Lead the Way: Libraries at the Heart of Community Engagement

Book Clubs, Pubs, and Grub share best practices on co-branding programs within your community. We discuss the lessons learned through neighborhood and community outreach programs.  Examples include - bar and coffee shop-based book clubs, BAM (Books and More - speed round book club during lunch at the local school), Park Popups (storytimes with activities and crafts), and full literary celebrations at locally owned brewpubs.  We share lessons on how to duplicate our successes and circumvent possible roadblocks. At the completion of this session, participants will be able to

1. Recognize community partners, identify commonalities, and create co-branded programming.
2. Utilize best practices to support and empower diverse community partners to ensure mutual success.
3. Incorporate proven outreach techniques to bring library programs into the community.

Libraries play a vital role in community engagement, and ensuring community events are accessible to people with disabilities is critical. In this session, you’ll learn best practices for planning inclusive events that meet the needs of all participants, how to advocate for accessibility, and what to do when a new need arises. We’ll explore how to find community partners who can support your inclusive efforts and discuss common challenges in creating truly welcoming spaces. Accessible event planning guides will be shared to help you apply these strategies effectively. Join us to ensure your library’s community events are both welcoming and accessible to everyone in the community.

Post-COVID, our library experienced a significant increase in disruptive teen behaviors in our library and we also noticed a significant rise in food insecurity. We piloted a project with donated prepacked snacks where teens were offered a snack upon entering the teen space prior to engaging with any of the programming or resources in the space. Within a short timespan we saw a significant decline in disruptive behavior and our usage numbers for the space increased. We worked quickly to gain community resources and developed a nutrition component to the program to educate the teens on food choices and how bodies process nutrients. We gained data to show the gap in the community in providing direct food to teens through partnership with local food banks who discovered that they weren't serving teens. Attendees will learn how we took the problem of poor teen behavior from incident reports and addressed it with fighting food insecurity. They will also learn how to engage and advocate with community partners and funders around a service not often provided in libraries, but a population that is welcomed in libraries more than elsewhere in the community and lastly they will learn how to change the message of what a library is to build a community of support around a common community challenge.

A public library in rural Wisconsin developed an oral health information resource tailored to under-served Amish and Anabaptist communities. You will learn 1) how the project was conceived in collaboration with the Network of the National Library of Medicine and the Wisconsin State Advisory Group, 2) how the activity book was designed in consultation with community elders, a dental student, and local artists for cultural relevance, age-appropriateness, and ease of comprehension, and 3) how the resource was presented to and received by three parochial schools. As a bonus, you will learn how to download, print, and share this free resource with your own communities!

Beginning August 2022 the Florida Atlantic University Libraries began to increase engagement activities with local service organizations such as Rotary, Daughters of the American Revolution, Zonta, and the Junior League. This presentation will highlight: 1) how partnering with local service organizations becomes a win-win event for the entire community 2) how partnering with local service organizations can help increase fundraising revenues and 3) how partnering with local service organizations helps raise the overall profile of the host University.