Talking with the Community

One powerful way to gather data about your community is to have conversations with those who live and work there. You may start by connecting to people that you identified in the community mapping process and that also connect to the questions you would like to have answered through your data gathering process. The goal of talking with those who live and work in the community is to have your questions answered. What you talk about should be focused on what you want to learn, not what you want people to know. conversations may be

Getting started with community-centered conversations

It may be difficult for you to engage in the conversations that are described here. The tips below should help you get started:

• Ask a colleague to join you in the conversation. Perhaps you know someone who is a friend or colleague of the person you would like to talk with. If that’s the case you can ask for your colleague to make the introductions and to join you in the conversation.
• Remember that friends and family may have information that can be useful in your data gathering. Ask them who you might talk with to have your questions answered and to learn more. Ask them to make introductions where possible.
• If you don’t have a connection to whom you would like to talk with, when you contact them for the first time, focus on building the relationship so as to better understand the community and teens in the community. Point out how the conversation could be beneficial to both instead of focusing just on what the library will gain.
• Ask the person you would like to talk with to suggest dates and times for you to meet up. That is a way to share power with the person and to acknowledge that their time is valuable.

If colleagues and administrators are not supportive of the conversations with community members, begin a conversation about what they would like to know about the community and how they would find out that information. Invite them to join you in the conversations or give you ideas of what to talk about. Speak about the ways in which the conversations will better support the needs of teens which will ultimately lead to a thriving community.

Remember that talking with community stakeholders may be a first step to building the types of relationships that can lead to partnerships. This means that you should keep in mind that the conversation has the potential to be more than a one and done experience. After each of your conversations, consider opportunities to talk again with the person you connected with. You may want to check-in about something you learned during your conversation or you may want to let them know how you are thinking about what you learned and ideas and knowledge you generated because of the conversation. As you continue to talk and learn from each other you will gain insight into each other’s goals and start to generate ideas for partnering in support of those.

As you think about the different tools available, reflect on the questions you would like to have answered. Consider which tool(s) will best help you to answer the questions. Ask yourself if you would like to start with a larger context and then dig down into local data in order to put the local data into context.

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