Hidden Heroes: Social Justice Through Local History & Community Engagement

As community anchors, libraries support the community we serve through materials we purchase, support our staff give, programs we host, and our physical spaces. After the call to action from the George Floyd killing and the overwhelming community response to Black Lives Matter, greater consideration needs to be done with how libraries can be engaged with our communities, and harness our communities’ passion, curiosity and thinking in historical events and how it affects social justice and brings about social change.

Mainstream culture historically and presently excludes and marginalizes communities of color, low socioeconomic status, women, LGBTQIA, disabled, rural, and others. Libraries play an integral role in this representation in the materials we purchase, the educational opportunities we present, and the programs we curate. Libraries supporting learning about local heroes and historical locations in one’s community helps empower libraries to broaden the representation of our communities and also, gives people a deeper understanding towards historical events and how these events create the culture we live in today.

Los Angeles Public Library (urban) and Tehama County Library (rural) have both employed the Hidden Heroes, Historic Places approach as an invitation for our communities to wonder and be inspired by coloring pages that celebrate and amplify the unheard voices of people who have done amazing things. Hear about the how-tos, the outcomes, and the feedback from our coloring books; we'll talk about how we decided which people to profile, figured out the costs of doing a coloring book project, and reached out to new communities. Together, we will brainstorm local heroes to celebrate within your own library communities and start working on doing the research of who you should profile.

We hope through the sharing of the process, people, and library systems, once inspired, can create their own, can define their own topics for learning about their own communities, which will not only create a more diverse passion-driven educational and research experience, the projects created will also be uniquely representative for each community that engages with the project.

Tools people will learn from this workshop will include: engaging with library resources, local archives, community partners, and then, creating history that reflects their communities and their culture. These projects show an integration of library resources and community engagement into a vehicle of creating greater representation and equity of access to local history.

At the end of this workshop, participants will be given access to the Hidden Heroes, Historic Places resources (an LAPL researched set of coloring pages, bios and location descriptions of local Angelenos) and Tehama County Hidden Heroes (a multifaceted community experience into local history, including a website, coloring book, story walk, audio book and community events).

Come prepared to learn about our local heroes and color some coloring pages with us. We’ll have some crayons to share.

The Los Angeles Public Library serves over four million residents of the City of Los Angeles, more patrons than any other public library in the United States. The library system is made up of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library and 72 branch libraries. Combined, they hold more than six million volumes.

The Tehama County Library is a rural 3 branch library system in Northern California. It serves a population of under 66,000 and has about 22 people per square mile. This 3 branch county library system is one of the smallest in California with 6 fulltime employees and has a collection of under 100,000 items.

Link to LAPL’s blog post about the project is here: https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/hidden-heroes

Link to Tehama County Library webpage and project is here:
http://www.tehamacountylibrary.org/services/hidden-heroes/