Transforming: Community Relationships

Accelerating Promising Practices: Innovative Ways to Meet Community Needs

Monday, June 27, 2022

1:00pm – 2:00pm

Location: Washington Convention Center, 149A-B

Learn about new community engagement frameworks for libraries and how you can use these frameworks in your work. This session will examine case studies from the Accelerating Promising Practices program funded by IMLS. In this program, more than 40 small and rural libraries across the country implemented innovative projects to engage with and serve their communities. These libraries worked in cohorts according to their project’s overarching theme (digital inclusion, community memory, and school library transformation). Each cohort worked with a mentor organization, a larger institution with broad access to resources to help make all projects successful. The libraries and mentor organizations collaborated to share resources, contacts, and strategies to meet community needs and to ensure project success. In this session, mentors and cohort participants will showcase the methods used to collaborate with other libraries and serve their communities, and describe how such methods can be replicated for success elsewhere.

Learning Objectives:

Analyze local and national opportunities and resources to find new ways to serve their communities.
Apply lessons learned about community engagement from the library projects highlighted in the session.
Develop plans for meeting community needs through partnerships, grants, and local and national resources.

Main Contact(s)

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Alex Nelson

National Digital Inclusion Project Coordinator
Kansas City Public Library

Speaker(s)

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Alex Nelson

National Digital Inclusion Project Coordinator
Kansas City Public Library

Moderator(s)

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Alex Nelson

National Digital Inclusion Project Coordinator
Kansas City Public Library

Speaker(s)

Ellen Brooks

Community Memory and Digital Archives Consultant
WiLS (Wisconsin Library Services)
Betha Gutsche

WebJunctions Program Manager
OCLC