Step 4 – Rest and planning
Step 4 – Resting the garden and preparing yourself and the soil for next season – is focused on reflecting on the journey you, your partners, and your community have been on. It is also focused on looking forward.
It is critical to take the time to complete this step, even though you may feel pressure to immediately move on to the next thing on your to-do list.
It is also critical to advocate for this time, for yourself, for your co-workers, for your partners, and for your community.
Sustaining yourself, your relationships, and your community requires time to reflect, rest, debrief, evaluate, and plan.
This step is also about long-term thinking, or moving from planting individual seeds to thinking through what you want your garden (and the environment/community around it) to look like 5, 10, 20 years into the future.
Questions to ask:
What legacy do we want to leave?
Where do we see the work we’re doing going in the long-term?
This image communicates what we are focused on in this stage. We are simultaneously looking backwards and looking forwards.
Looking back to seek to understand what just happened.
Looking forward to prepare ourselves for the ideas (seeds) we want to plant next season.
Mindfulness-evaluation continuum
Part of resting the garden is taking stock how things went — for you, for your partners, and for your community – as you went on your journey from seed to seedling to bounty.
Below are some techniques you and your partners can use to take stock and to help you get ready for the next thing you plant together.
You can take stock at multiple levels: as an individual, as a library, as a partnership, and as a community.
The main point here is to do what you can. If all you can do is take the time to reflect – to be mindful of what just occurred – that is OK.
If you and your partners have the resources to more formally evaluate what you did together, pursue that possibility.
Gardening tips:
Given the resources you and your partners have, what can you do to understand what you all did together?
Not everything always works out. It’s ok for some things to be annuals, rather than perennials.
Mindfulness is defined as “the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.” In the context of cultivating the relationship-driven library, being mindful means being aware.
To cultivate awareness, here some questions you can ask yourself. It might be helpful to write down some reflections to these prompts to begin this process.
Did we plant this seed at the right time?
- Planting tomatoes in the snow will not produce a crop, and likewise, forcing an initiative at the wrong time won’t be as well received.
- Recognizing the seasons of growth makes the process flow more smoothly.
Did we celebrate everyone who contributed during Step 3?
- Partners, volunteers, and staff all deserve and desire a bit of praise for their efforts.
- Knowing they are appreciated will help motivate them to delve into the next project.
Did this seed produce a perennial or an annual?
- In gardening, some plants just come back year after year – these are called perennials – and they typically require less work from gardeners.
- Other plants are annuals – requiring gardens to replant them every year
- Do you want to invest your time in keeping this partnership going? Is it a perennial partnership or an annual partnership?
- Perseverance is necessary for long term success, but even perennials change with the seasons. No blooms last forever, so staying aware of any slight changes in the community can help navigate the seasons and maintain partnerships even as they morph.
- Some partnerships are annuals, lasting just for a short time. That is OK! Being aware of your feelings about the partnership is key
- Sometimes annual partnerships are just as impactful as perennials. For instance, a Girl Scout troop approached the library in Pilot Mountain, North Carolina wanting to install a Blessing Box on the property. It was understood from the beginning of the project that the troop would only be involved for the installation, but the impact of that short term partnership on food insecurity in the community is priceless. Four years later the Blessing Box is still used every day. The partnership only lasted for a short time, but the fruits of that partnership continue to produce impacts.
It is one thing to reflect as an individual. It is another to reflect as an institution. You can use some of the questions in the individual reflection exercises to guide institution-wide reflection. Some additional questions to consider include:
- How do we set up structures for reflection?
- What issues arose during the partnership’s gardening season?
- What do you do (what can you do?) when you are involved in a collaborative effort and you feel like your contributions are not seen or valorized?
- Both your contributions as an individual and the contributions of the library writ large?
- What steps can you take to change that culture?
Here is what can be done if your institutional reflections reveal challenges in the relationship.
Pruning and weeding to make space for new growth.
What can your institution let go of, or re-think, to get you ready for next year?
