Toolkits

Welcome

We’re glad you chose to visit. This toolkit was created by and with rural librarians, for library people from communities of all sizes.

Toolkit Index

Alpha Order Tool List

Awakening to Community Potential: This tool will help you think about how much your library currently serves as a facilitator of community potential, your blindspots, and to the potential that lives in some groups of people in your town.

Building Local Political Voice & Power: This tool is to help you think about how you can make your local formal political process easier to understand for everyone in town. It may give you some ideas for how to facilitate your community members building their voice through self-made action.

Burnout: Identification & Prevention: This is an interactive no-judgement quiz which finishes out with self-care tips to help you create your own burnout prevention plan.

Community Support Assessment: This tool will help you consider the ways in which community residents, the library, and you support one another. It also asks you to brainstorm ways to improve those networks of mutual aid.

Creating Community Building Events: This tool has reflective questions to help you plan a community-wide event that draws in individuals from various parts of your local community and makes new connections for them.

Dare to Dream: Visioning Your Library: This tool will help you look at your library with aspirational eyes and open you to think in new ways about facilities planning.

Engaging with the Community on Wellbeing: Here you will find step by step guidance on engaging with your community as well as clipboard ready questions to take out of the library and into your neighborhood.

Fostering Knowledge & Discovery: This tool is designed to help you assess your work towards fostering lifelong discovery and knowledge in the library and in your community.

Is Everyone Welcome at Your Library: This tool will help you identify who is and is not using your library, and evaluate your current library practices to ensure inclusion.

Library as Community Welcome Center: This tool provides a series of considerations to help you see the library as a newcomer would. And to build resources that support them learning to make their way in their new town.

The Library Director: This tool has two parts: first a set of reflection questions to help you identify what qualities of a librarian your community needs most; and second, a set of interview questions that a library board can adapt to their hiring needs.

Nature: Going Beyond the Walls of the Library: This tool will help you reflect on how their library currently supports their community’s connections with the natural world and investigate new opportunities for the library to support and engage with the community in natural spaces

Pathways of Belonging: Contribution: Designed to help you assess how your community and your library facilitate contribution, this tool helps guide your thinking on belonging.

Pathways of Belonging: Delight: Delight hooks visitors and tethers long term residents to your library and to the community that can builds a sense of home and contributes to belonging. This assessment is a series of questions to help you reflect on how your doing on this front.

Pathways of Belonging: Seen & Known: This tool will help you think about the value of making patrons feel known in your library, and ways in which you can use personalized services to make them feel valued and appreciated.

Preservation & Community Story: The following is designed to help assess first your community and then your library work toward building resident belonging through a preservation pathway, and identify realistic ways to improve.

Safe & Secure in Your Community: This tool will help facilitate a better awareness of available resources for community members to improve Physical and Mental Health outcomes by building a sense of Shared Identity as well as Individual Voice and Power.

Uncertainty: This is a series of reflective exercises to help the user unpack where uncertainty exists, what impacts it has on their life, and identify strategies that work for them to process through the feelings and impacts that come with uncertainty.

Youth Empowerment: This tool will help you think through how your library can facilitate knowledge sharing to the younger generations, as well as some concrete ideas to get you started. The goal is to give children a way to be independent and inspire them to take the initiative to be self sufficient and productive.