Step 1 – Planting the seeds
This step is about exploring your library and community to find seeds (a confluence* of need and interest), identifying where to plant them (the partnerships you need to get ideas going), and then planting them (talking up the ideas to those you need to work with you).
In other words, this step is about figuring out where there is a confluence of interest and need. After you’ve found this confluence, the next step is to figure out how to most effectively move the needle forward on this confluence.
The fundamental idea is that you can do a lot if you’re in dialogue with partners.
You can’t do a lot if you’re not actively in conversation with potential partners.
Let’s talk about how you can “plant” the idea of the library as part of the community conversation, and therefore part of the community solution.
*A confluence is the term for that area where different rivers or streams come together. Similarly, in this toolkit we refer to seeds as that place where community needs and community interests come together. It represents the most promising area for action.
Finding the seeds: Exploring your library and community
Where do great ideas come from? They are all around us, inside our libraries and in our communities. The best way to find out where there is a confluence of need and interest – a seed – is by being curious, open, and interested in your staff/colleagues and in your community.
How do you find seeds in your community? Let us know!
Finding seeds inside the library
What are you, your staff, your board, and your library friends excited about?
Good questions to start the conversations with:
Professional goals – Why do I work in libraries?
Personal goals – What am I excited about in my personal life?
Use this inventory of interests to make a list of seeds you can plant.
Here’s an example: Marie Mueller of the Bigelow Free Public Library in Clinton, Massachusetts is an avid walker, so she decided to start a library walking club at the park across the street. That ‘seed’ led to opportunities to partner with the local hospital on their Walk with a Doc program. Walk with a Doc is a national initiative to get people walking and engaging with medical professions. It all started with Marie’s “seed” of walking, which she made visible to the community in a way that sparked collaboration.
Tools you can use to find seeds inside your library:
Finding seeds outside in the community
- What is your community passionate about?
- Good questions to start with:
- What are big issues in the news, in the school district, in the chamber of commerce, etc?
- If you don’t know, could you go to those organizations and ask them?
- What do patrons ask for when seeking local community information?
- What are big issues in the news, in the school district, in the chamber of commerce, etc?
- Example: High Point Public Library noticed that the local newspaper had extensive coverage on food insecurity in the city of High Point, leading them to ask what they could do to get involved, ultimately leading to teaching gardens, farmers markets, and a large grant from the Environmental Protection Agency.
- GOAL: Discover what residents love about where they live and identify common hopes and aspirations—what matters most.
- Good questions to start with:
- Decide which ideas best reflect what matters most and create a plan that ensures action, both now and long term.
Gardening tips:
As Pete Seeger and The Byrds sang “To every thing there is a season / and a time to every purpose.”
Finding seeds is hard! You not only need to find a need, you also need to find (or build) enough interest to move the needle forward on that need.
Do not take something on if you do not think there is enough interest to make a difference. You can come back to it later.
Figuring out good seeds to plant is HARD! It’s hard in part because you have to be fully aware of your environment to know what is going to work. Think of trying to plant a palm tree in a blizzard. It’s not going to work.
But. BUT! If you and your partners are able to build a greenhouse, then maybe you CAN plant a palm tree in a blizzard.
Our approach is that librarians CAN be involved in anything, but to do it well we have to be aware of personal limits, our institutional boundaries, and what support we may need to try something outside of what we consider to be our wheelhouse.
What do you and your staff have the capacity to do? And also what are the capacities and boundaries of others in your community network/soil? Knowing your boundaries and being confident in them is foundational.
The most important seed you can plant
In our research we found that the libraries that are most successful are those libraries that had successfully seeded the idea of librarians and other library workers as critical community partners.
Again and again in the 60 interviews we did with library partners, we found those partners go through a process of transforming their thinking about the people who work in public libraries.
In Stage 1, potential partners see libraries primarily as book repositories, and therefore library workers exist to distribute, preserve, and promote books.
