Yesterday, I participated in Lyrasis’ yearly meeting via webinar – what they branded as an eGathering – along with a few other NEKLS staff and librarians. The main part of the eGathering that I wanted to see was Rich Harwood’s talk about the Work of Hope. He talked about how to get community involvement in organizations – not just libraries, either – he’s seen some excellent progress on community involvement with public broadcasting, too – and how to stay “relevant” to your community today and into the future. Basically, he asked librarians to pay more attention to:
- Basics – igniting a greater sense of compassion for our communities
- Openness – more humility in the ways we engage with each other
- Common Good
- Small Local Actions
The one central task for the entire country consisted of restoring our belief that we could come together to get things done and make a difference. We need to be more concerned about action than just doing activities without regard to how they actually change our culture and our communities. More concerned with progress as opposed to just the process of doing *something*.
He gave 4 steps to strengthen community and enhance relevance for all libraries, too:
- Talk to people, in their language, about their aspirations. What do they want, not what you want to do.
- Focus on changing the conditions of the community – the underlying culture
- Help people to engender the belief that together, we can get things done
- Pay more attention to the narratives in our communities – not just stories, but narratives (he gave the example of a narrative of a community being that teens are troublemakers and up to no good – that narrative needs to be changed!)
Rich provided listeners (and any other librarians interested in the ideas) Conversation Materials for Libraries. That will get you started on the idea of community conversations that change the narratives in your community.
All that is well and good – and there were a lot of great ideas in the presentation – but what struck me was the similarity and overlap of Rich’s ideas to the ideas in the Daniel Pink book “To Sell Is Human” that was the topic of my book club meeting the night before. A group of Kansan library-related women (we had a librarian who works for a vendor, a librarian who does freelance training, a librarian who directs a library, a librarian who works on a web team for a local library system and a librarian who works for the regional library system here in NE Kansas – and me) read and discussed the book. First off – my impressions of the book were varied. I think the ideas were sound and many of them practical. I think some of the exercises were interesting and the stuff he talked about doing in order to perfect your “pitch” were very interesting. Others were a little on the cheesy side, but there were a lot of exercises to choose from, so that’s ok. The book is about moving people to do what you need them to do, but without resorting to “salesman” tactics. In libraries, we frequently want to move people to do things – everything from reading a book we are enthused about to writing a check to support the library and its programs.
We also want to move the community to support their library – and this is where Daniel’s and Rich’s ideas intersected for me. They both talked about doing more listening and less talking and more understanding and less imposing. Daniel’s ideas on questions and asking “good” questions really seemed to be echoed in Rich’s talk about listening to the community and understanding what they want, not what we want to give them. The webinar coming so soon on the heels of the book discussion was a revelation for me – the ideas are still swirling around in my head! I feel much better equipped to go out to the libraries in my system and talk about how to meet the needs of their communities than I did before – so the koolaid has been drunk and we’ll see what the results will be!!
