Local Project: Kenosha PL – Building Staff Confidence for Better Outcomes!

Kenosha Public Library – Kenosha, Wisconsin
Author: Barbara Brattin, Library Director
Final Cost: $6,050

Library and Community Information

The Takeaways

• Our staff is increasingly committed to the principles of Whole Person Librarianship.
• Our community is brimming with untapped partnership opportunities to expand our impact on reducing poverty and homelessness.
• Our police department is committed to alternative responses to mental health emergencies.

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?

Kenosha is a very diverse place, racially, culturally, and economically. Our library staff witnesses lots of mental illness and unhoused individuals who use the library as a refuge. We were the first library in Wisconsin to tap into the Ryan Dowd in-person training for working effectively with unhoused individuals. We brought Ryan to Kenosha in 2018 and filled the UW–Parkside auditorium with area library staff. That was truly our kickoff to these concepts and laid the foundation for our resilience. We’ve spent the years since then focused deliberately on staff cultural competencies and have dramatically increased staff diversity so that when the pandemic and civil unrest both hit us hard in 2020, our library was aligned to support our community in every way we could from curbside library service to food and PPD distribution. Now we have a social work student at two of our branches for a year long field placement that we hope will help us understand how we can effectively integrate the principles and practices of social work when responding to patrons in need.

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

We began our project by conducting a Staff Readiness Survey. It’s important not to assume that your staff is ready to implement Whole Person Librarianship principles. The vast majority of early respondents held fast to the belief that the library’s role was disseminating information and that’s where we should draw the line. To help them understand the need for more, we hired a professor from Carthage College ($250) to deliver a two hour workshop on Trauma Informed Care. After that training, many more staff could relate personally to the “why” of what they were witnessing in our libraries, which increased their willingness to help. We continued to make cultural competency training mandatory for all staff positions and when we stumbled upon the book Whole Person Librarianship, we knew we would work toward taking these next steps. With CLC’s ARPA Recovery grant, we arranged for all public service staff to attend online training on WPL principles with Sara Zettervall and purchased lots of staff copies of the book ($800). Then we pitched the concept of a field placement at two of our most challenged neighborhood branches with the social work program at Carthage College, and landed an outstanding student to join our team through spring of 2023. ($5,000)

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

Our downtown branch is surrounded by a park where unhoused veterans congregate. We are their heating and cooling center year-round. The church on the opposite corner of the park began bringing meals over to the veterans and our Branch Manager asked if we could invite them into the library for the meal on days when the weather was unpleasant. We started doing that and also set up an outside eating area. Our relationships with these men improved as we applied our new understanding of trauma informed care and we witnessed a lot less disruptive behavior. We also got to know their needs on a personal level, and since they spend so much time inside with us, we realized we could make a big impact on the quality of their lives if we had someone trained in social work and referral services.

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

We want to improve our knowledge of the agencies and non-governmental organizations that offer various services to people in need. We want to improve our interactions with people who have experienced trauma to create better outcomes and call the police less often. And we want to test the value of having a social work trained person on staff before we take the leap and hire a permanent position. We’ll measure improvement in staff confidence when handling social service type questions through surveys and we’ll compare staff attitudes toward library staff integrating social service principles before and after training by administering the Staff Readiness Survey.

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

When we pitched the offer of a field placement to the social work students at Carthage College, the concept of a placement at the library was foreign to them and no one chose us. But then because of a glitch at the county detention center, a senior student was suddenly without placement, and we had been her second choice, so we just got lucky at the last minute! She’ll still focus on incarcerated and recently incarcerated persons, since that’s her area of interest, but now it will be more through a library services lens.

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

The ARPA funding opportunities made us rush into the project and the pandemic forced us to hold the WPL training online. I think the training would be much more effective in person, especially since we opted for the 3 hour version.

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

This is the beginning of a long relationship with the social work profession.

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?

The two approaches are very different. Ryan Dowd’s training is very practical. You witness this, you do this. Staff love the practical lessons he delivers. Coupled with Trauma Informed Care training’s 3 R’s (Regulate, Relate, Reason) , our staff is much more patient, empathetic, and effective with people displaying disruptive behavior. There’s a lot more consideration of the reasons why the person presents the way they do. When you focus on the why, you can be much more effective.