Superior PL: Communication to Staff about Whole Person Librarianship

Communications to Staff

Example 1:

Sent by Sue Heskin, Director

[See also slides from the presentation mentioned below]

At a recent staff meeting, I presented on the City Library Collective (the CLC: 11 medium-sized public libraries in Wisconsin). I explained that our library is engaged in a collaboration with CLC, using federal ARPA grant funds to introduce concepts of social work into Wisconsin public library services. These social work concepts in library work were developed by a Community Embedded Librarian in Minneapolis named Sara Zettervall in her book Whole Person Librarianship. The CLC is bringing Sara Zettervall to all CLC libraries for training in Whole Person Librarianship (WPL) and how the WPL approach might make our library work better and easier.

This training is NOT intended to make library staff into social workers, nor to have our library serve as a social service center. The training IS intended to share how incorporating concepts of social work can make our jobs easier, provide better information & referral service to our patrons, and to help our library determine what it can do in terms of services and help set boundaries for what it cannot do.

The training page for the project: [link redacted]

I’ve also attached a flow chart about the CLC WPL Project purpose/intended outcomes, if you’re interested. There is also Sara’s slides for the Keynote video on the training website link above.

Thank you so much for keeping an open mind while we participate in this collaborative project.