[Music] thank you we are the federal government
we do start on time uh and it's it is so great to see you
all i'm so glad to be here in person with
all of you um i want to kick this off though by uh
introducing ann friedman uh ann friedman created this place
planet word she's the founder and ceo of planet word and i think you can agree
with me this is a pretty extraordinary place to uh to be
she she was a teacher uh in the montgomery county public schools here we
are in a a great public school building chairman of the board of the seed
foundation the parent body of the nation's only public inner city college
prep boarding school she's a trustee of the american alliance
of museums which whose event advocacy of that i spoke to
yesterday by the way and has worked with the aspen
institute's ascend program and as a co-vice chair
of the aspen music festival we're really honored to have ann friedman here to
welcome us
[Applause]
so welcome everybody it's so great to have you here and when i saw there said
empowering readers empowering citizens i was like wait did they steal that from
planet word because that is exactly why this museum
exists i was a reading teacher the best job i ever had in my entire
life the most fun most meaningful
but then i retired and i didn't want to leave literacy behind
so i was looking for ways to continue in the field
and i read about a museum in new york that
was bringing math to life with technology in a museum setting and
i i thought oh there's the idea
and why was that so important to me and and what you're all here about is
because i had heard a speech in 2004
given by the former head of the nea who said that they had done a survey showing
that readers were voters readers were more likely to be active in
their communities to be volunteers and to vote
so i felt like the only way we could ensure
the strength of our democracy for the future would be to create
citizens who were readers and how could we do that when all the
evidence was that reading was you know declining and people were finding too
many other ways to entertain themselves and so i felt like we've got to
get bring a buzz to reading we have to make it cool how could we do that and
seeing what they were doing with math in new york i thought okay we can do that
with words and language and that was that's the origin story of planet word
and i hope that when you have time later this afternoon to go through our museum
and see the experiences that we've created that you'll think that
that we've done what i wanted to do and made really reading really cool and fun
and um something you know that everyone would want to
to try and also not just word and not just reading but words themselves
we want to make sure that people are aware of the words that they use
the words that are used around them that builds empathy in our globalized
community and
we need that more now than ever so thank you and enjoy your lunch
and your meeting [Applause]
thank you ann so much um
so the the last time uh before the pandemic the fir last meeting before the
pandemic that i went to uh there was a celebration of the
community librarian of the year rivka sas from sacramento rivka is with us
today and the deputy mayor yay
the the deputy mayor of uh of sacramento was there i think that that's his title
uh and he said uh to to us uh he said when we have a problem in sacramento we
turn to rivka into the sacramento library
the first meeting post pandemic i went to was to hand the national medal for
library service to keenan mccloy in the memphis public library and i don't
remember the exact title but he was like the deputy mayor
kenan uh came came to that meeting and he said when we have a problem in
memphis we turn to keenan and the memphis public
library then i went about a week after that i
went to highwood illinois uh where we gave the national medal to carmen patlin
the highwood uh library uh their account of uh five thousand people nestled in uh
among the uh the north shore elite that's five thousand first and second
generation immigrants uh that uh uh the library serves in so
many ways and uh the the congressman schneider united states congressman
showed up the mayor showed up the state senator state representative the city
council showed up two-thirds of the population showed up and the dog catcher
and the meter made and they all said when we have a problem in highwood
illinois we turn to carmen and to the highwood public library
so we're the we you are the um
swiss army knife of the communities of this uh this this country so why did i
cajole and vegel and blackmail you all to uh to come here
uh the first group uh of library minds uh pulled together actually probably the
most exciting and and uh extraordinary group of library minds since the last
conversation that thomas jefferson had with benjamin franklin
um and it seems it seems like that uh you know was right before the
pandemic
uh so i i the the reason is
we we know how how important we are to the community
but what's happened because of that
an awful lot of what we do in the library world
is inertial inertial response to whatever the
community wants to whatever is going on in the world
the digital revolution has taken us over the pandemic took us over for sure the
polarization of this country is at our front door we're we're on the front
lines of the of the culture war uh the changes in our country the demographic
changes uh the changes uh the political changes
uh in our country uh the deep immigration we we have the highest level
of immigrants in the united states since the 1920s which was the highest level of
immigrants ever in the history of this country
uh the focus on inequality and on equity
to actually i think different things but two
important things and george floyd the racial reckoning in this country
which we have to go through we must go through in which libraries are engaged
in but how much purpose
are we showing in this i want to step back and think about the
library as a place in a place with a purpose
and i hope that that's the conversation we can have here
when i thought about this conference originally there were three people that
i wanted uh to invite uh robert putnam and shaylen uh romney
garrett his co-author uh of upswing and and bob i've known for a
long time i wanted to uh to invite marianne wolfe
because she is the most inspirational person i know about reading and i wanted
to focus on reading and danielle allen and danielle couldn't
come but danielle's book our declaration
which is about the declaration of independence is in my view
one of the great books of our time she discusses how she her belief that the
declaration of independence addresses our problems today and can
profoundly inform the dialogue that we need to have
on all these issues [Music]
she decided she agreed to come but then she decided to run for governor of
massachusetts fortunately
bob putnam and shaylynn romney garrett who's with us here today in person
agreed to agree to come right off the bat and you'll find that in upswing and
i'm going to mention this again uh when i when i do the actual introduction of
bob and shaylan that daniel allen is is there
prominently in the book on the last page actually um
but bob is of course the the uh uh the the most important delineator of the
decline of community uh in in the recent history of the united states and he and
shailene of course address what we might be able to do about it in in this latest
book um i believe that one of the things that
they say in this book um and and that is something that danielle also her work is
about and and marianne's work is a about as well is is about what happens at the
local level it's a topvillian view of the world of uh what happens when we
associate the great thing that tocqueville said about america the
unique thing he said about america was that we come together in our townships
it was the 1830s in our townships and associate bring create associations
around our problems and they spring up spontaneously
and i believe that the power of the traditional
library and our role in reading uh and particularly in children's
reading and the art is the archimedean leverage
point in what we do with our partners uh in the in the community uh and i wanted
the greatest evangelist of that uh mary ann wolf to be here with us uh and she
will be virtually um
and and then i had this all set uh and then i read tim coates's freckle
report using imless statistics tim came to the
conclusion that there must be correlations between
the decline in spending on books and materials generally particularly print
books the decline in circulation and visits to
the library and particularly the decline in children's
circulation and children's visits and perhaps a
correlation with a decline decline or failure to do anything about the
problems of reading among the most challenged people in our
community and the literacy of our communities
and what we know is true about reading is that it correlates with virtually
every measure of success and it correlates with virtually every division
and divide that we have in this country
so i believe that is the right question tim's question is the
right question and so we we put together a panel to to
uh to discuss that and we'll we'll see uh this should be should be an
interesting discussion uh about whether or not we're using our resources
correctly and what the focus of our resources ought to be to me that is the
ultimate question the focus of our resources
but i had one more conversation that was important that we added we added on to
the to what we're doing here tony again called me and some of you will know
tony many of you will know about tony's the chief technical officer at the new
york public library uh formerly doing the same things at the bbc and the
guardian in england and uh and and we knew we didn't have enough uh people
from great britain coming to this conference uh is our form of diversity
um and so uh tony in his conversation i asked a group of us some of whom i think
all of whom were here uh today and asked us uh what does a bookless library
looked like he said i'm creating a bookless library
and what does that look like and he said this with a certain amount
of shock and
startling
attention to the fact that he was creating
something that he didn't particularly i think like
um and so i think what the conversation
over the next two days is all about um
bringing these people together bringing the great panelists group that groups
that that we have and all of you uh is if anything about the soul of the
library what is a library today what will it be in the future what are we
doing for the community where is our leverage point in the community where is
our importance in the community and so i'll leave you
with that thought i don't know what will actually come out
of this whether it will be research orientation of the imls of best
practices a call to action
about reading or simply a redoubling of what we do
today so well in our communities but i do not know it's a conversation that
we've got to have and i'm really glad i'm having it with you
so i'll turn it over to terry devoe to explain what we're doing
[Applause]
brene brown's calling this the great awkward you can see i'm navigating it
already um i'm terry devoe from imls and i'm so
happy you're all here i normally have more of a backstage role
at our agency administering grants to the wonderful state library
administrative agencies some of whom are here today
but because we have a very packed agenda i'm gonna go
to show you that over the next one and a half days we're trying to fit in a lot
as crosby has sort of outlined for us my main role as the facilitator in this
event is just to keep us moving so
i am aided by our fabulous organizers in the wings they are all over
and we collectively are going to keep this moving on track
we are collectively the yin to crosby's yang he can expound on all the wonderful
philosophical things and we'll come back to the timing
we're the collective brain or brawn i should say to his brains
but we are so happy you're here and we welcome you to washington d.c
it's our deep desire throughout the next few days to ensure
a safe space for everyone in this venue we have some requirements
and some flexibility so we're going to do our best to navigate both
masks are required inside the common areas these include the lobby downstairs
all of the hallways and the restrooms masks are not required in this fourth
floor venue that we are in together so to navigate people's personal
preferences in this fourth floor level we're using stickers on our
name badges um if you have a green sticker we are
signaling that you're open to handshakes or hugs
yellow is more like a fist bump or an elbow bump and red means you're really
social distancing still
there are restrooms on all floors this this restroom on our floor is a single
restroom gender neutral so if you want more options you can head down the
stairs or the elevator on this side it's a little easier to access the multi-unit
restrooms which are just a floor below us and there are restaurants on all the
other floors as well
all the food is packaged as single serve to also keep
us safe and we'll have snacks throughout the day
and a lunch for you a grab and go style lunch tomorrow
at your table i guess i will stay on this slide for a moment sorry at your
table we have prepped readiness tense
which we encourage you to use to signal to your table mates if you're feeling a
little more introspective and you want to reflect on things a little bit longer
you can flip the side of the tent to your table mates that says reflective i
believe or i'm feeling reflective and if you're ready to just jump right
in and have the discussion then you can flip it around to the ready to discuss
side so we figured that would be a helpful signal as we move into our table
activities there are fidgety things if you need to
keep your hands busy i see lots of pipe cleaners
feel free they're for you we've got sticky notes or little post-it
notes in there we're going to be collecting questions on post-it notes
that's one option we're also going to have mics during the
question and answer session if you would prefer to stand up and ask your question
in person
there is an imls staff person at each of your tables if you haven't met them
already you'll meet them shortly and we also have host designations on
our name badges so if you have any questions just seek one of us out and
we'll be happy to help you we have easels in a couple of places one
on the side and one in the back these are our parking lots
so if topics come up that feel adjacent to the topics of conversation a
