Any advocacy initiative depends upon Community Engagement, whether it involves public or private investment, library planning, or marketing. A public library must work with and for its public.
Three Tenets of Community Engagement:
- Engage people who benefit from and care about the library;
- Organize them, as individuals or as groups, to take some form of action that uses their skills, interests and contacts; and
- Motivate them to stay connected with the library on an ongoing basis.
Be Systematic
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| Organize supporters to take action that uses their skills, interests, and contacts. |
For many libraries, community engagement has been confined to mobilizing individual voters when there is a budget crisis. Intermittent outreach directed only at individuals as voters, however, is not adequate or effective for sustained community support.
Community engagement means substantive dialogue and interaction between the library and varied stakeholders; it implies having processes in place for this interaction to take place on a continuing basis; and it also means that library officials seek the advice and participation of residents who have much to contribute to planning, developing and securing the future of the library.
Community Engagement means that citizens have a substantive and ongoing relationship with the library—a relationship that goes beyond the ballot box.
Engage as Many People as Possible
There are numerous means of engaging the community in thinking and acting for libraries, ranging from focus groups, forums and interactive websites to special committees or formal advisory councils. Whatever the format, it is important to engage the widest possible array of community members, including people of all ages, income levels and cultural traditions. Non-users as well as library users must be taken into account. No library can or should afford to ignore any constituency within its service area.
Engage Organizations as Well as Individuals
For too long, library officials and organized supporters have tended to neglect the role of other organizations in articulating the value of the library to officials and the community at large. The library’s base of advocacy support should extend to representatives of organizations that have complementary missions and visions for community development. Libraries that invite these representatives to the “library table” are likely to find willing allies who would support the library’s goals if offered the opportunity, given sufficient awareness of the issues or engagement in a planning process that addresses community needs.
Like communications and other key advocacy strategies, community engagement is essential for library campaigns and specific initiatives. Serious engagement should be an ongoing strategy.
To understand the power of engaging other organizations in library development, imagine a library-advocacy campaign that included legislative testimony from the head of the local nurses association, the Chamber of Commerce, the Community Technology Center, the president of the local community college, union representatives and the head of the Mayor’s Teen Council. Imagine that residents spoke out about the library not solely as a place to borrow books but as a key local source for health information, business data, parenting help, volunteer opportunities, computer training, literacy tutoring and story times, in, say, Spanish and Chinese.
To take the image further, imagine that the representatives of the organizations cited above were part of a permanent community advisory council, and had a role in working with Library Trustees, Friends and other advocates in planning new programs and spaces, or even planning joint initiatives. The power of working with other groups is not only in terms of Partnerships and Coalitions. It is in the integration of these groups and their clients’ perspectives into the ongoing development of the library.
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