For Project X I am immediately drawn to the idea of participatory service because I see a strong relationship between it and a professional goal I have been developing since starting at SJSU which is creating a Librarian-Organizer program. My hope is to eventually help train librarians to become community organizers who actively build relationships between their libraries and the people they serve. Participatory service fits neatly into this idea because it challenges the assumption that libraries should simply create services and then convince people to use them. It suggests that community members can become active participants in determining what their library does. I think that shift from providing services for a community to developing services with a community is incredibly important and it is something I want to incorporate into the Librarian-Organizer model.
While working through this assignment, I came up with a few questions about participatory service that I would like to explore as I continue developing this idea. Questions such as: How do librarians identify community members who want to become more involved with their library? How do we reach people who are not already library users and make sure their voices are represented in library decision? Should they be? How much actual decision making power should community members have over programs and services? I am especially interested in how we can turn occasional library participants into long term partners, volunteers, leaders, and advocates, because that is the ultimate goal of my program. One of the challenges with traditional outreach is that getting someone through the library doors once does not necessarily create a lasting relationship. I want to understand how participatory service can help us build those deeper connections and give people a reason to feel personally invested in the success of their local library.
It sounds like participatory service can give us important insight into the relationship between libraries and their communities. Libraries have/are tremendous resources but librarians do not necessarily know everything that a community needs simply because they work in that community. The people who live there have knowledge, experiences, skills, and relationships that librarians may not have access to. A participatory approach recognizes the value of that knowledge. Michael Casey (2011) argues that a participatory library should “integrate [the community] into the structure of change” (p. 2). He goes on to describe community involvement in brainstorming, planning, and evaluating library services. I think this is especially relevant to the Librarian-Organizer model because it describes participation as something deeper than just asking patrons what programs they would like to see. Community members actually become part of the process of developing and evaluating the services their library provides, giving them a real sense of ownership. For the Librarian-Organizer, this means teaching librarians to listen before acting and treating community members as collaborators rather than simply patrons or consumers of library services. The community should have some, if not most, ownership over what its public library is and becomes.
My own professional background is probably why I am drawn to this approach. Before pursuing librarianship, I worked as a union organizer, political campaign organizer, and nonprofit program manager. Much of that work involved talking with people one on one, listening to their concerns, identifying potential leaders, developing volunteers, and organizing people around clear goals. I think many of those same skills can be useful in participatory library service. An organizer does not just walk into a community and tell everyone what they need. Good organizing starts with listening, building trust, identifying common concerns, and finding people who are willing to become involved and take ownership. Professor Casey’s description of involving community members in brainstorming, planning, and evaluation sounds very familiar to me because these are also important parts of organizing. The organizer may help facilitate the process but the people themselves have to be involved if the result is going to reflect what the community actually wants.
I also believe librarians can use many of these same organizing techniques without turning libraries into overtly political organizations. Community organizing does not necessarily have to be about politics; At its core it is about relationships, participation, and getting people involved in something they care about. In the context of a public library organizing can become a method for building stronger relationships between a public institution and the community it exists to serve. Participatory service gives community members a meaningful role in that relationship. Instead of librarians assuming they know what people want and then developing programming around those assumptions, Librarian-Organizers could go out into their communities, listen to people, identify needs and potential leaders, and then bring those people into the process of creating programs and finding solutions to problems.
I want to figure out how to put these ideas into practice. A Librarian-Organizer could intentionally create opportunities for people to move from being library users to participants, collaborators, and eventually community leaders within the library. Librarians could build relationships with residents, identify needs through conversations rather than assumptions, and invite community members to help develop programs and contribute their own knowledge and skills. The librarian could also identify people who are particularly engaged and encourage them to take on greater roles within the library community. I think this could create something much more powerful than traditional outreach because instead of simply having more people attend library programs, we could create communities where people feel genuine ownership of their public library and have a role in determining what that library is.
This is why the topic of participatory service interests me so much right now. I do not see it as separate from the Librarian-Organizer program I hope to create but as something that could become an important part of its foundation. Participatory service provides a framework for thinking about what a truly community centered library can look like, while organizing provides many of the practical tools for actually building those relationships. If librarians can learn to organize people while also creating meaningful opportunities for them to participate, I think we can build libraries that are not simply located within communities, but are genuinely shaped, supported, and strengthened by the people who live there.
Reference
Casey, M. (2011, October 20). Revisiting participatory service in trying times. Tame the Web.