little off topic but you still want imls to know that you have thoughts on your
mind we welcome you to use the parking lots
and if something comes up that seems like it needs more
emphasis you can use the parking lot for that too
we we do have a kind of overriding question at the front of the room which
crosby touched on and that could be used for parking lot thoughts as well we want
to keep at the top of your mind the question of
you know as imls what kind of grant making or policy
research or other kind of work should we
prioritize to advance literacy so we're going to keep coming back to that theme
and would welcome you to keep it at the top of your mind and use the parking lot
for thoughts along that vein as well
all right so we talked about physical safety
but we also want to foster a safe space in our dialogue together over the next
day and a half so to ensure that our discourse is
productive we would ask you to lead with courtesy
and demonstrate respect for others this convening topic is really important
and we know a lot of you feel really impassioned about it
and we are welcoming your passion we just ask that you continue to listen
with an open mind throughout the remarks
create an environment where everyone can choose to speak deeply and freely about
their experiences we ask you to think before speaking
and more logistically when the time comes for us to be in dialogue together
we do ask you to use the microphones if you're asking a question we're both
recording this and the microphones enable us to pick up the conversation
for perpetuity and it helps each other
in the room hear each other better
do your part to let everyone participate everyone here brings different
experiences that are really important you've all been hand selected to be here
and we think of you as thought leaders so we want everyone to get a chance to
ask the questions that are important to them
and say the thoughts that are on their mind during the table discussions
and that means that all of us need to be gracious and give each other the chance
to speak so we're depending on you to make this a good
safe dialogue space not without passion not without strong
thoughts but just respectful
now we get a chance to try this out we are going to have a 10-minute
activity where you get to introduce yourselves to
each other at your tables so we're calling this pass the mic
we don't actually have mics for each of the tables so you know get a pipe
cleaner or something but we're going to have you introduce yourself one at a
time passing the mic to the right and you each get about one to two minutes to
tell us the following we want to hear your name role
organization and title so all the where are you from what do you do
and then share the goals and activities of your organization and how they relate
to literacy and social well-being and then we'd like to know what you're
hoping to take away from the convening so with 10 minutes
pass the mic [Music]
so now it uh it is a real honor for me uh
we we're going to present to you uh virtually uh bob putnam the malcolm
research professor of public policy at harvard uh and then a member of the
national academy of sciences a fellow of the british academy tim and tony
and in 2012 uh president obama awarded bob the national humanities uh medal uh
and shaylynn romney garrett uh and shilin has worked with bob on upswing
co-author on upswing worked with him on the book american grace how religion
divides and unites is a contributor to the aspen
institute's initiative weave the social fabric project
has her own personal journey
documented in her blog project reconnect her personal journey
back to community as she says and co-founded with her husband think
unlimited uh a venture in catalyzing social innovation in the middle east
in my 15 years at the kansas city public library i invited bob
to speak three times he represents to me
and certainly in his work uh with shay lynn in upswing the latest
book the best thinking about social well-being in our community
uh in bowling alone he chronicled the decline of community and and civic life
uh from rotary to republicans and democrats in our social life churches
family and even friendship declining and better together
uh his he assimilated his his critics comments
on bowling alone and and wrote an ode to
those new forms of community represented by things like mega churches and
importantly for us libraries
in our kids a book about in many ways his most
personal book a book about port clinton ohio where he grew up
he wrote about the the decline of community there and the generational
decline in mobility uh from his generation to the younger generations
in which he said in in upward economic
socioeconomic mobility uh the factors for
is it poised to plunge the factors for which we have found
growing class gaps are precisely the same factors that economist raj chetty
and his colleagues have found to be associated with socio-economic mobility
across america today family stability the decline of residential segregation
the continuation of school quality take your pick
community cohesion and income inequality now in upswing
bob and shaylynn try to answer the question of what we can do how
america came together a century ago the progressive era and what we can and can
we do it again and here they quote on the last page
uh danielle allen political philosophers have generated
the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other
we think we are required to choose between freedom and equality
under the general influence of libertarianism both parties have
abandoned our declaration they have scorned our patrimony such a choice is
dangerous if we abandon equality we lose a single bond that makes us a community
as alexis de tocqueville and so bob and shaylin say like alan we reject the view
that more freedom necessarily entails equality
and less equality in community believing
instead with alexis de tocqueville that individualism rightly understood is
perfectly compatible with community inequality i think
shayla and romney garrett and bob putnam are the right people to talk to us about
what library means in a world
in which freedom and equality have to be sought together
i think actually maybe i'm coming next unless shailene wants to take over here
and uh wait for my turn i can see you can you hear me
yeah okay sure and um
well let's go back just a second because i wanted to say something can we go back
to the uh there i wanted to say something to crosby
um who correctly reports that he and i have known each other for a very long
time and we've known each other for a very
long time for many reasons because we share values and so on
um we both have midwestern roots but especially because we both value
the importance of libraries and
in the first part of our remarks today uh libraries won't uh won't seem to be
an important part of the story i'm going to be talking about a much larger
picture in which toward the the second half of our
remarks though when shaylin is talking she's going to be talking about how what
happened when we face similar problems to those
today but we faced them 125 years ago and libraries
and especially carnegie public libraries are going to play a very important part
of that story so i ask you to bear with me now and now we
can go to the uh the powerpoints if if you'd like
um what i'd like to do now is
summarize for you very very quickly the first half or part of this book
called the upswing um
how america came together a century ago and how we can do it again
and then you see this chart and which is a little puzzling what's
the chart doing on the on the front page of a book
if we go to the next page i'm going to try to explain to you why that chart is
important here's the fact
america today by many many hard measures
has reached historic levels first of all a political polarization
where we've hardly ever in our american history
maybe in the period between 1860 and 65 1860 and 1865 but maybe not even then
have we reached the level of political polarization that we are now
and then independently of that we have reached historic levels of
economic inequality perhaps never in our history as the gap between and
poor been greater and then
seemingly independently of that the level of social isolation and social
fragmentation in america is extremely high
and probably has we it's a little harder to measure this but probably we've never
had the degree of social fragmentation and social isolation
as we do today and finally and this is a little also
hard to measure but i actually we in this book we do try to measure this
the degree of cultural self-centeredness the sense in which we're focused on
ourselves on not ourselves on each of us individually on our own self-interest
that too has hardly ever been reached so the first question of the book is how
did we get here and i'm going to say a little bit about
that and then of course the much more important question is how do we get out
of here in other words how can we reverse
these um these trends and that's when shaylin
is going to come in and provide at least the beginnings of an
answer to that so let's go to the first slide
um if uh i'm a numbers person and if you
like numbers you're you've come to the right place i'm going to use a lot of
numbers here but if you don't like numbers
don't worry it means you know part of it some of us like numbers and some of us
don't if you happen to be a non-numbers person that's okay settle back close
your eyes and um and i'll try to tell you what the
what's in these charts so the horizontal axis of this chart i
know of all the charts that i'm going to be talking about
is history american history running over from the left-hand side
1880 1890 the end of the 19th century and
zooming across the 20th century all the way up to the right
we find if you run a little uh laser pointer over to the far bottom right
uh that's that and then here we are
and that this is now basically uh 2020 or
right now we're out we're down and down in 22 but basically
each of these charts horizontally is going to show
change in america across this 125 years from the end of
the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century
and the vertical axis is going to be some aspect of politics or economics or
society or whatever in this case we're talking about polarization
political comedy or polarization the way the chart is
oriented um
polarization is uh up
i'm sorry polarization is down and political getting along bipartisanship
is up so let's let's see what we let's
probably just talk through this chart first so you can see what i'm talking
about over at the beginning of the at the end of the 19th century american
politics was extremely polarized
um earlier it had been even more polarized
in the in the civil war period of course but then by that by the end of the 19th
century american politics
was tribal basically no cooperation
across party lines i'm going to skip here saying anything about exactly how
we measured this but you'll just i'm happy to talk about
it of course because i'm a numbers guy but behind each of these charts
including this one there are have a dozen other charts that
are specific measures of that variable so here for example we're measuring
oh for example the degree to which parties cooperate or don't cooperate
across uh maybe politicians cross across party lines in congress or the degree in
which ordinary citizens like or dislike people on the other side of the aisle
many different measures they all saw the same story and you can see here that
what they show is at the beginning of the 19 the beginning
of the 20th century america was very polarized but then
in that began to change in the early years of the 20th century began to
become a little more cooperative not perfectly cooperative of
course but then that rises steadily keeps going up during the twenties and
30s and into the 40s
and into the 50s even now we're now into the 50s and even in the
middle of the 50s and about in the middle of the 50s we're
amazingly amazingly
unpolarized that is lots of political cooperation across party lines
symbolized by dwight eisenhower who was president at the time
who was almost certainly the least partisan
president in american history except for george washington he could have run for
either he could have voted for the presidency in either party i do not mean
that eisenhower caused that i only mean that he reflected the degree
in which people cooperated across party lines and
they didn't think basically about their own party they thought about the
national welfare and that continued into the 60s but then
as you can see toward the end of the 60s and into the 70s that begins to change
and then suddenly we begin to begin to plummeting um
uh cooperation or increasing polarization
down down down through the 80s and down through the 90s and
down through the 2000s and down through the 2000s and tens
and until now and if we actually if they we if we put on the graph the res the
numbers up to now it would be even lower we're amazingly polarized we're back
even worse than we were 125 years ago now let me pause just for a second some
people think that in terms of american public polarization
politics today that a lot of this was the call it was the consequence of um
of ex-president trump but as you can see trump is can't
be the cause of this he comes in way too late he doesn't enter american politics
until this trend has been going down for three or four decades so this story
is the broad angle the wide-angle view of how american politics have changed
over the last 125 years now i'm going to be a little
more quick as we go through the other dimensions of change let's have the next
slide please the next slide here same horizontal axis
from the 1890s over to the ninth over to today
this graph began this is a measure of the gap between rich and poor
um and it the graph actually begins in the 1910s because that's the period when
we begin to have really hard evidence that's when the
irs is created we begin to have really good evidence on the distribution of
income and of uh and of wealth in america and you can
see when the when the curtain rises america
is very very unequal and that continues
um for the first uh 10 years of the measure and then
and then it accepted it it's rising a little bit there's a pause during the
1920s that's the that's the gilded age that's when once again inequality is
rising as you go from from the 1920 to to the late 20s that's
the gilded age you can see it in the in the numbers but then
coming out of the gilded age long before years before the new deal you can see
that in the 30s america was becoming steadily more equal
by that i mean the gap between rich and poor was rising and that's true whether
