The St. Joseph County Public Library joined the Change Network in October 2018.

The St. Joseph County Public Library joined the OF/BY/FOR ALL First Wave to deepen its community connections. The library is located in South Bend, Indiana, a region of the Midwest with a growing Latinx population. As part of the First Wave, the library’s team decided to focus on the growing Latinx community on South Bend’s West Side. The question the team raised is: How can they ensure their community feels the library is for everyone?

Their leadership believes that an inclusive, community-engaged approach is critical to being an effective public institution in the 21st century. Leaders identified that organization-wide tools and training via OF/BY/FOR ALL could help make this vision real.

The first St. Joseph team was a cross-functional group of librarians at their Western branch. They defined their Community of Interest as Latinx artists living on the West Side of South Bend, Indiana. Librarians used OF/BY/FOR ALL tools to identify, connect, and build relationships with people in their Community of Interest. Librarians took immersion tours in West Side neighborhoods, learning more about the assets and challenges faced by these artists and their families. They got to know leaders in the community and learned about their goals. 

The first team built a Change Plan based on Latinx community goals:

• OF: They developed a new internship program geared specifically towards creative Latinx people.
• OF: They worked with their HR department to change job descriptions and hiring policies to enable them to start recruiting more Latinx staff.
• BY: They started building new programmatic partnerships with Latinx and West Side organizations.
• BY: They co-created programs with new Latinx artist partners, both by incorporating Latinx artists into existing library program models AND by facilitating new events and projects driven by community partners’ needs and interests.
• FOR: They started experimenting with bilingual marketing materials and program signage.
• FOR: They hosted new tours and programs specifically for West Side Latinx artists and their families.

The librarians worked closely with community partners as they pursued and executed all these changes, seeking input and direct collaboration to rework their hiring, program design, marketing, and program execution practices. While different community partners were involved in different activities, librarians always consulted or worked with community members on the changes. The team reported in to OF/BY/FOR ALL staff on their progress monthly, sharing changes they made, challenges they faced, and the number of community touchpoints they’d made. As part of these reports, they were required to ask their community partners to provide additional feedback on their efforts along the way.

As they executed these changes, the librarians received support and guidance from OF/BY/FOR ALL curriculum, staff, and the community of other members. OF/BY/FOR ALL staff pointed the librarians to specific curricular tools, coached them through stuck points, and connected them to other members who might help them move forward.

After nine months, the library had made concrete programmatic and policy changes, and they were seeing real results in terms of new partners, new library card holders, and more Latinx families in the library.

Based on their success in their first nine months of work, the library recruited a second team to double the change efforts at the institution. Now the St. Joseph County Public Library has two active OF/BY/FOR ALL teams focused on two different communities in two different branch sites. They are planning to add more teams in the coming year, as well a central team working to advance OF/BY/FOR ALL principles across the entire staff. Now, everyone knows that community is “part of the job.”

“What OF/BY/FOR ALL means to me is that we are here for our community. Our focus should be on what they care about. We need to be in a listening mode, in a caring mode, being flexible and doing our best to connect them with resources."

- Kris Springer, Team Champion and Branch Library Director