Evaluating Neighborhoods
When I was hired as the branch manager at Woods Run in Pittsburgh I knew very little about the surrounding area. I assumed, however, that the local staff did. It became evident, however, from my conversations with staff that although we were leading programs and performing outreach that they did not fully understand the community. They didn’t know the communities’ history, their demographics, their leaders and organizations that they were serving. Rather, each staff member was working as an individual; they were chasing numbers without understanding what those numbers meant. I wanted us to function as a team who clearly understood our service area and, as a branch unit, would outline goals and a strategy for expanding our footprint into the community.
In October of 2013 I decided that, as a staff, we were going to learn about our surrounding community. I had 6 full time or almost full time staff members and 6 neighborhoods. I assigned each staff person, including myself, a neighborhood and asked them to research it top to bottom. We looked at the history, the demographics, the historic demographic trends, the crime, the geography, the land use, the transportation, the businesses, the nonprofits and the schools within each neighborhood. Then we over-laid all of that new found data with what we already knew. We knew our current outreach sites and we knew where our borrowers and card holders lived. After researching, compiling and analyzing all of that data, I asked them to make recommendations of who was being over looked in each service area and how we might make inroads.
Each staff member, regardless of position, from clerk to children’s librarian, made a 15 to 20 minute presentation at an all staff meeting on their designated neighborhood and presented their recommendations for expanded service. I think that when you have a small staff in a busy branch, everyone needs to take responsibility for understanding and serving our community. By going through this learning process as a group, we forged a sense of shared responsibility to serve these neighborhoods. Every single staff person who participated in this process remarked at how much they learned from this process. From the staff person who had been there 10 years to the person I had hired 2 months prior. By working through this exercise together, we now had a common understanding of our purpose as a library.
After the presentations I made an excel spreadsheet. I documented every outreach possibility in each neighborhood (schools, nonprofits, businesses, day cares, neighborhood groups, etc) and our current relationship with that organization. I sat down with our outreach and programming staff and we devised a plan for 2014 to make inroads into our neediest and least served neighborhoods. I built buy-in from the whole staff because they were intimately involved in the planning process. From there, we put the plan in writing, shared it with the staff and held monthly progress report meetings.
Over the last year we made slow but steady progress on our goals. Most importantly, however, we were functioning as a team, with a common mission and a clear understanding of why that goal was important. We understood our community which made us feel more connected to its success. More than any trust falls or ice breakers, this process, although long and intensive, bonded the staff together with a strong belief in shared responsibility.
In October of 2013 I decided that, as a staff, we were going to learn about our surrounding community. I had 6 full time or almost full time staff members and 6 neighborhoods. I assigned each staff person, including myself, a neighborhood and asked them to research it top to bottom. We looked at the history, the demographics, the historic demographic trends, the crime, the geography, the land use, the transportation, the businesses, the nonprofits and the schools within each neighborhood. Then we over-laid all of that new found data with what we already knew. We knew our current outreach sites and we knew where our borrowers and card holders lived. After researching, compiling and analyzing all of that data, I asked them to make recommendations of who was being over looked in each service area and how we might make inroads.
Each staff member, regardless of position, from clerk to children’s librarian, made a 15 to 20 minute presentation at an all staff meeting on their designated neighborhood and presented their recommendations for expanded service. I think that when you have a small staff in a busy branch, everyone needs to take responsibility for understanding and serving our community. By going through this learning process as a group, we forged a sense of shared responsibility to serve these neighborhoods. Every single staff person who participated in this process remarked at how much they learned from this process. From the staff person who had been there 10 years to the person I had hired 2 months prior. By working through this exercise together, we now had a common understanding of our purpose as a library.
After the presentations I made an excel spreadsheet. I documented every outreach possibility in each neighborhood (schools, nonprofits, businesses, day cares, neighborhood groups, etc) and our current relationship with that organization. I sat down with our outreach and programming staff and we devised a plan for 2014 to make inroads into our neediest and least served neighborhoods. I built buy-in from the whole staff because they were intimately involved in the planning process. From there, we put the plan in writing, shared it with the staff and held monthly progress report meetings.
Over the last year we made slow but steady progress on our goals. Most importantly, however, we were functioning as a team, with a common mission and a clear understanding of why that goal was important. We understood our community which made us feel more connected to its success. More than any trust falls or ice breakers, this process, although long and intensive, bonded the staff together with a strong belief in shared responsibility.