we measured it in terms of of income or in terms of wealth whether
we talk about the degree to which you could rise from the bottom of
society the top to the top rungs of the of the economy
every year as you can see through the 30s and through the 40s and through the
50s steadily more equal and that keeps rising
um and in rising even during the 50s and hits the peak just about the 1960s looks
a little similar to that other graph and then suddenly surprisingly that
begins to change when we were let me pause up at the top there at the top
there in the 1960s we were very equal america was a more
egalitarian society in terms of the distribution of income than sweden or
denmark all those nordic social democracies we were even
more equal than they are but that ended in the late 60s you can see we begin to
become suddenly more less equal the gap between
rich and poor grows steadily through the 70s and especially in the 80s
and 90s down through the 2000s
you can see over there at the right hand side for just for a second in the in the
period around 19 around 2010 it looked like maybe that was ending but no no if
you kept on the graph um
with trump and the and the epidemic and so on now down in eggs way down way way
even further down this is we are now way over there in terms of
economic equality so that's another church it's actually a
little similar to the previous chart it shows how
our economy began by being unequal
and then there was this half century long rise to the
to the equality of the middle to the 20th century and then suddenly this
collapsed back down even worse than ever before let's have the next slide
now where the next slide is looking at social cohesion or what i sometimes call
social capital that's the degree to which we're connected with our family
and our friends and our neighbors and our community institutions
and again you can see down at the end of the 1990s children will have a chance to
say a little bit more about what that looked like but at the end of the
of the 19th century america was americans were very disconnected they
didn't because they just moved from rural small towns where they knew
everybody into the big anonymous cities and people were didn't know their
friends and neighbors and and they separated from their families and so on
and so we were very disconnected from one another low social
capital but then again as you can see as we entered the
the night of the 20th century there around 1900 suddenly that begins to
improve and the degree of social connection with
with as i say with family and friends and neighbors and
um so on begins to rise steadily rises through the
teens and in the 1920s again there's a little bit of pause in the 1920s but
then coming out of the 20s probably the greatest into the 30s and 40s probably
the greatest civic boom in american history
every our we were
we were having kids we were getting married at record levels we were having
kids at record levels that's the baby boom period we were
joining clubs we were uh getting to know our neighbors
steadily through the 50s and 60s and into this into the 60s and then suddenly
up there at the top in the middle of the 1960s suddenly silently mysteriously
people stopped going to clubs they stopped joining bowling
leagues um they stopped getting married quite so frequently they didn't know
their neighbors as well and then as you can see there
once again into the 70s and into the 80s it just
goes down down down more and more social isolation less and less connection with
our friends and neighbors and again it stops there the data
stopped there in the in the um in the in the middle of the of the you
know roughly 2015 is where the data go to but it just keeps falling
down down down further and further now if you go back go back up the curve just
to two to two thousand to point to the curve that's where the
book bowling alone was was published and at that point i was
describing the previous two or three decades of that downturn bowling alone
was basically a story only about this chart
and only about those three decades from the
1970s to the to or three or four decades to about 2000 but remarkably as you can
see i wrote the book and then it just
continued straight down that is real prediction the social sciences
it kept getting worse and worse and worse
and and now as i say we're back down to the level as we were in the at the
beginning at the end of the 19th century let's go quickly to the next slide
this is a um this next slide is a about
um what we call social cultural solidarity here i really wish i had more
time to talk to you about the how we measure this because i'm really
proud we have about its culture seems like a pretty
squishy idea but we've got some really hard measures about the degree to which
americans have thought of themselves as even either
being each of us in it only for ourselves
or we're all in this together
and it turns out you can actually measure the degree to which americans as
a whole thought of ourselves as either each of us out for his what was it for
me or
conversely thought of ourselves as being basically in the same boat all this
together and we rise or fall together at the end of the 19th century and
shailin will surely say more about this at the end of the 19th century americans
we're unbelievably focused i think we could call it i focus
very much focused on self-interest um
not just but thinking it was a good thing we should be just focus on number
one but then as you see once again beginning
in the early years of the 20th century that begins to change and we begin to be
a little less focused on eye a little more focused on we steadily upward
during the 1910s again there's that pause during
the 1920s but then again beginning in 1930 roughly
again steadily upward more and more focused on what we have in common
and what we owe to one another steadily upwards until
amazingly the same middle 60s and and middle 60s is when we were basically
compared to ourselves in the past or even compared to other countries we had
a very kind of communitarian sense that we were all in this together and that we
should look out for one another but then again at almost that same day
that begins to change and we begin to focus more on more in our self-interests
i would say our selfish interests down down down down
down and once again
this graph happens to end about you know uh five or six years ago but if we kept
on the graph it keeps going down further americans
are maybe not quite as focused on self-interest as we were 125 years ago
but but nearly so now i want to put all those charts
together and
let's see what they look like here we've just put all those same
charts on the same graph you can see economics and politics and society and
culture and
this graph passes what statisticians call the
interocular interocular trauma test
it hits you between the eyes but there's something similar here
something going on here it's not four separate stories it's one story as
america or moved at the from the at the end of the 19th century from very much
an eye focus economic inequality political
polarization social isolation and cultural narcissism
toward a we society in the middle of the 20th century
in 1960s roughly we were focused we were relatively equal
we were politically cooperative we were socially connected and we were
culturally focused on we and then
almost symmetrically and almost simultaneously all of those charts go
down that's not it and what it is what we're
saying is those are not four separate charts that's
a fundamental history of how america changed
over the course of the from the end of the 19th the beginning
of the 21st century and if you go quickly to the next chart we put all
these together that's the trend
that basically is the core empirical study
of our book the upswing you can see
they're beginning in the the first half of this period things are getting better
and better almost every year things are getting better more equal more
cooperative more connected more focused on what we have in common
and then almost simultaneously in the in the second half of this period we move
in the other direction now shaylin is going to
take over here and tell you a little bit more about what may like behind that
graph but especially she's going to focus on so what
because we're focused here not just on describing history but we want to draw
some lessons from history to say how do we get out of this pickle that we're in
now and sheila is going to explain that
say bob and i feel like we make a pretty
good team here because he's the numbers guy he's of course the world-class data
scientist and um and i'm the storyteller he's also a fantastic storyteller but
and he's taught me pretty much everything i know about that um
so if you if you've gone to sleep with regard to the numbers now is your chance
to wake up and join me in the land of the non-numbers people
and i want to pick up the story here by talking about by going back to the
question that bob started with which is how did we get here right that was the
motivating question behind this research we all recognize
from our day-to-day experience that we are in the midst of a multi-faceted
crisis as a nation that's not something that the numbers we need numbers to tell
us but
how did we get here and and ours is not the first study that attempts to answer
that question there have been so many books actually
in the past decade attempting to answer that question
that one of the reviewers of our book said this is just the latest edition in
the how america got into this mess genre of literature right
but we tend to think that our studies a little bit different in that most of
these books are looking at one of these phenomena just polarization or it's all
about inequality and we're looking at the fact that all
of these are part of the same thing the same trend that's one difference the
other difference is that we tend to zoom our lens out a lot further there's been
a lot of books written about the decline over the last half century or more in
one or many of these different phenomena but less clear is the story of what
happened before that so if there's been a decline since mid-century america what
happened before the decline and as we can see so clearly in what bob has
discovered through this this data-based story
is that there was actually an upswing that preceded the downturn
so when you ask yourself what's the lesson
from all of this data and each of the graphs that we showed you represent
scores of underlying measures so we're talking about you know all kinds of
different measures um so disparate that's kind of hard to believe that they
all follow the same trend we're talking about things like how often congress
people you know vote for legislation introduced by the other party as well as
you know what people have named their children whether they've chosen more
common names or more uncommon names over the course i mean all of these data
points very very different measures are combined here and are illustrating the
same trend now there's one way that you could look
at this story which is that we need to just turn back the clock
to this supposed golden age in american history when everything was better i
mean we can see it right here in the chart right
and and we've seen that rhetoric a lot particularly in the last several years
right that we need to make america great again
now we want to emphasize that this is not the story that we want to tell from
this data the story here to us what's less
relevant to us is looking at the period in history when these trends supposedly
culminated when we're at some sort of peak that's actually less interesting
than the realization that this multifaceted crisis that we are in
right now we have been here before by hard measures across scores of
different phenomena we have been in the exact same place that we are in today
once before and just like today
the social commentators from the first gilded age during the 1890s
1900s were decrying the end of democracy the
american experiment has failed plutocracy tyranny all is lost does that
sound familiar but
what the story of the upswing tells us is that none of those doomsday
prophecies were realized it didn't happen
on the contrary we entered
a multi-faceted multi-decade upswing in which year upon year
the ship righted itself so the question of our study is what can
we learn from the upswing the moment that looked most like the moment we're
living through that gave way to a period of things getting better and better what
can we learn from that moment in terms of how we could bring about
another upswing today so i want to highlight just a few
lessons from this period when the upswing when the gilded age gave way to
the progressive era which is when this upswing really picked
up steam now before i do that i want to just pause and clarify that when we're
using the term progressive in this presentation we're using what we call
capital p progressive meaning the historical period or the
movement that took place during the early 1900s
and historians have called the progressive movement of that time so
diverse as to be barely coherent it was a bipartisan movement that
included all different types of people different genders different classes
and it was not what we would call progressivism today the term that we as
we hear it used today is what we would call small p progressivism which
describes the left-most side of the political spectrum okay so when we're
talking about progressivism we're talking about this historical movement
that was incredibly diverse but that was animated and united by this galvanizing
belief in the power of everyday citizens to
make change that's the progressivism we're talking
about so if we go to the next slide let's look at a few of these lessons
from america's last upswing this moment when the progressive era began to to
change the course of american history so as bob noted we're looking at you know
all of these this is a data-based story so we're looking at all these different
measures and when you have trends over time that start to all move in the same
direction at roughly the same moment you might say to yourself well if we could
figure out what the leading variable is in other words which of those trends
started moving in the right direction first
if we could figure that out then maybe we would know what was driving or
leading the rest of the variables to go upward
right so the question is statistically can we identify that well
the first thing that we can identify is actually the lagging variable the
thing that happened last which surprisingly turns out to be economics
