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Gwinnet County Public Library

Opportunities & Challenges:
The Gwinnett County (GA) Public Library serves one of the fastest growing and most diverse countiesin the US with fifteen branch locations and more on the way. The Library is internationally recognized as an innovator in its field; and its leadership knows that when you’re at the top of your game is the time to up your game even further for success. The challenge was to create a strategic plan to guide the library for the next five to seven years: one that is flexible—allowing the organization to cultivate its position in and relationship to a changing community—and one that provides concrete guidance for action in the near-, middle-, and longer term.

What we did:
M&B engaged the Library in an eight-month planning process that included extensive stakeholder engagement, research and careful crafting and review of the plan. We invited staff, community leaders, strategic partners, and citizens to participate in the process, so that the whole community has its “fingerprints” on the final product. We then worked with a group of key stakeholders to examine findings and develop goals and strategies. A set of action items was developed, along with extensive project plans, to create the first round of implementation for the plan.

Deliverables:
Deliverables include the strategic plan document, detailed documentation and processes for managing implementation and documents to guide further planning efforts.

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“Cozby Library Reaching New Levels of Success”

M&B recently wrapped up worked on the COZBY LIBRARY AND COMMUNITY COMMONS, STRATEGIC PLAN 2017-2020 in Coppell, Texas. Check out this article, from the local Coppell Gazette, highlighting the new energy and excitement around the library!

 

Cozby Library reaching new levels of success
By Victoria Atterberry
Coppell Gazette 

The Cozby Library and Community Commons’ strategic plan is working out well and has received a positive response from the community.

Monday, the library board met with the Coppell City Council and the Parks Board to update the city on its progress. Library leaders said it has been successful, and many people are benefiting from the new additions and amenities.

“The community loves what’s happening at the library,” said Adrienne Morton, vice chair of the Coppell library board.

The first goal the library adopted centers on collection building and services innovation. The goal primarily focuses on growth and how to better serve the community.

“(Our) efforts there are to offer collections and services that are highly relevant to the community needs and to incorporate innovative collections and programs with those that are popular, valuable or enduring,” Morton said.

Early literacy backpacks, TAMS science boxes and Lions Club game collections for the visually impaired are a few of the new additions that came out of this plan. These new services have been popular among the community and are in high demand.

The second goal the library adopted focuses on resources, buildings, technology and systems.

“The focus here is meeting the evolving and diverse knowledge, creative and learning needs of the community by offering innovative spaces, technologies, methods and delivery systems,” Morton said.

Some of the programs that came about through this plan are the teen zone, toddler zone, study rooms, business center, meeting rooms, commons area and a drive-through book drop off. Morton said the drive-through book drop is one of the most popular features of the library.

The library also added self service checkout, laptop checkouts and catalogue tablets for easier checkouts.

“The idea is to make it easier for people to get in and out of the library and get what they need. It’s all about convenience for the community,” Morton said.

The library will soon be adding digital media workstations that will have audio, video, graphic design software and web design software.

The strategic plan includes four more goals focusing on volunteer efforts, advocacy, professional development and funding.

The library was also able to add a number of new building enhancements. Victoria Chiavetta, director of library services said the library was fortunate enough to have extra money in the budget to add these new enhancements.

New podiums have been added in meeting rooms as well as new jacks and network cables. Additional speakers were added throughout the library. The library purchased a third service desk and is also looking to replace staff desks. Since many visitors complained about noise levels within the building, the library is also planning to install new sound masking equipment.

Over the past year, library activity has grown. More and more people are participating in programs and enjoying all the feature the library has to offer.

“We love to see (residents) there,” Chiavetta said. “The library is getting used well and is quite busy.

Check out other examples of and commentary from M&B’s near decade of work in strategic planning for our libraries!

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Carnegie 2.0: Re-inventing Communities

Just when some pundits were announcing the demise of the public library, and politicians are trying to defund them, libraries are undergoing a major revival as centers of community re-invention.

You can call it Carnegie 2.0.

It is 88 years since the last library was built with funds from Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist, but the spirit of helping communities thrive is alive and well across the United State of America.
Altogether, 2,509 libraries were built between 1883 and 1929, most of them in America (1,689,but others in UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France and half a dozen other countries.

Cuts to library budgets seems to be a bi-partisan effort. For example, in 2010 New Jersey Governor Christie slashed funding for libraries soon after becoming governor in 2010. In the same year, Newark Mayor, now Senator Corey Booker, cut the budget of the city’s library by 20% when be first became mayor.

