Building and Supporting Capacity

Library Systems and Structures in Support of Capacity

As mentioned previously, often library staff struggle with capacity building because of the services, policies, and procedures that are in place and that can hinder their ability to move connected learning services forward. Some of the library systems and structures that may get in the way include:

• Job descriptions: For example, if a job description does not include language that requires you to build relationships with the community, it may be difficult to get buy-in for that activity from colleagues and administrators.
• Staffing models: If you are required to be on a reference or circulation desk for multiple hours during your work day, and that limits your ability to connect with internal or external assets, that can hinder building connected learning services.
• Mindsets about library work: Sometimes library staff think that time spent planning a service or time spent analyzing assessment and evaluation data is not how hours in the day should be spent.
• Policies and procedures: There may be policies and procedures that your library has in place that unintentionally limit your ability to work with colleagues, community stakeholders, and/or youth and families in order to build capacity for connected learning services. For example, your library’s hours may not coincide with the hours in which community stakeholders are available to talk with you about opportunities for building services together.

None of these hindrances should derail you from moving forward with building capacity for connected learning services. Some methods for advocating for changes in one or more of the above challenges include:

• Sharing the impact. Make it a regular practice to talk about the impact of connected learning services for youth and families in the community. You may tell a story of a teen that benefited from a connected learning service that you facilitated, or you may ask a teen to tell their own story at a library board of trustees meeting or another venue where library staff and administrators are gathered together.
• Looking for collaborative opportunities. Talk with administrators and colleagues about how working together can help the library better serve the community. Provide examples of how breaking out of staffing and service silos helps staff members learn from and with each other about the community. This helps you reach a more diverse group of community members with your internally collaborative services.
• Envisioning policy change. Describe how changes in job descriptions and policies can help the library become more centered on community. Provide a sample job description for yourself that highlights what your work might look like and through that work your ability to build library capacity while at the same time building community strengths.

Building Capacity with Library Volunteers

In the Mentoring module you can learn about connecting with volunteers to support connected learning-based mentoring activities. Volunteers can also be an important part of library capacity building. Community members who act as volunteers most likely have time, skills, interests, and expertise that you can leverage in support of youth and families. For example, maybe you have learned that teens in the community would like to work on a civic engagement activity that focuses on designing and installing a mural that acts as a beautification project for a struggling area of the community. You may not have the capacity to take on all of the pieces of that work from connecting with community leaders who would have to approve the mural to connecting with artists who can help teens to plan, design, and paint the mural. That’s OK. You can leverage the capacity of volunteers in the community who have the time and expertise that you lack. You can oversee the project to make sure it moves forward, however the day-to-day work of planning, etc. can be organized by the teens and volunteers that you select for the work.

Read more about implementing volunteer programs, including volunteer policies, in the Mentoring Module.

Building Capacity through Community Collective Impact and Targeted Universalism

There are multiple models of capacity building that you can engage with to build connected learning services with your community. While these models structure their ideas within the context of solving large community problems, each can be used as a frame for building capacity in support of connected learning. Two models to start learning about are Collective Impact and Targeted Universalism.

Collective Impact

In 2011, John Kania and Mark Kramer wrote about collective impact in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. In that article they highlighted the features of the collective impact model and stressed that as community members, stakeholders, and organizations often have similar or related goals in mind, that these groups can work together to best reach those goals. The components of this model are:

• Common agenda: The shared agenda is a focus on working toward mutual goals together.
• Shared measurement system: With a shared measurement system those working together to reach mutual goals share data across institutions and use the same or similar systems to collect, analyze and share that data.
• Mutually reinforcing activities: Activities which connect to each other so that community members/youth and families can move between community organizations to build on skills and knowledge.
• Continuous communication: In collective impact work, partners in the work regularly communicate with each other about ideas, activities, needs, assets, data, and so on.
• Backbone support organization: One organization in a collective impact situation keeps all of the pieces in place including data management, communication, activities, etc.

Targeted Universalism

Like collective impact, targeted universalism is centered on the idea that community stakeholders and organizations often work towards the same or similar goals, but do so in isolation. Targeted universalism looks at that framing with the lens that in each community reaching mutual goals requires looking deeply at different community neighborhoods and groups and working collectively to design solutions that are targeted specifically at the specific assets and needs of the groups or neighborhoods. For example, consider the different areas of your town or city. Are people in all areas of that town or city exactly the same. Do they all have access to the same resources? Most likely your answers are that they are not the same and they do not have access to the same resources.

With that in mind, it’s important for the library, working with other community organizations and stakeholders to take a targeted approach to working with the whole community on connected learning services. For one group you may decide to focus on virtual connected learning because of transportation challenges that the group faces. For another group you may determine that going to the 4H near where that group lives and goes to school is the best way to support their connected learning needs. In this way your connected learning services are specifically targeted to the audience you are working towards reaching and in this way your connected learning services are equitable for that group. Learn more about targeted universalism at the Beckley Othering & Belonging Institute’s excellent website on the topic.

While building collective impact and/or targeted universalism centered connected learning services may seem to take away from your library’s capacity, once you begin to work with others using a collective impact or targeted universalism approach you will find that capacity is not lessened, it’s built as you can work with and rely on others to help design and implement connected learning services for youth and families.

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