we kind of have this bias in american culture that economics drives everything
and i think that comes mostly out of the social sciences where people are often
treated as economic animals we tend to think if we could just fix
the economic inequality first then we'll start to feel like we're all
in this together and those other big trends will begin to change well we're
not saying that fixing economic inequality is not important it's
absolutely critical but what we do learn from the last upswing is that it is not
the thing that changed first it's the thing that changed last
so what do we learn from that there may be underlying things that we need to get
moving in the right direction first before we'll have the political will to
change our economics that's potentially one lesson we can learn here so if we
know that economic equality was the lagging variable what was the leading
variable it seems clear from both the data and
the historical record that it was a cultural and moral shift
that actually began to change first bob spoke briefly about this but the
gilded age again end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century was
characterized by a highly narcissistic self-focused culture
and a big part of that was something called social darwinism so not too long
before this darwin had articulated his theory of the survival of the fittest
which of course was meant to describe the natural world and how it worked but
there were social commentators that came along and said well if that's how the
biological world works that's how the social world should work
and that's a great way to organize society
and darwin himself was not there's some evidence that he was not very excited
about this idea um just to sort of clear his name a bit
but um but there were people who really took
this to heart and said you know society is not about cooperation it's about
competition and only the strong will survive and the devil take the hindmost
that was really the reigning cultural ethos of the day
and into that and that's what produced the robber barons right
and the huddled masses on the lower east side and equivalent places all over the
united states into that moment came moral voices that
began to question that as an organizing principle of our society
and this interestingly moral movement came first and foremost out of
evangelical protestantism it was christians who began to say first
to themselves i don't think we're actually living our
own moral values and there was a movement called the
social gospel that began to say now wait a minute at the time christianity and
the theology of christianity was very much focused on me and my personal
relationship with god and my personal sins and whether i was going to get into
heaven and everybody else's that was everybody else's business not my
business the social gospels came along and said
wait a minute we can't just apply our morality
to our own life we have to apply it to society and think about social sins and
how we can begin to change those that first took root in christianity it
began and then it took root more broadly until we had a sort of moral outcry
happening through the muckrakers and all these
people trying to bring to light what was really happening and call for change
and so this was this was the first trend that we began to move upward that began
to change the way we thought about whether we were all in competition
or whether we were all in this together so that's a really important lesson we
think from this period so who were these progressive reformers
who were having these moral moments they were largely young they were very young
the jane adams's who started the settlement house movement and the paul
harris's who started the rotary club and the ida b wells who was out there you
know um showing forth to the nation the evils of lynching they were all under
the age of 30 when they were doing their most important work
these were young people who were living in a world completely different
from the world that their parents had lived in the industrial revolution had
changed everything and the old rules and the old institutions and the old social
structures just didn't apply and so these young reformers were energized
with a totally new innovative lens on what we would have to build to move the
nation forward and we believe that today
any upswing that we will that we will see has to be led
architected orchestrated by young people just as it was last time young people
who are not afraid to use a moral framework to call for change
and we're inspired by the fact that we are already seeing this we're seeing it
in the climate change movement we're seeing it in the black lives matter
movement we're seeing it in the calls for gun control young people who want
change and who are framing it as a moral issue
so we think that there's cause for hope there as well as cause for hope in in
youth voter participation numbers which have
never been higher except in this exact same era that we're describing the last
upswing another lesson from this period
is that these young reformers these young progressives
they were all about association building and association as both an end and a
means so what does that mean well if you look
at the story of paul harris he came from a small town in vermont moved to chicago
he was part of that huge demographic shift during the industrial revolution
he became a lawyer and he was very lonely he just didn't know anybody in
that town so he decided to get three business people together to start
something that was sort of like a lunch club
and it became the rotary club which of course has you know
multiple millions of members worldwide but it was really just first and
foremost about meeting his need his loneliness a new way to bring people
together but progressives were also geniuses at
bringing people together across lines of difference the social settlement house
movement is my favorite of those movements that was really intended to
bring people who never had any contact with one another into contact with one
another and we of course know that libraries
are another of the inventions of this period that do
exactly that so association was first and foremost
about meeting that social isolation that we saw in the graphs but then it became
a means for creating change over time
the other thing to know about this period was that
there was no real charismatic leader out there saying i'm going to lead a
progressive movement here's a giant national blueprint for how we're going
to change everything
the progressive air is often framed this way in sort of cartoon histories that it
was all about these big national programs
but actually those big programs the consumer protection agencies and the
national income tax and all those things were sort of the caboose of this
movement the engine was grassroots organizing
was people working in communities right outside their doorstep
in tenements in neighborhoods in municipalities tinkering with solutions
in what the progressive louis brandeis called laboratories of democracy
coming up with new models for how to solve problems that then went viral and
became things that became adopted in other states and other places and then
some of which became models for national programs that changed the face of the
nation so there was nobody laying out a grand
plan that then went from the top down it started as a bottom up and was met from
the top down with national programming we believe that that is what another
upswing is going to have to look like today so the work that you are all doing
out there on the front lines of your communities is the absolute most vital
work of a new upswing
so those are some of the positive lessons of this period i just want to
end with sharing with you that there aren't all positive lessons from
this period of the upswing right there are several cautionary tales as
well and i don't have time to share all of
them with you and i have only a little time to touch on this briefly i wish
there was more time to go in depth but i will just say this
one of the biggest cautionary tales of the progressive era
is simply that this we the progressives were building toward was not inclusive
it was largely a racialized we and
not to put too fine a point on it but you know most of the progressives not
all of them but most of them were racist so a lot of the programs that they built
that actually fueled this upswing that got us closer to
we than we'd ever been before had to knit into them the seeds of their
own demise because they failed to take into account the need for full inclusion
as we've seen so many times in american history the progressives too largely
kicked the work of racial reconciliation down the road
and the needs of people of color and to a certain extent women were sort of
sacrificed on the altar of progress so any upswing that we would hope to
create again today can't kick that problem down the road anymore
and i think one of the things that we can learn putting all these lessons
together is that the beginning of an upswing today is going to be about a
cultural and a moral shift and the place that that has to start is
with inclusion it's not just about programs and
policies and economic equality it's about doing the hard work of racial
reconciliation to create a new north star for what a
real inclusive we could look like if we could do that
and mobilize at the grassroots and get our young people involved and put
association across lines of difference at the first at the forefront of what
we're doing we believe that we can see another upswing one that hopefully will
be durable and will lead us closer to that ideal
beloved community that we know is possible
these are just a few of the lessons from this period there's so much more we
could say i wish we had more time but i will just leave you with one parting
thought if we can go to the next slide teddy roosevelt
who became one of the most articulate leaders of the progressive movement said
this the fundamental rule of our national
life the rule which underlies all others is that on the whole and in the long run
we shall go up or down together we believe that what these graphs and
charts and statistics show is that when we lean into we
things get better and better and when we lean into i
things get worse and worse in the words of one of my colleagues who
i love to quote eric lou he says we all do better when we all do better
that's what the data shows us that's the story that we want to tell today we
believe that we've been in a mess just as ugly and gnarly as the one we're in
today but we got out of it once before we made a lot of mistakes that we don't
have to make again today but we believe that we can do it again
and that's the hopeful message that we want to share with you today and we're
of course humbled and inspired by the fact that you're already doing it so
we're really grateful to be here and share this message with civic innovators
such as yourself who are making this happen all across america today thank
you so much
so thank you so much shaylyn thank you bob
and and now we'd like to get three panelists up here to to talk
uh uh about what what we've just heard from shaylynn and bob
um and and i think they are all three people who
are putting the wii in the upswing in fact i think we should call them up
swingers um
so diane connery uh if you would come up diane uh is the
pottsboro librarian pottsboro texas the postboro library has been getting
known and diane's been getting known over the last few years as one of the
great libraries in the country in rural rural texas one that voted one of the
top three best small libraries in america in 2017
and diane herself was honored as an
innovator in library journals mover and shakers class of 2021 and those of us
who've been on the many calls that we've all resumed calls that we've all had
about what we're doing in the library world and know that diane
is doing so much in the way of outreach digital outreach and every kind of
outreach in in her community i've already mentioned carmen patel and
carmen please come up
the highwood public library in highwood illinois getting our national medal the
the truth about carmen is that she's won it twice she did it uh before in
waukegan uh as well she was partly responsible or significantly responsible
for that uh uh the imls has given her two gold medals and and i'm uh two
national medals and i'm sorry that's it for this decade carmen um
yeah uh and and her her uh outreach efforts are are extraordinary across a
wide variety of literacy
ged english skills esl programs
etc and she's done work with a house of peace a culturally informed shelter for
women and children struggling with domestic violence uh she's an
extraordinary librarian and our last icon of library world for this panel is
felton thomas i think everybody knows everybody in the library world knows
felton the cleveland public library uh director formerly
the white house champion for change in in 2016
president of the public library association
of america a leader in technology education
economic development every aspect so take it away panelists
all right [Music]
well i'll i'll start i want to read something to you really
quickly social well-being what is social
well-being social well-being is having a sense of
belonging to a community and contributing to society it involves
building healthy nurturing and supportive relationships
as well as fostering a genuine connection to those around you
so that is what highway public library has
done we have nurtured a community a community
that has been neglected it's a small town of 5400 people
and 50 are immigrants mostly undocumented immigrants who live in fear
who live hidden who live invisible and so the library is working very hard to
make them present because they are the economic engine they are the underbelly
of that community and so why not provide them the resources the literacy the
access to support that they need so our library is focused on
early childhood young adult
and adult literacy we've created programs specifically based on the needs
of the public the public informs our programming and so i'll give you a very
quick story about betty betty came in to our library well she didn't want to come
into our library because she didn't trust her library
but i met with her and i encouraged her and she felt welcomed betty came in and
all she ever wanted was to get her ged and to continue her education
so an immigrant an undocumented immigrant now has a ged and is now on
her way to getting her business degree at the local college
betty is now changing generational cycles of poverty because
her son
will no longer be invisible and her son is excited to go
