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Library Resilience Toolkit

In 2021, the City Library Collective was awarded an American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) grant in order to collaboratively explore and promote a model of “whole person” library services, which informs policy and practice with relevant concepts, tools, and techniques from the field of social work. The grant project combines highly collaborative activities with individual library pilot projects to develop infrastructure including community data gathering and analysis, staff training, and implementing incubator projects at select libraries to position the library as a community resiliency partner and to serve as a model for other CLC partners.

The goal is to help libraries and the communities they serve anticipate, withstand, adapt to, and recover from adversity — to be resilient.

CLC member projects range from working with local universities to offer paid social work internships to developing staff readiness training. These local projects rely upon and strengthen local partnerships with other municipal departments, social service agencies, and nonprofits, to ensure that the projects meet the most pressing needs of the community.

This is a place to explore how to apply concepts of social work in your library, whether you are just beginning to learn about social work and libraries or you are ready to hire a social worker.

The Project Repository is broken into logical categories to make exploration easy:

Introduction to Social Work Concepts in the Library

Articles, tools, and other resources that introduce library workers to social work concepts.

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Data & Assessment

Shared assessment and evaluation strategies used by the CLC to develop benchmarks and identify short and long longer-term impacts of their work.

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Helpful Documents

Job descriptions, templates, sample contract language, and more to make applying concepts of social work and community resilience as easy as possible.

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Communication & Advocacy

Find sample press releases and examples of how CLC libraries have advocated for community resilience and social work concepts at their library and shared their successes with their communities.

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Social Work Concepts in Action

Examples of social work in the library from CLC members and elsewhere. Each library conducted their own local project, focused on their community and library needs related to community resilience. Explore what they did, how they did, and what they learned in the process, as well as other noteworthy stories about library and community resilience.

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