It is not all books anymore, although they are not going out of fashion. And googling stuff is no longer reliable, as the Internet is fast becoming a place for “alternative facts”, which are not facts at all.

Libraries are fast becoming the go-to place for:
  • Starting a new project or business, creating a new product or service, or making things
  • Building a resume and finding a job
  • Checking out community talent in the same way you check out a book or a movie
  • Acquiring skills and knowledge, packaged up in smaller chunks, just when you need it
  • Offering internships for community projects
  • Enjoying edutainment for toddlers, children, teens and adults
  • Critical community conversations
  • Meeting and socializing with others
  • Working with your tutor or mentor

The new roles for librarians are:

  • Honest brokers between a rapidly expanding number of disciplines, each with its own specialist language, ways of seeing the world, and growing distrust of other models/frameworks
  • Validators of knowledge of vital importance to communities and organizations who wish to make good decisions
  • Facilitators of crucial conversations between a diverse range of interests, particularly in community decision making and planning, policy making, and implementation
  • Curators of new and ever more diverse collections, including tools, methods, processes, systems and talents.
  • Mentors, so curation, categorizing and research become skills that everyone routinely uses.
  • Trusted partners, helping people and their organizations build the capacity for the wise application of knowledge, so they become much more than “learning organizations”.
  • Conveners for meetings, events, exhibits, safer refuge in emergencies, making and designing.
  • Community systems integrators, connecting organizations and talents in the community, and employing their skills and resources to help their people adapt successfully to change.
Here is an example of the kinds of far-sighted approach that libraries are adopting. It is two version of the strategic plan Maverick & Boutique developed for the Cozby Public Library and Community Commons in Coppell, Texas – the  Cozby Library Slide Show and the Cozby Library Strategic Plan. It is a major part of our consulting practice, currently averaging 4-5 plans a year. We use our own collaborative technology – Zing – shown in the image above to help conduct the community conversations, to achieve the “join in” necessary for the projects our clients  to develop to fact-track community-wide change.
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New Partners in Economic Development

There’s a revolution underway in economic development across the USA. Inching its way out is the traditional real estate-focused approach to economic development and some of the $80 billion in tax breaks (NY Times, December 1, 2012) and other incentives state and local governments offer to attract new businesses and jobs.

Enter stage left are new partners in economic development, a grass-roots assortment that includes libraries,  community organizers, special interest foundations, teenage app developers, Big Picture schools, churches or sustainable energy entrepreneurs.

We explored how communities might partner with such organizations/people at the Build North East conference in Worcester (September 7-9, 2014). Robert Leaver of New Commons Rhode Island and John Findlay, Maverick & Boutique conducted rapid-fire 5 X 5 workshop to:

  • Identify opportunities for partnering with strategically positioned community organizations such as libraries, leading edge schools and colleges
  • Explore how to expand social and business entrepreneurial activities at a grass-roots level, especially in urban and rural settings
  • Plan the start-up of public access making/manufacturing, design publishing, app development in the center of a village or town

Six teams began by identifying a village or town in New England that was experiencing an intractable economic/community development problem.

  • Good New England Bones
  • OK for 6 months of year
  • Struggles economically during Winter
  • Youth unemployment, drug epidemic
  • Can’t get critical skills
  • Good in parts – has sprawl, some blight, brownfields (costly to remediate)
  • “Poverty in paradise”

Each team chose one of six PARTNERS to work with, for which a profile had been developed. Here are the profiles:

Libraries: are adopting new “wise application of knowledge” roles in a rapidly changing and more complex world. They provide a local high touch experience for the high tech world we live in. Their new roles in economic development include:

  • Maker spaces – 3D printers, electronic and electrical, publishing equipment
  • Public access to the Internet, computers
  • Lend books, CDs, software, equipment,
  • Meeting rooms and meeting facilitation
  • Incubator spaces
  • Courses for completing K-12
  • Support for college study and research
  • Research for new businesses
  • New skills – software, webpage, databases

Public access manufacturing/makerspaces: Cooperatives and companies such as TechShop are establishing manufacturing and production facilities for the public to rent/use by the day, week or month. Their new roles in economic development include:

  • Time share equipment use
  • Basic training, On-site instruction and college courses
  • Metalworking – mills, lathes, routers, plasma cutters, 3D printers
  • Culinary – shared commercial kitchens, Many kinds – metal working,g rooms Agricultural – equipment for bottling/canning, fermented products – wine, beer, cheese and yoghurt production
  • Arts and Artisan – woodworking, framing, showrooms etc.