to college and so this is what the library is doing in
highwood it is transformational it is impactful
we have programs like i said for youth young adult
adults and we recently received a major grant of 578 000
to work on health equity and so getting health access to individuals
so i think we're doing a pretty decent job
of creating upswings
[Applause] hi dianne connery i am here
i think as a spokesman for rural public libraries pottsboro is about an hour and
a half north of dallas a town of 2500 people and
i often say it's like driving back in time and not in a good way it's not a
quaint little town i have an advantage that maybe many of
you do not and that is we have almost no budget ten years ago
it was an all donation all volunteer library and the first
meeting i went to was a discussion of how many months left
before we closed and long story short a group of us decided
what if we just did everything differently and made this library so
important to the community that then if we were going to close people would be
up in arms and so through grant writing
thank you imls and tslac and many other
foundations we've had a lot of success with innovation
and that's energizing to me we have been in the position
and the reason i said that i have an advantage that you don't
is there's very little bureaucracy over a small town library if i get an idea in
the morning i can do it that afternoon i don't have to go to a bunch of board
meetings and i think i have come to library world
in such a fortunate time
because of covid it was recognized what the lack of
digital inclusion meant for rural residents
and so when we talk about kind of that that
social movement that then leads economic movement there's money coming for
infrastructure for rural libraries i was fortunate enough thanks to imls to
attend the national digital inclusion alliance
two weeks ago in portland and
[Music] that's where librarians need to be with
these cross-sector coalitions of people talking about how are we going to make
real impact because if libraries are about information
how much of it occurs now online
and so our library focuses on digital inclusion
we started with things like an esports team i think we were the first public
library in the nation to have an esports team because so many people
in our area don't have internet in their homes and they don't have computers in
their homes and i saw these kids and like how will they ever be on a level
playing field with their peers from bigger communities if they don't know
how to use a computer and the pandemic started and we couldn't
close because we're so essential to the community people didn't have internet at
home so they came to us and they started asking us if they could connect with
their doctors and
through a national library medicine grant we launched a telehealth room
and then that led to connections with national library
medicine and health systems science researchers and
clinicians and health literacy specialists and it evolved in so many
ways and ecf funding there's so much money on
the table for libraries and in my
sphere that i'm aware of so few libraries who were asking for that money
so our all-in and pottsboro taxpayer-funded
operations budget all in 39 000 a year that's our total
budget we have requested fingers crossed 7.5 million dollars in ecf funding to
put up infrastructure throughout our county around libraries
so that people can have internet in their homes
people who live within a mile of the library come to our library check out a
router take it home and have internet in their homes hot spots aren't a long term
answer so at ndia they were talking about hey government has
42.5 billion dollars to spend on digital inclusion and they're not quite sure yet
how to spend it librarians need to be at that table and
when when shailene talks about grassroots efforts
i think and again i'm biased rural library i think these are happening
amazing things around the country are happening in rural libraries but our
capacity is limited because we're cleaning the bathroom and i'm spraying
weed killer in the edible landscaping and you know all that kind of stuff um
and so we don't have the time or don't make the time to advocate for
the difference we're making in our communities and that's something that i
want to see come out of this is for librarians to
kind of have a louder voice amplify their voice
in the difference they make in their communities
so that these grassroots efforts can multiply and be bigger than themselves
because i can't tell you how often i think i've had an original idea i try to
google it find nothing two years later i find oh some other library was doing
that two years ago i just had no idea and
i'll close up with saying one of my couple observations i said i was closed
and then i said a couple couple observations from the pandemic is
um all these the well the federal
government and all these organizations and non-profits need libraries to make
these programs and services real they've got the theory they've got the
money but how do they get to the people and by libraries speaking up we can be
at that table and we need to be at that table
um so that's been one of my um takeaways is the the importance of
of coalitions these cross-sector coalitions getting out of library world
and in our case i think we've had to fight against the stereotype of what a
library is um and what we provide so that's an
uphill battle but
but we're making progress on that and so i think we are needed and we just need
to amplify our voices more and then the final piece of that
is researchers i am not a numbers person but i have now seen
and i have learned from some of the numbers people
that if when we went into our program planning
we could talk with some of the researchers to find out like what would
be a good assessment of this program what are we trying to accomplish because
i i will admit cover your ears james that when i'm as a small library writing
a grant i want to get something out there and i want to get the money and
then i need to implement it quickly but if we could think bigger and get
everybody working together the researchers want us
we want them how do we get together and so i really feel
like coalitions working on this are the way to make some progress
thank you i want to thank crosby for this opportunity to
actually say bob hey bob you know i mean to the professor
beyond the same kind of talking space with bob and
jaylene who i have great deep respect for and
i've been reading their work for a while and i've been thinking a lot about a
couple of concepts that are brought up in his earlier work around bonding and
bridging the the idea of bonding is that we typically kind of hang out with
people who are very much like us same age same religion you know um
uh and we though to be successful need to do more
bridging be around people who are different from us different ages
different religions different ethnicities and so i wanted to share a
story of that i think shows that really the
leadership is going to come from the youth um and and uh it was a very
interesting um program that kind of led me to this
kind of thought that i wanted to share with everybody so a few years back um
the jewish federation who's a partner of the library
came to us and said right we've heard about our the partner city with
cleveland which is beijing israel um that they have this great library and we
would like you to go to israel and my answer was okay i'm on i'm packed
let's go right right and so i went to see the library
and all of a sudden i started walking around and there was nothing but like
12 year olds and 13 year olds and 14 year olds they were working behind the
desk they were doing circulation they were doing all of these other things
throughout the library and i was like and they said this is it
the kids run the library right i was like okay
right and they said well let's go meet the librarian so the librarian was in
the back in the back room with his feet up and i was like this is genius
right get the kids to run the whole library
you just sit up and eat snacks right
and he goes no this is this is my thought right
we you know we uh always tell the kids what
to do and israel has a long history of letting young people lead so i just
let them run everything
and literally he let them run everything every decision in the library was run by
the young people right and so
um i would i was just kind of like really
surprised and i spent some time with the kids and i started to see the leadership
development that was coming from this as i was they asked me to speak to the
kids and the like there was a 11 year old doing my
microphones and all the technology right and i was like no disrespect not to say
that right only 11 year olds could do that but
but it was so interesting seeing that and and so
i wanted to come back to cleveland and kind of put forward this option
let's let the kids kind of run like the library of which my leadership
team said that's the stupidest thing you've ever said right but what became
very very clear was that
we have a kind of history of always telling young people what they're going
to do how they're going to do it and as we started to kind of do a similar type
of program it was the same thing that continued to happen
our our older folks couldn't allow the young people to let be free and allow
them to make decisions we always had to make sure and tell them this is not
going to work right so they never had a chance to leave so
the jewish federation brought some of the kids from israel
to cleveland to meet our young people to kind of like push them to kind of move
forward and it was so interesting right initially these kids are from
two different countries but they were kids who were in
in beijing they were poor kids who were there and
they were with some of the poorest kids in cleveland right and they started
talking and they started bonding
and soon they were starting to create a bridge between the two cities right
and what we had what came out of this was after the kids started like like
stopping wanting to do anything because they all wanted to go to the mall they
all wanted to hang out and they became really close friends
so now continually they send messages to each other ahead of time
because they're on different you know time zones right and they talk about how
they're moving forward with their work and the value teams that now they are
called the volun instead of volunteers there now the volunteers who run a
volunteer program out of our library for their community right
are have just seen
unbelievable growth in those kids right they are now leaders all right and you
know they're getting up doing speeches in front of
of their peers telling them how like they don't need to listen to adults
anymore because they know how to do everything
right and it's a small scale thing to see these two countries bridged by these
young teens from the poorest communities in their countries
but what it said to me and what i took from this
was that there is a way for us to move forward if we get out of our way
right that our the adults aren't willing and if this is going to happen
right if we are going to see ourselves somehow
take that bridge space and the leadership is going to come from
these young people somehow the older folks are going to have to find a way to
get out of the way so i am going to ask you two a question
right because we're showing our time all right and i wanted to make sure that
this was one of those kind of questions in crosby has pushed
me to to put this out there is
while i agree that there are a lot of rural librarians doing great work and
there are a lot of folks doing great work
i think sometimes we take this room and say that there are
lots of we could fill this room 10 20 times over
but many times i see the same people in this room
right right we're like the illuminati we we
we're always here right and i think what we have to ask is in this profession do
we do need to do more to make sure that we could fill this room with 10 of us
10 times over rather than the same folks that we see who are doing very
progressive work
i just wanted to add that what i've heard here is commonalities
i have a very small budget i would consider myself a rural library
a island
you know in a community of extreme wealth the north
shore is one of the wealthiest parts of illinois of the country for that matter
and so highwood my operating budget is 297 000 a year
but my real budget now is 1.5 million and it is
because of grants and it is because of grassroots efforts that we have been
doing and is because all of our programming is run by informed community
engagement so we are out there we are boots on the ground the reason why i was
able to receive two iml s's is for a community engagement strategy
that we have developed that we connect with leaders from within our own
community and power them to go out and be our boots
eyes and ears on the ground during covet that's what allowed the
library to be a lifeline for our community we never closed we
closed the front door but we left the back door open we served 23 000 meals
during covid we partnered with department of public health to do
vaccine tests i mean covet testing and so far we partner with walgreens to do
over 3000 vaccines in the arms of community members so we're a trusted
source in the community we are a bridge to connect individuals we have a tab
team which is a teen advisory board that is doing all of the the teen programming
so we have commonalities we don't let bureaucracy get in our way
we were on the verge of being shut down it was because of elizabeth martin that
stan sitting over there who wrote a strategic plan that made sense
that they hired a non-librarian because i am not a librarian by profession and
they hired someone with community engagement skills and that made all the
difference the library is now vibrant we are about to do a four million dollar
renovation um with a 300 less than 300 000 budget
right it's all possible if we were creative in what we do
and we leverage partnerships with key organizations and key funders funders
are out there and they do want to give money and they want to give money to
changing change agents and we are that every one of you in here has your own
story and has that change agent mentality that's why we're in this room
so i think listening and hearing to the community especially the most vulnerable
now that it's been very clear to us with covet who the most
vulnerable are that we do need to see them and we do need to be inclusive and
we do need to be a we it can't happen just with an eye so i really am grateful
for this opportunity that i have been given to share a little
