Advocacy is an essential skill and passion for you and other members of California’s library community at all levels. This highly-interactive session, facilitated by experienced advocates active within the California Library Association, is designed to help you hone your advocacy skills to the highest possible level. You’ll hear stories highlighting key traits and skills displayed by successful library advocates; learn how successful advocates combine effective storytelling, fundraising, marketing, social media, and collaboration skills to create the most dynamic, diverse coalitions possible to provide measurable positive change within the communities they serve; and have plenty of time to find ways to apply, to your own work, what you are learning. The session will conclude with an exercise designed to help you develop a first-draft action plan you can use in your current advocacy efforts.

N.B. – This workshop is a modified version of a session presented at the California Library Association 2023 annual conference in Sacramento.

Goal: By the end of this session, you will:

• Be able to identify and describe at least three key elements of any successful, engaging advocacy effort
• Have numerous advocacy tips you can incorporate into your work
• Craft a basic plan of action for an advocacy initiative you are currently developing or would like to develop within the next month
• Be able to cite at least three resources you can use in your work as an advocate for libraries and the communities they serve

Session Facilitators:  

Nichole Brown, Treasurer for the California Library Association and a member of CLA’s Ursula Meyer Advocacy Endowment Committee, is an advocate for children and young adults, passionate about providing quality library service to all, and proselytizes reading with reckless abandon. She is also an ACEs Aware, Trauma-Informed Librarian II at the Oakland Public Library. Her superpower is encouraging reluctant readers of all ages to read the first chapter of any book. 

Deborah Doyle, a member of the California Library Association Advocacy and Legislation Committee and Ursula Meyer Advocacy Endowment Committee, serves as Chair of the Sonoma County Library Commission as well as CPLA’s Treasurer and Past President. As a writer/editor/fundraiser, she has worked at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, Dolby Laboratories, Booz Allen, Heidrick & Struggles, and the Council on Economic Priorities.

Essraa Nawar, named by the Orange County Register as one of Orange County’s 125 most influential people for 2022, serves as Development Librarian, DEI Program Coordinator, and Chair of the Arts, Exhibits, and Events Committee at Chapman University. She has also been a TEDx speaker.

Paul Signorelli, CLA Library Advocacy Training Project Manager and author of Change the World Using Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), is a writer/trainer-facilitator/presenter/consultant immersed in lifelong learning. He develops and facilitates learning opportunities onsite, online, and in hybrid settings, and recently helped design and co-facilitate #etmooc2, the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course that explored artificial intelligence in lifelong learning.

About the Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training Series

This program is part of an ongoing series of monthly online sessions organized offered through the Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training Series; sessions are generally held online on the second Wednesday of each month, beginning at 10 am PT. The series honors the memory of Ursula Meyer, 1977-78 CLA President, California Library Hall of Fame inductee, longtime director of the Stockton-San Joaquin Public Library, and fierce advocate for library services and intellectual freedom. The Ursula Meyer Fund was established to provide for the training of librarians in all stages of their careers, and library supporters, in political advocacy and political action, in honor of Ursula’s belief that librarians need effective political skills to advocate for library support at all levels of government. Archived recordings of previous sessions are available on the California Library Association YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@californialibraryassociati2705/videos.