Bridges Out of Poverty

Bridges Out of Poverty

I was at the Hudson Museum all day today at a workshop entitled Bridges Out of Poverty. It was not what I expected. The focus on the workshop was coming up with ideas on how to improve library service for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It was not necessarily focused just on poverty, but on our attitudes and the way we created barriers to service for people who had a difficult time encountering the library setting.

We started with identifying many of the barriers to getting service in the public library. One of our first projects was identifying tbe basic difficulties a library patron would have getting to and using the library. My job was to identify a patron who was coming for reference services.

We created a mythical visitor who first had trouble finding a parking spot, then had difficulty going through the large steel doors and up the two flights of stairs to the circulation desk. From there they passed through a detection system with a large metal bar which had to pressed aside. Then they entered a room without enough signage indicating where to go to get reference. They first had to go to the circulation desk which was at the entrance and the circulation clerk had to point out the sign across the room at reference.

Then I had to imagine various difficulties associated with the reference desk. A line of people waiting to be helped. A phone ringing off the hook while there was only one person at the desk. No map to the different sections in the library. Then when the person was helped, no way for the librarian to get up and walk them to the area where their book was. From there it was handed off to the technical service librarian who had to describe how to build a map of the library and properly arrange signage.

It was a long constant barrage of questions. They even had us relate what we had done from our last session. Apparently the childrens room created a goodie bag for new patrons and the adult room created a whole slew of bookmarks and exhibits.

The lunch was not too bad. We had wraps, salad, and coffee. Mostly, I sat with my colleagues. A lot of the staff were there. I had done the first part of the workshop amost a year before.

It seemed half of the day was about attitude readjustment, why we should be considerate of people from different economic classes. How, we should take the time to really listen and be polite to everyone no matter what their background was. It was a lesson on understanding others or at least how to pretend to understand others discreetly. They keyword was understand, understand, and understand some more.

Pretending to understand others discreetly is a large part of a librarians job, no matter how frustrating this may be. This goes for all of you customer service people as well. Remember, no grins, no raising eyebrows, listen closely, a polite but gentle voice, and a willingness to be flexible about how you talk to people is an absolute must. And most of all have a sense of humor and a thick skin. Park your ego at your desk with your coat.

They even did the classic angry customer roleplay which always happens at these things. Usually someone is angry about a library fine they received and doesn't want to pay...

Then we spent the rest of the day brainstorming on different ideas on how to make the library more accessible to people from many different backgrounds. Our first exercise was create twenty five different ideas on how to improve service. Each table had a director of a large library in Westchester County and their staff. Our director was there. A person from Westchester Library System was there as well.

So, it was one of those things where your job was too discretely perform and do a good job in front of everyone else. I think I did alright. We winnowed the list of twenty five things down to several activities which we promised to do; do outreach to troubled groups so they can visit the library like the group home, the drug rehabilitation clinic, and the mental rehabilitation clinic in our neighborhood, open a tutoring center for teens, and create a community survey.

This thing has a lot of interesting political ramifications. I am not sure what they are right now, but they should be fascinating. The whole thing was kind of exhausting and a bit relentless.

I am glad the day was over.

It was a great relief to get on the train and head home. I got to crack open a book and read a bit. I even wrote a short review of Reading The OED while sitting on the train. I am going to type the review tomorrow. I am too exhausted to do anything else tonight.

Bridges Out of Poverty-- Workshop

Today, I was sent to participate in a workshop, Bridges Out of Poverty at the Hudson River Museum. The program ran from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. it was presented by a lady named Terie Dreussi Smith. I got there in time to have a section of muffin, half a croissant, and a cup of coffee. Several of my colleagues also went. I often see these events as a chance to gab with colleagues and find out a little bit about libraries in different places. A lot of these events exist for networking.

As a presentation it was kind of interesting. The presenter suggested several books as she was doing her talk. Many of them are classics on poverty issues. I am going to list a few of them. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, Rick Bragg All Over But The Shouting, and Paolo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed. She also talked about a book which creates a better framework for explaining poverty than the ones beings used now; The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor (Hardcover)
by Charles H. Karelis.

We watched a few video clips as part of the presentation. One which was particularly entertaining was a clip on a movie on social class in the United Staes, People Like Us



I think the talk was aimed at administrators who were going to create policies or pick up programs to help poor people in their agencies. The focus of the program was not how to turn poor people into middle class people, but to help poor people improve their economic stability. I am really not sure how effective this would be.

We got a lot of statistics. One of the most striking is that 49% of poor people spend more than half their income on housing. Also poverty is increasing inside the United States. As more globalization and deindustrialization occurs there are less and less middle class jobs in the United States. Jobs are moving overseas.

Something else which she said was the need for sometimes extreme entertainment for poor people. Because so many people who are living on the edge are so close to losing the roofs over their heads, not having enough to eat, and they can't afford to buy a lot of things, they often turn to public sources of entertainment.

The public library gets a lot of people who are very poor. Some people will come in who appear to be on public assistance or disability, are retired and living on a fixed income. They often borrow four or five different dvds every single day and return them the next day.

I really am not sure what I will do with the information I received from the program. I am hoping that we will get back our GED program, the afterschool tutoring program for little kids and maybe some more programss on helping people get jobs. Hopefully the recent work on improving the Job Information Center might help.

Things are getting harder lately. Gas and food prices are rising. The middle class is struggling in the United States right now. For people who are already poor it is probably really rough.

There is a websites for the seminars. The seminars apparently were done at Brooklyn Public Library, New York Public Library, and Queensboro Public Library.
http://www.ahaprocess.com/

I have noticed that a lot of consultants have been moving into the nonprofit sector recently. Recently we did a film program with Healthfirst a Medicaid Part D provider.