As partners work more with library workers, and begin to learn about the roles of public libraries in communities, they begin to see that the library as a trusted resource (Stage 2), a space that is always there, that people turn to, that is stable, and trusted. But, and this is critical, at this stage partners see the library primarily a a space to use. They do not see all the amazing contributions library workers make to communities.
It takes time, and a lot of work, to get to Stage 3. Here, the focus shifts from the library as a space to the library worker as a critical community partner. In this stage, librarians and their partners work together to figure out what to do in and with communities. There is true back-and-forth going on, and library workers have a seat at the table.
We believe this idea – that the people who work in public libraries are critical community partners – is the idea we always need to be planting. How have you planted this seed in your community?
Don’t just take our word for it! Others have come to similar conclusions. See this research by a team of scholars from Kent State University in Ohio. They studied the process of “building a collaborative preschool-library partnership to support whole family engagement” and found that, as one library worker told them,
“I think part of the struggle of library work is that it can be hard for people to grasp what we can do. I think it would be good for us to have time to talk, so we can remind them of what we can do and then talk about how we could work together.”
Campana, K., Martens, M., Filippi, A., & Clunis, J. (2022). A “library school:” Building a collaborative preschool-library partnership to support whole family engagement. Early Childhood Education Journal, 50(1), 71-82.
Where should I plant my seed?
The people you may want to work with are vast. The right people for the job are not always obvious. We advocate for looking for partners in coalitions and moving beyond the usual suspects.
Figuring out where to plant the seeds of collaboration involves preparing good soil.
Soil represents the network (formal or informal) of community ties out of which collaborations can be built.
What groups/organizations are your staff, your friends of the library, your library board connected to already?
What organizations does your library work well with already? What organizations seem to be “go-getters” currently?
What does “fertile soil” look like for you? Thinking about your library, what makes some organizations better partners than others?
“Multi-sector organizations” is a fancy way of saying organizations or groups that bring together a lot of different people and groups in your community.
Every community has one, even if it is as small as a group of elected officials, like a Soil & Water Conservation Board.
Some of the more promising multi-sector organizations we found in our research include:
- United Way and Community Foundations: key institutions in almost every community that can help you get on the road to long-term collaborations
- Rotary, Chambers of Commerce, and other groups of businesses and business people
- Non-profit alliances
- Ministerial and inter-faith alliances
- Health coalitions
- Food Councils
- Community of Hope Coalitions
- Schools, Universities, Colleges, and any other educational institutions that typically have a wide array of potential partners within them, including librarians, teachers, nurses, social workers, etc., as well as community groups like Parent Teacher Associations
What if I can’t find fertile soil?
If you can’t seem to find a group where you can plant your seed – that is find interested allies – try to start your own!
For instance, we learned that in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the library identified the fact that there was no venue for organizations interested in STEM education to work together and stay connected.
So they started a STEM Learning group! It’s been great for the library, great for the community, and has led to a more cohesive STEM learning ecosystem, including in the health sciences side of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
But that’s simply not the case!
The best way to push the needle forward is through a coalition of the willing, and being able to consider, identify, and recruit strange bedfellows is often the best way forward.
Here are some quote-unquote non-traditional health partners that we found libraries working with in our research. Who are your ‘beyond the usual suspects’ partners?
- Local parks and recreation agencies, represented by The National Recreation and Park Association and its state chapters
- Out of School Time educators, represnted by groups like The National Summer Learning Association and the Afterschool Alliance
- Other local government, represented by ELGL – Engaging Local Government Leaders
- Downtown Development Associations, represented by Main Street America and State Main Street Associations
- The US Department of Agriculture and its State-Wide networks, including the Cooperative Extension, 4-H, and Summer Feeding Programs
- Society for Public Health Education and its state networks
- No Kid Hungry
- Alliance for a Healthier Generation
- Area Agencies on Aging
There are many others! – look broadly for ideas, resources, and support, wherever you can find it!
