Local Project: Superior PL – Social Work Intern

The Takeaways

• Even as the smallest library in the City Library Collective, we were able to host a social work intern. They not only helped patrons, but helped staff better understand the needs of many patrons and improve our services.
• Through the process of hosting our social work intern, we were able to make additional contacts at community organizations and with the UW-Superior Social Work program

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?

The Superior Public Library has some experience and is continuing our progression in the Community Resilience Project. We started in January of 2022 with a UW-Superior (UWS) Social Work intern placement of 450 hours through July 2022. Our intern conducted a staff assessment, coordinated Whole Person Librarianship and other trainings, and developed community resource referral information for both staff and patrons. We now have a dedicated area in our library and on our website for referral information.

Our intern graduated in July and we have since contracted with her to serve as liaison for two future student placements. She will also continue her work on the community resource referral guide, work with our library’s programming team, coordinate staff training opportunities, build connections with area helping organizations, and provide general support for public services staff.

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

After researching social work in libraries, the Library Director reached out to the UWS School of Social Work to request our first field placement. The library would provide a stipend to a motivated student who could help us begin our work in Whole Person Librarianship.

We were fortunate to get a bright, creative, and self-directed intern who was enthusiastic about the project. The Library Director began working with her to develop a learning plan. The plan included research in Whole Person Librarianship concepts as well as several activities (described above) that would incorporate social work into our public services and programs. Halfway through the internship, our Manager of Programs and Partnerships took over the intern’s site supervision and together they began developing a Community Resource Guide and information center within our library.

The financial cost was $5,000, which was spent on the following:

The cost of library staff time was not included the grant. We spent about 120 hours of supervisor time totaling approximately $5,000 of in-kind work. We greatly underestimated the amount of time it would take to begin an internship of 450 hours as well as coordinate the common CLC trainings of the Resiliency grant. The upside is that our social work intern established a solid plan for future internships that students and staff can now build upon.

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 intent of our project was to give SPL staff more options to address increasingly-challenging information needs, provide more safety and security in our library building and premises, and to develop relationships with other helping agencies addressing needs in our community of Superior and Douglas County.

SPL library staff have noticed changes in psychosocial needs of an increasing number of patrons during the past 5-10 years. Substance abuse, mental health challenges, homelessness, and other issues have made it more challenging to provide front-facing public services. The issue came to a head during the Covid pandemic when staff were pressed to help people in close proximity at the computers to connect to housing services, job searches, unemployment benefits, and even essential needs such as e-mail accounts. The added stressors of the pandemic made it difficult for some patrons to function, and our library experienced a group of unsheltered people living on library property and the adjacent City park.

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

Staff will be more knowledgeable about helping organizations in our community, the roles they play, and how these organizations can provide needed information to our library patrons. Staff will feel more confident referring patrons to the helping agencies. Staff will be more aware of the psychosocial needs of library patrons and be able to respond effectively. Patrons will have information available to them about community organizations in an accessible and timely manner.

We will measure these impacts by tracking 1) the number of training opportunities for staff, 2) the number of staff and patron referrals to our community resources information in both print and electronic formats, and 3) the number and severity of situations in our service incident reports and their outcomes (SPL uses Basecamp to track incidents).

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

The timing of the ARPA grant and Resilience project was problematic for us. SPL was still operating with the stressors of Covid pandemic restrictions, mask enforcement, and staff shortages. Morale at all job levels was low, and staff was resistant to taking on another project or acknowledging yet another exhausting community role.

We tried to overcome this by making the project intent clear to staff and pointing out the project outcomes that might help with challenges we were experiencing. Our intern administered a Staff Community Assessment which gave employees the chance to describe problems they were seeing in the community and in the library as well as their perspectives about our current and potential responses to those problems. The staff feedback was used to gauge comfort levels for adopting potential new services and community roles. The feedback was also helpful in gauging how quickly to proceed with the intern’s projects, the Whole Person Librarianship training of the ARPA grant, and other needed trainings.

Attending the Whole Person Librarianship training online with staff from other CLC libraries went a long way toward letting staff know we are not alone in these struggles and that libraries all over the state and country have similar struggles.

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

We would spread out the workload more evenly among library managers. As mentioned before, we underestimated the amount of staff time involved with coordinating this first internship and the many learning objectives needed for the intern’s coursework. We would also plan more of the projects further in advance of the student starting.

We purchased a subscription to Niche Academy to host the various staff trainings and documents for our Resiliency project. We are no longer using it very much and probably will not renew it. The CLC will be hosting content for the Resiliency project and making it available statewide.

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

From our Resiliency project we found that public libraries of all sizes can benefit from incorporating concepts of social work. As the smallest library in the City Library Collective, Superior Public Library does not have the volume of incidents that some larger libraries have, however these social work concepts can be used in everyday interactions with all customers to provide better customer service. Reaching out into the community to build working relationships with other helping agencies can only benefit our library and patrons long-term.

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?

We have found Ryan Dowd’s trainings most helpful in providing actionable guidance and now we require all staff to view his core training as well as his session on when and how to call the police. Another training we have incorporated into our onboarding routine is the Healthy Boundaries for Library Workers webinar by Dawn Behrend, provided to the CLC by Appleton Public Library. This is an excellent webinar and essential viewing for any new library employee.

Sara Zettervall’s Whole Person Librarianship training was helpful to those of us at the administration level. Our intern also found this training useful. We have used Sara’s Zettervall’s book as a guide to making the most of an intern’s experience here, as well as how to hire a social worker as a permanent or contracted employee.