bit of the work that hollywood is doing and the work that's yet to come this is
just the beginning for us to work in libraries and begin to change what
libraries are really all about
i think of it in terms of entrepreneurs thinking like an
entrepreneur because
in in my situation the lack of taxpayer funding i had to look at things of okay
an entrepreneur wants income i need income how do we make that happen
and um so so we were able to be creative and then work with the people
i i would write subject lines to um people and it would be subject line
would be what if dot dot dot and then their answer would just be hell
yes whatever whatever the crazy idea was it was like yes let's do that um the
other thing and this may be unpopular here but i received my mls two years ago
um and i got it out of spite it
[Laughter] i got it to prove
that i did not need what the library educators were teaching
and
with the hindsight i will say 50
i think about 50 of the curriculum applied to my reality
of what i do so i
i would be a proponent of looking at what is taught by library educators to
get more creative people into the field
well if anybody disagrees with any of the
comments say they came from kelvin watson
so terry's coming i think uh we i know we're close to time
so listen believe it or not you have 10 more minutes if you need it but um i'm
going to give you the option of needing it first i'm going to explain what's
going to come next and then we'll go to break
after the break jalen's going to come back up and join us for a question and
answer session of 30 minutes so we would love for you all who are with us today
to think of questions that can foster a good deep discussion about the things
we've heard from robert putnam and shaylin and our panelists on the dais
right now we have post-it notes that you can
either write your questions on attribute them to yourself or anonymize
them either way or calvin
and feed them to your notetaker your imls no
taker with the host badge at your table or feed them to me
and we will come back after the break and have a robust question and answer
session um so with that i will give you all the
laughs can i can i can you hear me yes can you hear me yeah
um is it possible uh we're going to do a q a for shane and me to respond but i
wonder whether we could at least i would like to comment very briefly on the what
we've heard now from these panelists because i think
it was to me very instructive we would love that but
i don't want i don't want to throw the whole organization
off kilters so now what i'm afraid of is
we're getting the yes from crosby we we've got a yes okay
so um the idea professor putnam thought i was crazy is great that is
is all-star thank you professor hold it felton hold it
first of all felton you you may or may not know
that i grew up in a small town a tiny town
um about 70 miles uh
west of cleveland yes um
ages ago so i can right now this is probably
70 years ago i could name for you the starting lineup of the cleveland indians
well what they were then called the cleveland indians in 1919
50 so they're i'm going to identify with
both the small town people in the audience but also with cleveland
um and and i apologize for calling the
cleveland indians i'm i'm that old that i don't even remember uh the the new
name of the indians of the uh cleveland audience um
i wanted to i only wanted to make one point because it's relevant actually to
what everybody here said i really like felton's question which is
how can this group stop preaching to the choir
you all know all these things and the question is there's a very large
i know actually that there's a very large number of librarians out there who
ought to know what you know and ought to be doing what you're doing
well they've not yet got the message and that seems to me they're that it it the
direction in which that moves me is to say
there needs to be a social movement among librarians
to kind of no i mean of course to social movement
beyond libraries but in particular among librarians
to mobilize many larger numbers of libraries i'm a
huge fan of libraries as as as crosby knows better than anybody i'm an
enormous fan of libraries not just as a consumer but but as a as a analyst of
society but i do think that there's that i do
think that more thought is needed about that question that
felt and asked not what not just what good things are you guys doing
but how can you get the how can you reach out to mobilize a much larger
number of librarians and the the last point i want to make has to do with
the way that the role that libraries played
in the progressive era because it was an extremely important role
and that is the carnegie libraries and i don't know how widely maybe the carnegie
library story is very well known among contemporary librarians among all of you
so i maybe i'm just again preaching to the choir you all know about carnegie
libraries but if if you don't there are deeply interesting parallels
between the problem that the carnegie libraries
that andrew carnegie set out to create and
and the problems that face america today for example
andrew carnegie was himself a librarian he was a librarian who made his fortune
i'm sorry he was a he was a person who made his fortune
because he came out of libraries that's i don't mean library school i mean
because he was a he was in libraries that's what first of all
awakened his intellect and he he gave back
do you know that hat at least in that in 1930 or no maybe more recently that
1950s half of all public libraries half of all
public libraries in america were founded as carnegie public libraries it was a
huge im had an enormous impact on the reality of libraries in america
and um so it was intimately tied with the immigration of that period both
he himself as an immigrant and secondly he was
intending the library should serve uh should serve the purpose that um that
carmen was talking about in her uh in her town
and he was he was intending to reach out to rural areas that was
that's i mean the the the resonance between
what andrew carnegie was trying to do and did do
was first of all to make libraries present in in
throughout america but secondly to make libraries community institutions of
community learning community centers
and that's i think a lot of what you're all doing
and so i'm not trying to say that you don't that you have to take instruction
from from andrew carnegie but in the carnegie
libraries but i do think you'd find a lot of inspiration and some lessons
in that which which why am i talking about it because it's the progressive
era that's it was libraries and carnegie played a crucial role
in the upswing sorry to go on so long
we appreciate your comments um i will give the panelists a last word one one
last thing is our we change our library name
to the highwood library and community center
because that is exactly what we are now is a community center that welcomes all
people that listens to the needs of the community and we respond with relevant
programming so it's important for us to say that we have a community center
within our library because that's what we are
wonderful i i jumped the gun i'm sorry all good i think felton wants the
microphone back no and but to the professor's point i think they're
they're hassle bob please okay all right i could say bob look at that
look at who i am today all right but it goes to the the idea that
i think most of us believe that we have moved
from the traditional model to the transformational model in library world
and we're many of us are so far
gone from the traditional model that we don't even think about it in that sense
anymore but i think if we really were to look across the especially for us who
were in public libraries the you know 9 000 public library systems and we
started to examine how many of them still operated in the traditional model
i think we'd find a lot more than we probably think
right and so i think having that traditional model
being there is can can be transformational for many
communities but what you see here
you know with you know
us here is that we have really been able to
to be to create much more transformation and connect our communities to their
libraries in different ways by being transformational rather than traditional
and i think there needs to be much more discussion about that in library
i think we we find ourselves in the echo chamber many times when we get together
and i've we've got to figure out how do we go out and and do that work outside
and lastly to your point bob i think we do
need to find a carnegie um and it may not have to be someone
who's spending boatloads of money on us but we need i think in libraries someone
to be a hype man out there for us um in the general
larger world um and i'm not sure who that's going to be
but i you know well i don't think it's flavor flav but
you know i think there should be somebody we've got to figure out who
that is because in essence what andrew carnegie did was
make libraries seen as the most important part of their communities in a
lot of ways and we've kind of we continued to do that
but i i don't know if everyone sees it in that way
beyonce would be great
for a long time i called myself an accidental librarian and i guess i can't
do that anymore because i'm so passionate about it
but i think all of us are at an incredible once in a lifetime
once in a hundred years
time for libraries right now i just think this is is the time and i hope
we spend our money wisely and we don't let the opportunity pass us by
great what a great note to end on thank you panelists thank you kino
all right we've got we've got our two keynoters and our three panelists here
for our 30-minute question period we did get some sticky notes to kick us
off if you
have sticky notes that haven't made it up this way there's some imls folks that
are wandering you can you know bring them up to me on the podium we also have
three mics in the audience so there's a possibility to just get up and stand and
ask your question the mics are on the floor we're going to start with the
sticky note questions but we'll get to the mics
and we have many questions so to the extent that our panelists and keynoters
can be brief in the response to the questions we'll get through more of them
so i think we're going to start with one that came in and is probably directed
more to bob and shaylynn the question is if the 20th century
wasn't truly radically inclusive or racially inclusive excuse me
was it really that strong and upswing across the four metrics
would you like me to repeat it or you got it
no no we got it okay um caitlyn you want to
you want to take it well i mean but you never should take it but you're the
specialist sure
so um
okay brevity being the key i'm gonna just give it a minute to think where to
start and how to make this brief because i i will just say this is a fantastic
question it deserves much more time than we're
about to give it um there is an entire chapter in the
book that addresses the question of race and and the and the movement over this
period toward or away from racial equality and how that maps on to the iwi
century so if you're really curious about this i would encourage you to just
take a look at that and you don't have to buy the book you can check it out of
your library so um so
so what i'll say is this um i think that
our question we approached this question from a data
standpoint because the whole backbone of the book is data right
so the question is what longitudinal data do we have that maps onto this same
period that can help us answer this question
when you talk about what people assume the data looks like over this period
a lot of people assume that because things were in fact extraordinarily
bleak from a racial equality and inclusion perspective at the beginning
of the century there's often this assumption that nothing changed for the
better until the lightning bolt changes of the 1950s and 60s civil rights
revolution and
what we would call so so the the graphs that you saw look like sort of inverted
u curves right by contrast a lot of people feel like the movement toward
racial equality inclusion looks more like a hockey stick no change in the
dramatic change that turns out to be true when you're
looking at measures of inclusion particularly things like the
long-delayed entry of black americans into professional schools and
professions um lack of representation in government
uh residential segregation on and on and on
there are many measures uh where it was just purely exclusionary and it took
that sort of um changing of the du jour
segregation for things to begin to move interestingly and what came as a
surprise to us is that it does the curve does not look
that way when you're asking questions about material equality between the
races and when we say when i say between the
races i mean between black americans and white americans and the only reason that
we are framing it in that way is because that's what we have data for over this
long period it's not because other peoples of color don't matter it's
because we don't have data over the full period to answer that question with
other groups but we do for black americans and white americans
and what's so interesting is that when you look at the data and when we're
talking about material equality we're talking about things like
um [Music]
health measures so infant mortality and life expectancy we're talking about uh
income distribution we're talking about wealth
or home ownership for example we're also talking about voter registration and
voter participation when you roll all of those measures together
and you ask yourself were we moving more toward equality was
the racial gap narrowing or widening over this 20th century period and when
and how fast what you actually see
is that the bulk of progress toward narrowing the gap
took place during the upswing actually before the civil rights
revolution which i think particularly for white
americans that's a surprising story it's not that surprising i think for a
lot of black americans because this is their genealogy this is their family
history this is the great migration the main driver of that
move toward equality um
was because black americans stood up and claimed their place in the american we
and left the south for the more hospitable
west and north in this country and so you see that very clearly in the
data um and and we often get the question
well you know there was just so much room for
improvement for black americans maybe that's the whole explanation but it
actually turns out that everyone in america was doing better and better over
that first two thirds of the 20th century but black americans were doing