Big Picture Schools: Personalized learning one student at a time. Big Pictures Schools prepare students for the real world, with applied as well as soft skills – leadership, project management, mentoring and planning – rarely found in “curriculum driven” schools. Their roles in economic development include:

  • Students complete an authentic project connected to their interest
  • Students learn how to be adults by being with adults
  • Mentors are expert in the field of student’s interest and in their field
  • Assessed by growth and change, not tests; family involved
  • Project based – portfolios, exhibitions, reflective journalling
  • Small group learning, maximum of 150 people per school
  • Learning by serving the community via projects

Churches: As community and economic development are increasingly inseparable. Faith-based organizations, which have a long history of education, health care and support service delivery have a critical role to play, including personalisation – reversing the trend to corporatisation and large scale service delivery. Their roles in economic development include:

  • Education and health care service delivery
  • Support for those who have fallen on hard times
  • Aged, children’s, and rehabilitation services
  • Fostering a sense of community
  • Drug dependence and recovery services

A gaggle of 14 year old app developers: Who knew? Many of the next generation of Tech Millionaires are starting their businesses on-line before they are old enough to drink or drive.  They are developing phone and tablet apps that operate at between current paradigms and disciplines. Their new roles in economic development include:

  • Capable of building new applications in a few weeks.
  • Low-cost business models
  • Solve customized local business and community problems
  • Connected to the world and other developers
  • Entrepreneurial – regard work as projects rather than careers
  • Low barrier to market entry

Sustainable energy entrepreneurs: Plug-and-play sustainable energy solutions which deal with the business case, permits, marketing, installation, connections to the grid or shared use are the hallmarks of the sustainable energy entrepreneur. Their new roles in economic development include:

  • Local energy production from solar, wind, biomass, pellets
  • Local solar networks, linking neighbors with great and not so good aspects
  • Architecturally appropriate moldings to integrate solar into New England-style houses
  • Transportation fuels from landfill gas, biomass gas; biodiesel
  • Plug-and-play solutions which solve the complexities of permits, connections

Participants used a worksheet to collect ideas from both the perspective of the TOWN and the new new PARTNER, and how each could serve each other’s interests in a syngeristic, win-win-win way, so not only did the participants get a successful result, but so did the broader community system.

Workshop

Here’s the workshop outline:

1. TRENDS: What are the big trends for your TOWN? What are the big trends for your PARTNER?

2. CAPACITIES RESOURCES: What resources, capacities and other stakeholders do others in the TOWN have that could be really useful to your partner? What skills, capacities, access to resources, customers and other stakeholders does your PARTNER have the town needs?

3. BAKING A BIGGER CAKE: How could the TOWN help your partner become very successful and the town/region to be successful as well? How could your PARTNER help the town/region? How could you put the TOWN and PARTNERS’s resources and interests together to bake a bigger cake?

4. FUNDING AND FIRST STEPS: To get started, what are the first steps? Who will you get involved? How will it be funded? Actions: Who, by, for?

5. REPORT BACK: Prepare for the report back in any way you choose but at MINIMUM, give the project a SNAZZY 4-5 WORD TITLE AND A 25-WORD DESCRIPTION. (Consider Song, Dance, Skit, Slides/Talk, Demonstration, All of the above, etc)

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Future of Libraries in NJ

Opportunities & Challenges:

In 2011, Maverick & Boutique was engaged by the New Jersey State Library and LibraryLinkNJ, the New Jersey Library Cooperative, to facilitate the development of a state-wide strategic master plan for the 2000+ libraries of all types in New Jersey.

Libraries continue to face substantial challenges, both as an institution and on the ground day to day. Public libraries, for example, are receiving unprecedented demand for services such as citizen access to the internet, the lending of materials that people could not otherwise access or afford and help with writing resumes to get jobs or studying for new careers. Yet the services of public and school libraries are being reduced or curtailed to help balance state and municipal budgets. Libraries of all kinds are having to redefine their value to their communities and, in many cases, reinvent what they do to remain a vital part of 21st century life.

What we did:

Maverick & Boutique helped the New Jersey library community cooperatively create a “living” strategic plan that put in place not only specific goals and measures—including some 33 initiatives—but also one that delivers an ongoing process for reinvention that any library can use, guided by the plan, as the need arises.

The planning process included multiple community engagement sessions held around the state to obtain the broadest possible range of input from stakeholders, extensive research into promising practices around the globe and close interaction with the directors and staff at LibraryLinkNJ and the State library.

Deliverables:

View the July 2013 Executive Summary, Statewide Strategic Plan, and the “Create Our Future” sheet.

 

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