All too often in library advocacy, we bury ourselves and our potential collaborators under facts and figures, somehow losing sight of the human side of our work. As we celebrate Valentine’s Day, we will turn toward the heart of library advocacy, focusing on the personal stories that drive our initiatives.

Join us for this highly-interactive 90-minute free California Library Association Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training session designed to explore ways we can better tell the stories of the special communities (e.g., children who don’t have adequate access to food, students and job-seekers who don’t have adequate access to the Internet for work and learning)—and members of those communities—we so passionately serve and with whom we collaborate to foster positive change. We will focus on and share a few of the stories that drive our most effective advocates working with and on behalf of special community groups and set the foundations for an upcoming series that highlights how advocates in California libraries and the California library community identify and work with community members who sometimes are overlooked and/or underserved.

Goal:

Participants will become better prepared to collaborate with and tell the stories of specific community groups to promote positive change within our communities.

Objectives:

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• Identify at least three approaches successful library advocates use to identify and work with members of special interest groups within our communities to promote positive change
• Craft concise, compelling stories designed to gain support for members of special interest groups within our communities
• Cite at least three resources you can use to further hone your advocacy skills on behalf of specific community groups with whom you work

Presenters/Facilitator:  

Paul Signorelli, a San Francisco-based writer/trainer-facilitator/presenter/consultant, serves as Library Advocacy Training Project Manager for the California Library Association. As author of "Change the World Using Social Media" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), he captured the stories of advocates working in libraries and a variety of other settings, and he continues to work with individuals and organizations to help them hone their collaboration skills to create productive coalitions to produce positive results. He recently led a one-hour “Advocacy Basics” session at the American Library Association’s LibLearnX conference in Baltimore and is scheduled, over the next few months, to facilitate a variety of other similar workshops on advocacy, community, and collaboration for onsite and online conferences.

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.

To support the series though a donation, please visit the CLA website at https://www.cla-net.org/donations/fund.asp?id=23440.