actually better at a much faster rate than white
americans which is really interesting right
but then comes the other surprise right when
the damn of exclusion breaks and the civil rights laws are passed
you see very clearly in the data what we call in the book a foot off the gas
period so you had all this progress on material equality
that then stagnates stalls and in some cases reverses
during the i period in american history so we have this view when i say we i'm
referring mostly to white americans we have this view that like
the civil rights movement happened we fixed that things have gotten better and
better right and i think one of the most important
messages of the black lives matter movement has been to shed light on the
fact that that's a completely false narrative
the data is very clear that things have stagnated or gotten worse for black
americans in this country and when you look at that over the full course of
what we're looking at here of this this i we i period
you have to ask yourself well how does this map on to the iwei story well it
turns out that time at the the time when america was
moving more and more in the direction of we turned out to have been better for
black americans than a time when culturally more broadly we turned toward
hyper-individualism hyper-individualism
is bad for everyone it's particularly bad for
traditionally excluded groups and that bears out very clearly in the
data and so it's it's a complicated story because
we're not saying wow this first two thirds of the 20th
century we should model everything on that because it was so great but what we
are saying is again if we're getting underneath these questions
there is some cultural work that we need to do
around restoring this culture of we the belief that we are all in this together
the feeling that we are all in this together
that work has to be done because that actually
is an incredibly important part of this story not just policies that are going
to equalize things or make things less segregated we have to do that hard work
to get back into the cultural and moral ethos of we
i think that's a really important lesson here it's not just it's not an easy
thing of saying two-thirds of the first two-thirds of
the 20th century good or bad should model on that shouldn't i mean it's
obviously much more complex than that um and so hopefully that gives you a
little bit of a taste of our thinking on this and and how the data lines up here
thank you thank you so much we're going to turn to a question for
our library panelists can you talk about how your library has activated local
networks of support and social cohesion in your communities maybe an example or
two so how have you activated local networks
of support and social cohesion in your community
sure um
so our air conditioning went out last year
and we just put out a call to the community we don't have have money to
fix it and we can't open until we get the money and within four days we had
eighteen thousand um to replace it i got a ten thousand
dollar check somebody handed me and they said
we trust you to do something important for the community with this
no direction no strings attached ten thousand dollars and so we started a
library of things to check out pressure washer and carpet cleaner are
most most popular but but bicycles and canning supplies
and all kinds of things i i um we have an annual lunch and friends at the
library luncheon every year and i just talked about and briefly because they
don't want to hear me talk i talked briefly to we feed kids snacks after
school and um the next week i got a check in
the mail from someone i didn't know and i opened it up and it was for seventeen
thousand five hundred dollars and it said keep feeding kids
and um honestly
my brain could not make sense of the amount i kept thinking is this 17 and 50
cents because that seems so odd
but because we have done what matters to the community we're doing an aging and
place initiative right now the community has really responded and i
do think now if the library was to close there
would be pitchforks i mean people really support us now
awesome example of social cohesion and support i would also say that for us at
highwood when i said earlier that we were able to
serve 23 000 meals we didn't use tax levy dollars
we during covet we partnered with two other nonprofits
the other two non-profits received grant funding
and we became just a distribution site and we became the trusted entity so we
had lines of individuals uh and when you see the stark
poverty within this extremely wealthy community
it's very
heartbreaking that i would see families
take our recycled dumpster and use that as a transport because families also do
not have transportation in our community so so for us to be to have become a
lifeline and have partnered with other entities to make that a possibility is
incredible the other piece is the recent grant that we received yesterday as a
matter of fact a 578 thousand dollar grant to partner
with one of the largest health systems in the community to do
the access to health services in the area of mental health
that is a very important partnership because we know the stigma behind mental
health especially for communities of color and especially for an undocumented
population so partnering is very important we can't do it alone and so
there is where the we comes in and i can go on and on about the different
partnerships we had to raise four million dollars to renovate a very
outdated facility is it was it used to be three restaurants in the past and so
they that became a library in 1976 and so it had not been renovated since 1976
and we still had the same furniture so imagine that nails sticking out and
holes in the furniture how is that an acceptable space for learning for for a
population like we serve so
it's miraculous to be able to raise almost the four million dollars during
covet but people care when they see that there
is organizations that are trustworthy and that are willing to go above and
beyond for their community so
just a little tidbit more and you know
very similar whether it is working with our food
banks working with our hospitals you know
giving a test or doing being a site for covid
testing or like working with our legal aid
society so people can come in and get assistance and and not be evicted or you
know working with our school district to hand out
thousands of pcs to their parents so that the kids can actually be able to
get online there were just so many different
partners that we were working with during this period of time
but the great thing was that came out of it in this last year we are
having a big run-up for our new mayor and
one of the candidates stood up and said at as his first line he says the way
we're going to get out of this is that we were going to make the library
our public library the front door to democracy
anyone yes so
he is already we're looking at how we put government innovation labs in all
our buildings right so those are kind of examples awesome
all right i'm going to ask one more question from the stickies and then
we're going to go to the mic so if anybody's ready you can make your way up
this this one's more for bob um how can you measure the impact libraries have on
local networks of support and social inclusion
well i i'm trying to figure out a way to
not answer in a too
um academic away i mean there are lots of
ways in fact to measure um
uh i i don't i there are lots of
cis serious ways in which you could evaluate
your initiatives especially by doing before and after
that is measuring something like
youth well-being or like
um uh political participation
well there are a range of things you could measure before and after you've
tried some initiative and that would tell you did we actually move the needle
um
i'm i'm a little
torn here because i i want to
emphasize what i think you could do
beyond libraries
um and beyond um
providing uh
social services which which you were which you are doing and it's wonderful i
know i'm not being negative about that at all
how could you positively affect politics in america
and that's i know seems like a stretch i recognize that seems like a stretch
so let me ask i mean i will tell you how i think you could do it
but i'm i'm asking you now to challenge yourself
don't think of yourselves as victims of polarization think of yourselves as
agents that maybe could work against
polarization and
that means building in my jargon um which felt referred to earlier bridging
social capital that is politically bridging social capital that is bringing
people together to discuss
local community problems across party lines that's not easy that's a big
challenge um
and i think i just mentioned or one of us mentioned earlier on in the
maybe that was in another another session today um
in uh not long ago sheila and i were speaking to a group in kansas city
actually have a local a group in kansas city that is devoting
it's not a library but they no doubt are cooperating with
the kansas city library um bringing
people from very different backgrounds together to discuss
urgent practical community local community problems like schools
um everybody's talking about schools right
and fighting about schools that's that's the biggest one of the biggest flash
points in american society today but we're shouting at each other about
that and so the challenge there are many other examples besides schools but the
challenge i'm suggesting is could you bring
people from different points of view in greater cleveland i'm using that
example because i know it much better you know people from
cuyahoga heights and people from you know down toward
young son on akron and people from you know the inner city and so on
together to talk about schools and how they could be fixed
intentionally bringing people from different backgrounds and different
political backgrounds different especially different political
backgrounds um
i'm and then of course
the question was asked me was could you measure that absolutely i could tell you
ways in which you can measure that but i'm trying to put that as a challenge
to you all and not just to the panelists here but to the to the room as a whole
thank you and can i just add one thing there which
is that you don't have to do that programming
yourself i mean there's a whole dialogue across difference movement happening in
america there's probably three different organizations nearby every one of your
libraries that's figured out the facilitation model and figured out you
know how to do this well you could just invite them into your
space right this doesn't have to be another thing that you have to create
from scratch
so why don't you name a couple uh dave a couple
um braver angels is the number one that i would recommend
for political discussions specifically but
there's there's just
um so many that
and they're so a lot of them are really regional and really local so but bravery
angels is national they're a chapter based organization so they're entirely
citizen run i would say um start there thank you
just as a time check we're we're already halfway through our q a so we're clearly
not going to get to all the stickies but i will commit to putting them on a
parking lot so that they can be um you know
rumbled with in our personal time and we have a question from the floor
i actually i had a sort of follow-up to this to this conversation on the role
libraries can play in in sort of active civic discourse you know part of what i
pulled from from the from the data that you put out there is that the
how divided we are is in part what gets in our way of being able to have civil
conversations and i know that we in libraries you know many libraries that
i've worked in we've tried various different versions of this some
successful and some less successful and one of the things i'm curious about is
is how do you get people back to a point where they actually can't trust again
trust one another um in it is the first entry point conversations around you
know gun violence in my neighborhood or like is that the right place or is there
is there a before point in terms of how we how we build back some of the social
cohesion and how do we tie that back too so i'm just curious like i think in the
public library space we generally think of ourselves as being able to do
this kind of stuff well and yet we continue to struggle to do it well and
so i'm curious if there's a if there's a it's a it's an earlier step that we can
actually give ourselves credit for for building those connections before we
jump you know right into some of the really hairy
issues i i have two quick responses and i think
probably shelian has more one um
don't always think of failed experiments as a failure
entrepreneurs if they never had a losing you know if they never had a an idea
that they funded that didn't go well they would think they're not being risky
they were not taking enough risks and you have to this is what the laboratory
democracy meant you try out ideas so you shouldn't be discouraged if you try out
ideas it didn't work try something else trying is it's that experimental
attitude that the the progressives above all had
secondly my my uh view is that you ought to look first for
topics that are not political but that that people get care to care
about but that um
that cut across party lines and and the my best example i i use it a lot but i
just don't think i'm just picking on or just
using cleveland i bet there are a lot of people in
cleveland who care about the um
the cleveland sports teams um yeah
maybe huh you don't have to worry about that
across party lines and and they probably have divergent views about
you know who should be quarterback next year or
or you know you i don't even have to go
through all those um issues
and hosting a session like that
it seems a little weird i recognize and maybe it's not the right example but
what i'm trying to say is finding topics that lots of people care about
in which their differences do not correlate with their politics
that kind of discussion builds is what builds a little bit of
trust because they you know after you finish the conversation people are then
feeling a little more positive about the guy who turns out to be actually turns
out to be trump's supporter or whatever but that was not the most important
fact the most salient fact in the conversation i don't think max it makes
sense or not phil no it does
i did want to ask though if i could say laying in you
has there been any research to determine if the
younger you are the more flexible you are
more likely you are to be open to other discussion as compared to folks
maybe over 25.
