Making Social Change: Promote Civility
The public library by our mission and place within communities across the country is in a position to help facilitate positive social change.
The public library by our mission and place within communities across the country is in a position to help facilitate positive social change.
Diedre Conkling, one of the subjects in the article, is a librarian in Oregon who has spent most of her career working to encourage public libraries to embrace progressive social change, environmental issues, and politics and spurred them to be part of the movements that make those changes possible. She very graciously took the time to answer a few of my questions about the role public libraries should take in this time of great social and political upheaval.
For the last eight years, Colbert Nembhard has volunteered his time reading to homeless children at the Crotona Inn homeless shelter in the Bronx. He believes in early literacy intervention and strives to cultivate a love of reading in children while they are young. When Nembhard is not providing programming at the Crotona Inn homeless shelter, he manages the Morrisania Branch Library of the New York Public Library. Andrew Hart interviewed Nembhard via email on December 8, 2016.
By choice or circumstance, librarians are social activists, and with this comes responsibility.