Further up the continuum, we also want to make sure to make space for reflecting and debriefing with our partners. Some questions to guide that process.
What counts as success? You and any collaborators decide. You can ask your partners “were we successful from your point of view, why or why not?”
Gardens are meant to grow, but bigger is not always better. Ask your partners, “where do we go from here?”
In health, and in library partnerships, seek quality over quantity.
The “next” level may be sustaining, fine tuning, or even pruning to allow growth in other areas. Refer back to your own criteria for success will determine when to let go.
Some places the relationship might go include:
- Modifications
- What tweaks can help future programs/services/collaborations?
- Snowballing/expansion
- How (and when) should you use our relationships to try something new, together, or to invite new partners in to the collaborative?
- Maintain lines of regular communication during the “off” season
- Even if you and your partners hit ‘pause’ you can still stay in touch – often those ‘off-season’ communications lead to new seeds and new opportunities
Up to now, we’ve been focused on structures to promote mindfulness in individuals, institutions, and in collaborations. But to truly understand the success of a relationship, you need to engage in formal evaluation. Evaluation is defined as “the making of a judgment about the value of something.”
In the relationship-driven library, evaluation focuses on assessing the value both of the relationships we cultivate and of the products of those relationships.
Evaluation can be used to see where the relationships worked well, and where improvements may be needed.
If you want to engage in formal evaluation of your partnership, we recommend the resources of the The Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, a nonprofit community organization that creates lasting, positive change rooted in people through direct services, research and community building. They combine knowledge, compassion and action to improve lives today and for generations to come.
In particular, their Collaboration Factors Inventory is a free tool you and your partners can use to evaluate the value of your relationships, as well as to assess where additional work may be needed.
Here are some additional questions to include in evaluation of your relationships and their products.
Look at what others have done to evaluate
In addition to sharing what you have done, taking time to explore what others are doing is invaluable. Many associations, libraries, and librarians now maintain blogs or social media accounts in which they share their ideas and processes for a wide range of programs. Discovering entirely new ideas can enhance community relationships while learning minor adjustments to current programs can drastically improve workflows. Remember there are always multiple approaches to similar projects, each uniquely suited to the community it serves.
Look back to look forward
In addition to taking stock of what was, you and your partners (and the wider community) want to look forward to what could be.
Do you want to plant the seed again? Try a new seed? Bring in new partners?
Now is the time to develop infrastructure by providing support for librarians who want to learn how to apply for grants. This can be a tricky process; is there support for it?
Success has four ingredients (example from Memphis Public Libraries, TN):
#1 – Culture in which library staff are seen as experts
#2 – Culture in which library staff are encouraged to dream, and to take risks (including with outside community partners)
#3 – Culture in which library staff have access to professional development, and to resources (via Friends of the Library)
#4 – Culture in which [insert goal] part of the work the library sees itself doing through partnerships
Expanding your garden plot involves expanding your infrastructure.
You’ve had success one one project, planing one seed, and now your task is to expand this work outwards to create space and opportunities for your library and all library workers to be involved in community collaborations.
In addition to expanding the internal infrastructure for community collaboration, you can turn outwards to increase capacity in your community for community collaboration.
What are some steps you can take to do so?
In our data, we found librarians becoming active, ongoing participants in community convenings as a way to build up this community infrastructure.
This may include getting involved in the leadership of your local Rotary Club, or your Chamber of Commerce, Partnership for Children, Food Council, or whatever other groups that exist in your community to bring together cross-sectors of the community to work together and share resources.
It may also involve looking towards larger opportunities, such as funding available from regional, state, or even national foundations. Check out Visualizing Funding for Libraries and then use this information to jump-start conversations with your community partners on how you could work together to bring new resources into your community.
Gardening tips:
Looking forward can be exciting! As you’re looking forward make sure to always keep in mind what you and your library bring to the table, as well as your capacity challenges – as we discussed earlier in this toolkit being upfront about what you can and can not do is critical to building successful relationships!