![]() The Skills for Community-Centered Libraries trainings are focusing on increasing staff capacity to do community engagement, since many have been doing very successful outreach for a long time. Then, you can build on this initial relationship to build responsive services by more engagement and collaboration with that community.” Sara Gillis, Community Engagement Manager at Halifax Public Libraries, echoed this relationship: “We see outreach activities as useful tools in ‘entering’ a community and getting to know them. ![]() Examples: providing civic education workshops for the community, offering facilitation and communication training for staff, developing fundraising training for Friends groups, helping Friends groups plan a meeting, and supporting staff in planning their own meetings.Ī primary goal of our organizing team is to build the capacity of both community and staff, but that is never where a relationship starts. Capacity Building: Supporting the development of skills and resources that enable an individual, organization, or community to achieve their goals more effectively and efficiently, so they can take on new, greater, or more complicated endeavors.Examples: getting community members involved in the planning and execution of programming, facilitating conversations in which people can envision what they want out of their library, and including community members as experts in their own neighborhoods and needs. Engagement is an active partnership that serves the interest of local communities and the public good. Community Engagement: Building relationships between staff and surrounding communities to empower people to take ownership of their library and its resources.Examples: door-knocking, tabling at community events, fliering, phone-banking, and doing presentations about the library’s resources. ![]() Community Outreach: Building awareness and sharing information about programs, resources, and services with people in a community.Engagement and outreach activities build upon each other, so our definitions and examples are distinctly different, yet not mutually exclusive. Community engagement is doing what you do in order to fulfill or advance a specific goal of the community.”Ĭindy recommended a Building the Field of Community Engagement publication called “Distinguish Your Work” that helped us reflect on our work and formulate our own definitions. We reached out to our National Advisory Committee members to learn how their library systems define engagement and outreach and how they build library staff capacity.Ĭindy Fesemyer, director of the Columbus Wisconsin Public Library, makes a distinction between engagement and outreach based on whose goals the work is advancing: “Community outreach is doing what you do in order to fulfill or advance aspecific goal of the library. A common definition is a baseline for discussion at workshops and a way to push people’s thinking. 2, so it’s a good time for the Free Library of Philadelphia’s community organizing team to share what exactly we mean by community engagement. The Skills for Community-Centered Libraries initiative - a series of trainings meant to build community engagement capacities among staff - launched on Oct.
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