Local Project: Beloit PL – The BELL Project

Beloit Public Library – Beloit, Wisconsin
Author: Nick Dimassis, Library Director
Final Cost: $23,500

Library and Community Information

The Takeaways

• Navigating local business start-up resources is not easy nor always intuitive, and resources vary from library community to library community.
• Library staff are not well-trained nor especially comfortable helping visitors with business-related questions.
• It is the human connection that is most important for those considering starting a small business, not being handed a book.
• “Don’t let the dream die at the reference desk,” can be applied to everyone we serve, not just to those seeking to start a business.

The Project

Tell us a little about your library and where you are in resilience readiness, including applying aspects of social work in your operations. Are you a beginner, have some experience, or far along?

Our library participated in the social work resilience readiness aspects of this project, but also focused on workforce resilience in terms of helping those at the very early stages of starting a small (sometimes very small) business. As far as Whole Person Librarianship, I would consider Beloit Public Library as having “some experience” or a bit further along. But the Whole Person Librarianship, and social work lens, helped to inform our approach to serving those coming in with an idea for a business and the anxieties that come with it.

Describe your project! What did you do? Who was involved? What did it cost, in terms of both purchases and staff time?

Beloit Public Library partnered with Beloit College’s Center for Entrepreneurship in Liberal Education at Beloit (CELEB) program to do the research and create the toolkit, as well as provide training sessions for our librarians. The grant funding allowed us to contract with the CELEB and the cost was $20K. Another $3,500 is being used to develop marketing materials and to package the toolkit for libraries across the state to use. For example, a recorded presentation by the toolkit creators that will be available to all libraries.

How did you decide to pursue this project? What needs did it address in your library and community? How did you discover these needs?

The Beloit Public Library was developing partnerships and collaborations with many business or workforce related organizations and agencies and, while they all did good work, there didn’t seem to be much coordination between the organizations–at least in a way that was helpful for library staff to understand and confidently refer patrons. The BELL (Business and Entrepreneurial Leadership Lab) concept grew out of this need. At first, we were considering a physical space for the various entities to gather and hold office hours, but it was decided that more important was the human element at the moment the visitor walked in–and that human was inevitably a library staff member. The motto became: “Don’t let the dream die at the reference desk,” and so we focused on training our library staff to engage and not just point to an area of our collection or to bookmarks of the various organizations.

What is the intended impact of your project, and how did/will you measure it?

Staff members that are well-trained on local resources, are comfortable engaging with the potential small-business proprietor, and facilitate the “hand-off” to the appropriate organization with the human expertise. We will measure the train-the-trainer sessions (i.e., training of library staff), presentations/programs at the library for our local community members (using a customized version of the toolkit), and feedback from our collaborating organizations.

What challenges, seen and unforeseen, did you encounter? What strategies did you use to overcome these?

We did not want to duplicate what our partnering organizations were doing; we wanted to highlight and be a conduit to them. The challenge was making sure each aspect of our project was doing what needed to be done and not drifting into the work/mission/expertise of the others. We wanted to enhance, not duplicate. I believe we did a good job–so far–by thinking through the consequences of anything we added to the toolkit.

Looking back, what might you do differently if you were to redo this project?

I think we did a very good job with the time we had–but we could have used more to do a little more to work through iterations. We did one focus group by presenting at the Wisconsin Library Association (WLA) annual conference in November, 2022 (see program description at bottom). We also did a focus group with a few of the heads of our collaborating organizations (Small Business Development Center of Rock County, Downtown Business Association, Impact Beloit, etc.). We would like to have (and probably still will) do a bit more testing among the small-business start-up hopefuls to be sure it’s at peak performance.

What do you want other librarians to know about your project?

Just like social work resiliency, workforce and small-business resiliency, and the critical facilitation assistance, is part of what we do for our community, just as much as early literacy programming and our materials collections.

How have you incorporated concepts of community resilience into your library’s work? Have you found trainings like Ryan Dowd’s Homeless Training, Sara Zettervall’s Whole Person Librarianship, or others valuable? What have you found to be the most useful and how have you applied it in your specific community?

Yes, we have used Ryan Dowd’s very practical training to our benefit, as well as having his team come to Beloit Public Library and provide training to our staff and, because it was important to our whole community, we opened it up to other local organizations who assist in one way or another those experiencing homelessness in our community. I thought Sara Zettervall’s training was very helpful as well, as she provided a more comprehensive, or textbook, approach. The two were a good complement. Most useful was learning to combine practical advice and tactics (Dowd) with the larger context of social work (Zettervall).

Additional information

You can find and use the toolkit used to train librarians below:

• Beloit Public Library: Toolkit for Guiding Entrepreneurs