspectives and experiences.

It was the best conference I had ever been to. I was blown away by how poised, informed, and prepared the youth were. But I wondered: how did they do their research? Had they been visiting our libraries every year without us even knowing it?

Our Youth and Family Learning Manager looked into it and found out that this was exactly the case. Although Powerful Voices (the organization that hosts Girlvolution)  had a "Library Day" as part of their program each year, the library had not been providing direct support.

What an awesome organization.

So this year, we collaborated. My coworkers and I met with their staff to hear more about their organization's mission and goals, and to learn how we could help. We arranged for me to visit Powerful Voices on a Thursday afternoon a couple of weeks ago to talk to the youth and their adult allies (mentors) about research. It was a great conversation about everything from whether all the world's information is available on Google (heck no) to evaluating resources.

Results of a survey asking participants to rate the effectiveness of Library Research Day.

That Saturday, the girls and their allies all came to the library. We settled down in the computer lab and got SERIOUS about research. I showed them how to find books in our catalog, and how to decode Dewey. We dug into databases to find the most up-to-date information and the best statistics. We ended the day with pizza, which is never a bad idea.

Powerful Voices ends their sessions with a gratitude circle. That Saturday, many youth and adults mentioned finding out about all the great resources the library has to offer, and how helpful librarians can be. I was grateful for all I learned from them, and to be part of the support network for such talented and engaged young women.

They were pretty excited about the new library.

For the past six months or so, my fellow teen services librarian and I have been building a partnership with a local drop-in center for homeless youth. We began by meeting with staff several times and taking a tour of their facility to get a better sense of what they do, and how we could help. Then we moved into outreach efforts, like tabling at an on-site job fair. We even revamped their on-site library. 

By this time we’d really gotten to know the staff, and we’d also spent a good bit of time at the shelter talking with the youth. They mentioned weekly gaps in drop-in services, as well as a desire for help with job and education goals. Our partners suggested that we all collaborate to co-host a weekly drop-in at the library on Thursday afternoons, when both downtown youth shelters are closed.

We've been holding drop-ins for a little over two months now.  When my schedule allows, I visit the shelter on Thursday mornings to personally invite youth to the program. Several staff from the partner org co-host with us each week: the outreach coordinator, an adult intern, and a peer intern. They are all very talented at working with youth, and full of great ideas. It's absolutely a co-production from both partners. Drop-in wouldn't work if the library tried to host it on our own.

The very first drop-in.

The library provides snacks, and we do different activities each week—gaming, crafts, etc.—all while talking to the youth about where they are in their lives, and what they need. While many of the participants are unstably housed, others attend private school. Drop-in attendance is diverse in just about every possible way: financially, ethnically, culturally, racially. For many of them, it's a unique opportunity to hang out in a friendly, safe environment with teens whose circumstances are very different from their own.

This game of Egyptian Ratscrew got intense.

Sometimes participants want to work on resumes or interview skills, so my coworker and I help with that. Sometimes they need our partners' help connecting to shelter or other resources. Sometimes they just want to hang out and eat popcorn.

During the first couple of months of drop-ins, we collected information from participants about what they want and need from the program. Now we’re using that information to design evaluations that will measure the impacts we all want to see. It’s a slow process, but I’m confident that the outcomes from this program are going to be profound.

We take our fun seriously.

Already, we’re seeing big mental shifts among participants. Youth who feared they wouldn’t be welcome in the library, or who had previously visited but had never spoken to staff, are now regularly accessing library resources. Our partners have seen more youth accessing their resources, too, and we’ve connected at least one participant with a job. I can’t wait to see where this partnership will go.

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.

Volunteers from a partner organization help students with college applications.

Last week we talked about finding your perfect community partner, the one who can make all your dreams come true. Once you’ve met a few potential partners and really gotten to know them, you may be ready to choose one and move forward on a shared program or project.

As you’re working with the partner to formulate the project, here are some questions to consider.

1. Do the partners play equally important roles?

This could shake out lots of different ways. Maybe you provide the space, the pizza, and the marketing, and the partner provides the expertise. Maybe you’re creating all of the program content, and the partner is bringing the audience. (Although ideally, you’d probably want to check in with the partner to make sure your content is relevant. If you can create the content collaboratively, even better.)

What matters most is that roles are clearly defined and both sides are making significant, meaningful contributions. If that isn’t happening, you may be doing something cool, but it’s not a partnership.

2. Does the project deliver something important to both partners?

Just as both partners have to put something in, both have to get something out. Outcomes should be clearly stated and deliver something that each side needs to further its mission. For the library, outcomes will often be concerned with promoting equity.

3. Does the project have an end point?

It took me a while to realize how important this is. Even if a project is relatively small and low-impact, set a firm date to pause and examine how things are going. If things are going really well, pat each other on the back and agree about how awesome you are. Make minor adjustments if necessary, then dive right back into it.

If things are not going so well, or if circumstances have changed for one of the partners, you’ll be glad to have a built-in opportunity to make big changes, start all over, or quietly pull the plug. Even in this worst case scenario, you'll have learned something valuable that you can bring to your next partnership.

4. Do the partners agree about how the project will be evaluated?

What are the top priorities? What kind of evaluation tool will you use: pre- and post-tests? Surveys? Interpretive dance?*

Who will design the tool? If you can, work with the partner to create evaluation tools collaboratively or, even better, empower the youth themselves to design the tools and evaluate the program.

And one last tip: Write it all down! We use a Memorandum of Agreement form to make sure that everyone knows what’s up with a new project. Better to tackle misunderstandings before you begin than in the middle, when it’s hard to adjust expectations, or at the end, when disappointment or resentment may have set in. Communication is key throughout the process, but good communication late in the game can’t make up for a lack of it up front.

*Note: Don’t use interpretive dance.

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!