that's a bob question for sure i mean i can give a vague answer but you can be
much more specific bob and then i do want to add a couple thoughts
yes
[Laughter] [Applause]
yeah i mean i would just say to the previous question you know braver angels
for example and there are many they have been honing a facilitation
model to be able to create safe space to talk about hot button issues they've
been working on that for instance 2016 or earlier and so that's why inviting
these organizations in that have the tools and templates built they've
already made all the mistakes you can make and they've figured out how to
facilitate those conversations in a positive way
so that's one reason to look to that expertise but the other thing i would
say is the more you are building community
around affinity affinity meaning we all like basket
weaving and so we come to the library to learn basket weaving and then i discover
that the person i most across the table with weaving a basket is a democrat and
i'm a republican you know that is incredibly important
work you cannot you cannot understate the value of that work
actually i think that's probably more important
than these um staged conversations where we get in
a room and debate our hot button issues so i'm going to hop back to advocating
for the hot button issue debates though which is that you have to keep in mind
that if you are structuring debates well
you're building citizenship skills so the goal is not always to get people to
come to the end of an hour and agree or think oh all of a sudden i think well
of my republican neighbors or vice versa but you think of it as citizen skill
building for having better debates right learning how to debate is a
democratic skill
and who's the quarterback of the cleveland browns as a hot button topic
interesting so debate that and then you're building
skills that then you can transfer to harder topics later on
all right um as a time check i've gotten
permission to let this go a little longer so we're going to have 15 more
minutes of q a and we'll make a little bit of a shorter activity so i'd love to
have another question from the floor hi my name is nicole cook i'm the
augusta baker endowed chair for childhood literacy at the university of
south carolina and i have a question for the panelists
so i just wanted to give a little context there was a comment made about
lis education
i hear i hear the laughter already um so
so it's really not as simple as saying oh the library school should teach x y
and z and i you know before i make my next
comment i have personally told tracy hall at ala all of these things
love tracy happy to support her and she's on board but we are very much
constrained by accreditation we are constrained by the phd pipeline
um you know i personally have been in two
programs where i have innovated the curriculum for equity diversity
inclusion and social justice i am the only one teaching these classes
in my programs right so who's coming to help me teach
these classes and more importantly these classes are
electives right so
you know i think that part of what's happening is
uh is that you know the classic conflict between theory and practice but i will
say that our programs are absolutely putting out the upstanders the uprisers
the bystanders whatever we want to call them um they may be geographically
constrained we certainly need more of these students but they're there
and so i mean you know there's lots of debate we can have about this but i just
i needed to push back a little bit on that
i have at least six of my lis faculty colleagues in the
audience here today and we are dancing as fast as we can
so with that said um several of you in the room have guests lectured for me and
i have my eye on quite a few more so if you would like to guest lecture
and talk to the children directly um i am happy to have you but just to
say we are we don't do the mechanics of literacy
right we leave that to our wonderful k-12 educators but we are talking about
the practice of reading and what it means and how to have these
conversations i think a lot of you would be really surprised at the things that
we're talking about so if we can you know add to the lengthy list of what
we're doing here in the two days and find a way to better partner up with the
lis programs i think we can absolutely contribute to that progress thank you
i just wanted to comment what brian was saying about uh facilitating these
conversations these difficult conversations and i reach out to our
office of human rights and they have been an extraordinary
partner in diversity dialogues we have ongoing dialogues
they like you said are skilled at this so
even when i had a staff discussion
i don't have the lived experience of my staff i live in a majority minority
community in prince george's county maryland and so i had the director of
the office of human rights lead this conversation for me because i felt it
was important that my staff were able to voice their opinions
but not from someone who looks like me because i don't have that experience so
i just there's a lot of groups out there that can help you facilitate so you
don't have to feel like you're on your own island which of
course we all do sometimes so i just want to make that comment thanks
[Applause] um hi folks i'm rich rescal i'm the
director here at the d.c public library anne friedman who welcomed us to this
building that she started she mentioned a 2004 study that
the nea put out called reading at risk and that was the study that documented
the decline in reading and also just and also
sort of attached it to the corollaries and other declines in civic
participation voting going to sporting events
volunteering and all these other social ills that we're talking about today
and while you're all talking about the great things that so many of us are
doing in terms of you know providing covet tests and all
these other great things i'm just wondering fundamentally are any of us
figuring out a way to tie all these great programs back to some of the core
stuff that we're to be doing right how do we get how do we leverage giving out
a pcr test to getting somebody interested in reading a book because i
think part of what and i won't speak for crosby but i think part of what he wants
to do here is how do we like do all these how do we take all these great
things and get people back to reading
open question if anybody has any ideas [Music]
well i i can say for us that um we are not a quiet library we're a no shushing
library um we do a lot of things that are fun
drones you know stem nights all those kind of
things so now we really are a hangout for kids it used to be a place
that children weren't welcome so at least we are getting them in the
building and exposing them yeah i'll say to that i think one of the
keys to what we want to do um in getting people in the building is
for them to recognize the traditional model of what we do right and and the
importance of reading for them to be successful but a lot of that comes along
with having it co-signed by others one of the
part of the our new mayor talking about uh us being the front door to democracy
was the first thing he said is i want to do a
city-wide campaign on literacy right and i want the library to to lead this
campaign they all kind of started because he came
into the library before he became mayor to get a cover
test right right this is not not part of of
of many other things that he used the library for and he did you know he he
did the swearing-in of his of the honorary swearing-in at the library that
he went to as a kid right so the idea that we have to take advantage
of these folks in our communities who are tied to the library for a variety of
different reasons and then use their bully pulpit to keep talking about that
i mean that's our job to get out there and talk about reading and the
importance of reading but we need a lot of people talking about it right and you
know beyonce talking about it would be great right i
believe i have two daughters who would do whatever beyonce says right but i
think we we need as many pie pipers as possible talking about it and i
appreciate the idea at my table when we first introduced ourselves i said i
appreciate the idea that i have to try to
move away from my concept of really focused on being focused on social
justice back to where i started in libraries right and find a way to
integrate them together and i will make i'll make a comment and
say that in communities like mine where i come from
where i grew up as a child i there were no libraries
i'm an immigrant i came to this country undocumented
uh there were no libraries
and so for my job in my community is to really help
broaden that mindset of the community that this is a library it is not a
libridia and a librarian means a bookstore so for
changing the culture and the mindset of what this institution is is very
important once we get them in the door we can gain their trust
then we connect them to the book and we connect them to the literacy programming
all the programming that we we create at our library is outcome based programming
so we are measuring the success of the reading levels for children we partner
directly with the school district and support the school district in the
extended learning process so it's changing um the culture for a
community like ours and so like i said earlier ours is 50 latino which
presumed that our library is a bookstore and so teaching that and helping them
understand that no we are a free institution where you could access these
resources and learn how to read
and so
i think we have time for one more question may i ask one may i ask one
sorry yes
can i ask one quick question are
uh i'm so old that i when i was learning to read i went with my mom every
saturday to a reading group at the library
and in those years that's very old-fashioned i know the family
structure was different and so on but it's an updated version of that also now
common are reading groups for kids common in libraries because i think
that's a brilliant
yeah i mean i'm just responding to the question that had been asked earlier
yeah yeah
story time is the foundation of what we do yes
am i on you are yes hi i'm lisa um and i run a
large public library system and you know i think we're in
a really interesting period because we know technology saved us during the
early part of coven right all of us who run public libraries say libraries open
technology technology we put out hot spots we boosted signals we had people
we lent out hot spots we lent out laptops
the problem is i think we're moving back to transaction
felton it's not just the lending out of the thing it is what they're doing with
the thing and i think this is the opportunity
crosby because and the citizenship part and i know uw is doing some fabulous
work by the way i need more money from uw
to do that work but i think what we need to do is be
carnegie was about improving and we can all disagree what improvement meant in
19th century versus now but he was about bettering the community bettering
oneself and i think we have the opportunity now with technology if we're
good and careful to get away from the transaction part and how are we
bettering our communities how are we helping them navigate the technology
that we are now providing the broadband the stuff out all the stuff our rural
communities need and by the way our suburban communities need to
so that's just the question i have of all of you and all of us to be
thoughtful when we jump on the technology bandwagon and i love
technology that we're doing it in the way public libraries do it the best
which is to help the people people be the better of themselves that they want
to be to be them their own better selves whatever that looks like make sense
thank you all right
i want to give each of our speakers one last closing
thought maybe 30 seconds or a minute each
responding to questions or just if you have something on your heart you want to
say
anybody want to start
can i just respond quickly to that and maybe make this my closing thought i i
mean i see enormous opportunity for libraries to be stepping into the space
of training citizens for how to navigate the information
that is coming at them which i think is a little bit what you're getting at
right and i think this is
the number one arena in which we need civic
innovation how are we going to manage the fact that
we have a citizenry that doesn't know truth from falsehood
how do we train because it used to be you know you could just check out a book
right and yes there were some debate about what books were good and what were
bad but like now we're not in that space anymore that's obvious you don't need me
to expound on that but i think that this is
going back to the to the root of what libraries originally were it's about
information and that is one of the most hotly
contested spaces now in our democracy that may be
the do or die for our democracy information
and so i i would just challenge you um not to put one more thing on your
enormous plates but what
is this what is the action there that is directly tied to citizenship
about navigating a very difficult information space much
of which is online and i would say
thank you thank you for being patient with
my story our story here and being willing to hear this story
uh what i what i will share is what drives me daily
is to be relevant to our community all of our community all the taxpayers
not just a certain segment of the population that speaks of their needs
i i want to work towards that in our library i'm going to continue to enhance
the programming that takes place out of the community center
and and transform a community to make them more productive members of society
through the work that we're doing in our library so it's exciting to be a part of
something like this and it's exciting to be a leading force
at least in my neck of the woods to do something like this i have been
approached by several libraries in my community who would like to learn more
of how to do this and i'm excited to be a part of that teaching and that
connectedness because we're all together in this like like you shared earlier
we're in this together we're all one people and so
it's exciting to be a part of such such a thing where we could help transform
all members of the community
and i'll i'll just speak to the technology
through an example we are starting a program that
we're hiring 15 teenagers to be digital navigators for specifically for older
adults and we're starting that in partnership
with the health science center is coming and they're bringing a simulation lab
for the teens the first training session will be to learn how it is to work with
computers if you have low vision or hearing issues issues or mobility issues
and so through this program we will be teaching
the the teens will be learning some soft skills they'll be learning job
skills um i've been reading about the longevity economy our rural area needs
people to be able to to age in place i hope some of those teams
see entrepreneurial opportunities as they go through this
program through ecf those
seniors will be getting specific devices that they can keep so it just to me it
all comes together all these things work together for
social well-being for our communities and i would say and this is a point
which you're making there certainly um success moves at the speed of trust
right and we are very fortunate that as an
industry and as a profession we are very trusted
right and we can use that trust um to really
make a difference in our communities but i think we
and i was just saying this i think we have to really start to focus on our
youngest people because they have been through a trauma that no
one else can ever ever experience just imagine all of our 10 year olds
eight-year-olds who haven't been to school who have gone through and seen
losses in their life they are willing to and ready to make a change in this in
the way this world is and we've got to be willing to help them do that
thank you robert putnam
i'd like to uh build a little bit on on what felt just said libraries have many
different age constituencies uh very young kids
um you know young
adults uh older adults even really old adults like
me um
but from the point of view of building a social movement that is going
to change america i'm going back to our the
story we told in the shalin told it was young americans in their late
teens and twenties the last time who let us out
there are some good examples of that now that is there are some terrific examples
of kids
of that age group uh that are helping to lead a civic
renewal in america but inevitably they're a minority
most kids of that age are not leading civic
renewal activities they've got other things on their mind it's my
grandchildren i know them i know that age group very well
but i think libraries ought to be thinking about that constituency too not
just the people who are learning to read not just the people like me who you know
or need to be brought into libraries to you
know to keep us from being lonely but
this is really a point that that um tell me earlier and i'm just i'm
risk reiterating and not just the what you do for young kids
but inviting
peop young people in their late teens and twenties
into libraries to be agents not to just to receive stuff from you but to be
agents to help you become um active contributor to revitalizing
american democracy well on that note can we all thank our
panelists and speakers
[Applause]