Libraries as Learning and Diversity Hubs

Each week I take my girls to the #library and load up with books. That's not all we get: it's a peek into a #healthcare beacon and community safety net. Investigate the resources offered by your local library and report back. Here's a sample of what my county library system does: - At the peak of summer, the library serves as a cooling center. - In wildfire season, you can pick up masks or escape poor air quality in the library. - There are mobile services to deliver media to those who are unable to leave their homes. - There are multi-lingual financial assistance programs. In the spring, you can get help with your taxes; year-round, you can get information on small business loans, personal finances, and unemployment. - If you need a computer, internet, or printer - there's a room for you, and your librarian often serves as a guide. This can be a huge leap forward for a job-seeker, and a place to access #telehealth visits. Our library coordinates with local #socialservices to ensure participants can have their virtual visits at the library. - There are no-cost museum and park passes to serve as enrichment opportunities, reducing barriers to education and cultural exposure. - Book groups and meeting spaces help many to escape the isolation; we have story times in a variety of languages to help connect our communities. - In downtown Seattle, you can use showers and get access to housing resources. Libraries are incredibly important for the health of your community.

"Libraries have never been more important than they are in 2024." - Well said by Patrick Losinski, CEO of the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Columbus, Ohio. Yet libraries face myriad challenges. How might those be best turned into opportunities? Libraries are enjoying a #renaissance in usage – which goes far beyond checking out #books. (But remember: Running a library isn't free. This soar in usage takes resources and talent to fulfill.) Public #libraries have evolved into all-purpose community centers, offering everything from #skillsdevelopment courses to covid tests, off-hours #wifi access, support for migrants, and care for the unhoused. Some are developing spaces for #neurodivergent patrons and training librarians to teach kids to use #AI. For many communities, they're the only local organization doing such things. Society depends on them. They're doing all of this while battling book bans, physical and verbal assaults, and budget cuts. I like how American Library Association president Emily Drabinski puts it: "I'd much rather have these challenges for additional services and pressures than have people saying that our time has passed." I believe we're in a kind of magic moment, both uncomfortable and extremely promising, where libraries' role could be considerably redesigned – in addition to access to information and quiet spaces, think #economicdevelopment, #communitybuilding, #futureskills #internships, and forging #tolerance and #empathy. What would you like to see most at libraries of the future? https://lnkd.in/gTTt69-P Brooks, Colleen, Amy, John, Skye, Tommi, Urban Libraries Council, Anne, Harmen, American Library Association, Portland Public Library, Jerry, Marshall, Story #librariestransform #lifelonglearning

RETHINKING LIBRARIES: BUILDING COMMUNITY MINI BRANCH BY MINI BRANCH What would happen if we reimagined the public library and school so as to give them a much larger role in the neighborhood landscape? Such that they did not just service individuals but nurtured relationships neighborhood by neighborhood. Libraries, for example, are prime for a rethink. They serve an important role promoting reading and enabling access to information and should continue to do this. In recent years, many facilities (such as the closest library to my house) have added a wide range of facilities for people to use, including basketball courts, coffee shops, meeting rooms, playgrounds, etc. These all help attract a wide variety of people to their core function as well as offer families access to amenties they might not have otherwise. But if the goal was to become a neighborhood hub, the scale still works against it. In my county, neighborhoods are decently distributed but still serve huge amounts of people (50-100,000 each). In the neighboring county, it is even worse, with a small number of libraries serving a vast area. This means that there is no intimacy, few spontaneous relationships developed, and no impact on actual places. In an age where information is abundant and relationships increasingly scarce, libraries should become smaller, far more numerous, and embedded within local neighborhoods. This would give them an intimate relationships on a human scale with a relatively small number of people - say 10-20,000. They would include some of the newer facilities, and see themselves as a hub nurturing ties between people from the streets immediately around them. One way to achieve this would be to leverage existing public buildings - schools, for example, may be unused on weekends and nights and offer facilities that could be leveraged by libraries. Another way would be use a former church building, a lot meant for a house, or a spot on the edge of a park - after all, we are not talking huge, but about developing a local hub where people can access information and find relationships that are unavailable elsewhere. (Schools once built community simply because they were located at the center of walkable neighborhoods, encouraging kids to play with each other and nurturing robust family support networks in the process.) In an age where there are fewer and fewer organizations nurturing relationships organically, it is time for us to be creative about the institutions we have that can play a larger role here. Libraries are one of the few public institutions that could do this at scale -- working sideways small branch by small branch, neighborhood by neighborhood, to restitch the social fabric. Sam Pressler Ian Marcus Corbin Anthony (Tony) Guidotti Placemaking Education PlacemakingX #isolation #neighborhoods #community #humanflourishing #library #communityhub Ron Ivey #librarians Ofri Earon David Erickson Shawn Duncan David Edwards