Doing the work: It starts with a conversation
Cold calling (or cold emailing) can be intimidating, but it can also be the most impactful thing you can do to start partnerships and relationships that may transform your work, transform your library, and transform your community.
The greatest things in the world often can be traced back to a single conversation. In the words of the musical Hamilton, you want to be “in the room where it happens,” and that room is wherever or however you and your potential partners start talking and brainstorming together.
Expect that some of your attempts to foster these conversations will elicit no response. That is OK! Not every conversation, or attempt at conversation, has to lead to an amazing partnership. The key thing is to keep trying. Eventually you will reach a tipping point – where organizations start reaching out to you!
Learn more in our Laurel Public Library case study, where that very tipping point took place.
Confidence also includes boundaries. You ARE just one person! Remember that you have a lot to offer, but you can’t do it alone.
What do you and your staff have the capacity to do? And also what are the capacities and boundaries of others in your community network/soil? Knowing your boundaries and being confident in them is foundational.
Think of the gardener who tries to plant a palm tree in a blizzard by themselves. They MIGHT be able to be successful, but only if they overextend themselves by building a greenhouse, and controlling temperature, humidity, and light to replicate ideal palm tree growing conditions. That’s a lot of work for one gardener! Look to lighten the load.
What’s your “blizzard palm tree?” – something you’d LIKE to see but that you know you can’t do alone. That’s the perfect thing to use as a test-bed to put these principles into action. Talk up the the you know you CAN’T do by yourself. See where that conversation takes you.
Role-playing exercise: What’s your “networking introduction”?
What’s the language you use to introduce potential partners to the idea of the library as a community partner?
For Example: In Anne Arundel County, Maryland, when the library opened a new branch in a shopping mall one of the first things library staff did was send out a form letter – customized to recipients – every single other entity in the mall and in the surrounding business district. That letter essentially said “we’re here, and we want to work with you. Let’s set up a time to talk.” And that got the ball rolling. Sometimes it can be that simple.
Keep it simple! Don’t overthink the idea of seed planting – you’re not committing to something just by talking it up in the community
The most important thing is to have your talking points – your elevator pitch – ready to go.
Struggling with small talk? Start with why you are doing this work! Your ‘why’ – your personal why for being a librarian – can be a great way to get the conversation going and open up horizons of possibilities. Telling and sharing personal stories about your experiences is a great strategy because it will help you find common ground.
Remember that when you are planting seeds you are also planting the idea of the public library as a community partner.
In the process of doing so, you are also advocating for the library. You are saying ‘we are a critical community institution, and we need to part of efforts to make our community the greatest place it can be.’
Some language that may be useful to your pitch include (adapted from OCLC/WebJunction’s Public Libraries as Partners in Access to Justice):
- REACH: There are 17,000 library locations across the country that often are open past traditional business hours, and that also increasingly offer a wide variety of outreach services.
- PROGRAM DELIVERY: Libraries welcome 1.3 billion visits and offer 5.4 million public programs each year, making them the most utilized lifelong learning institution in America.
- COMMUNITY TRUST: Public libraries are familiar, nonpartisan institutions communities turn to and trust, making them a natural partner for the development and delivery of pragmatic solutions to pressing issues.
- BRIDGING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: For many—especially in rural areas—libraries provide the most consistent and reliable internet connection in a community.
Seed planting: A recurring process.
Just as gardeners have to keep planting their garden, so too do you need to keep planting community relationships. Staff change, organizations change, communities change. As the local conditions change, you need to stay out there.
To that end, it is critical that you pitch the idea of the library as a partner while you also work to develop relationships around your particular seed, or idea.
In this way, you’re planting two things simultaneously: Your idea and the idea of library workers as critical community partners.
Gardening tips:
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – similarly an amazing idea starts with a single conversation.
We don’t always know – we can’t predict – which conversation is going to be the one that carries our idea forward, and thus our job is just keep talking! The more we talk, the better we get at talking, and the more likely we’ll find those we need to help us get things going.