advocacy independent study final paper

7/31/2019 Advocacy Independent Study Final Paper

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Library Advocacy

Creates an AdvocateMy journey to gaining a passion for libraries.

by Brandon Lewter


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My Beginning: Library Advocacy and Jamie LaRues Strategy

My involvement with library advocacy began in late November, 2011 when I attended a

workshop on library advocacy at Durham County Public Library. A keynote speaker at the workshop was

Jamie LaRue, director of Douglas County Libraries in Castle Rock, Colorado, who has been a long time

library advocate, and in doing so has become an expert on the subject. In a few short years after being

hired as director of Douglas County Libraries, LaRue grew their library card holders in the county from

51 percent to, and perhaps even more impressive, one year, after having half of his librarys budget cut,

he devised a plan to get that money back through a system called BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

BHAG is a business strategy where a company collectively works towards a single, medium-to-

long-term, organizational goal. For libraries the goal is to increase federal and state funding, and the

strategy is built upon the idea that libraries do four things: libraries change lives; libraries mean business;

libraries build community; and libraries are a smart investment. Those four things can change a

communitys mind about the importance of libraries, and LaRues idea is that if you can replace the

negative views about libraries with these positive ones, you will earn support from the community and

their leaders. In-turn, you will earn support from the legislators who have an impact on the flow of federal

and state funding.

LaRue teaches that you can replace negative views about libraries (that they are impractical,

unnecessary, money pits) through the telling of short, formulated stories about ways libraries have

positively impactedpatrons personal lives. The formula for the stories includes the following elements:

specific character name(s); a problem the character(s) is struggling with; the way the library helped; a

happy resolution to the problem; and a tagline (one of the four aforementioned ways (applicable to the

story) libraries can have an impact). These stories should be told to community leaders and legislators,

ideally by a well-respected, non-librarian who is skilled at public speaking. As LaRue experienced

firsthand, if his strategy is followed correctly, library systems can experience a noticeable increase in

support, both in funding and from communities as a whole.

After the Workshop

After the advocacy workshop I was pumped up and ready to start working. As I waited for the

spring semester to begin, the time when I would officially start working on the advocacy project, my

mind raced with the possibilities of what could be done. When the spring semester finally started, and I

met with Dr. Chow to discuss my role in the project, I started to realize what a huge and important task

we all had ahead of us. Our goal was to collect as many stories from across the state about how patrons


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lives have been positively impacted by a library and then find a way to present these stories to our

national legislators in Washington DC on National Library Legislation Day and our state legislators on in

Raleigh on State Library Legislation Day.

My main responsibilities included the following:

Setting up the advocacy Web site, already created by Dr. Chow and LIS student, BenMcFadden, to be able to accommodate the storage, organization, and viewing of stories

by North Carolina County and congressional district; this involved creating an individual

page for each North Carolina county (100) and congressional district (13)

Transferring the stories we collected through a questionnaire (set up by Dr. Chow) to ourWeb site; this involved reading the stories to make sure they follow LaRues formula,

editing the stories for grammatical errors, and finally posting them to the appropriate

county and district page while advertising these stories through our social media sites

Updating our social media sites with links to new stories and encouraging submission ofpositive impact, library stories through our social media sites

Helping prepare presentations for our national legislators during our trip to WashingtonDC

Act as an observer of the advocacy project; this involved attending task force meetingsand keeping a log of several different aspects of the project.

With these responsibilities I really started to get involved with the advocacy campaign and truly became apart of the North Carolina Library Advocacy Task Force, an ad-hoc committee made up of North

Carolina public library directors, state library employees, and Dr. Anthony Chow, a UNCG LIS professor.

As the name suggests, the common goal of the task force is to advocate for all North Carolina libraries,

whether it be a public, university, or school library.

The Next Steps

After establishing my responsibilities and deciding on our strategy, the next step was to start

collecting and posting positive impact, library stories from North Carolinian library patrons to our Website, and the story collecting actually started happening in December right after the workshop. We started

to collect the stories by sending out a request to the North Carolina public libraries listserv, asking library

directors and employees to share their patrons stories. Our first story came to us on December 7, 2011

it was about a seven-year-old boy named Kevin who, with the help of his public librarys resources and

staff, earned his first A ever on a school report. From that point on we received only five more stories in


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December and two more stories in January, but that was before we really started to reach out for stories

through social media.

In mid-January, when I really first started to work on this project, we only had a total of eight

positive impact, library stories. Dr. Chow and I knew that we needed to reach out to the library

community through some other way than the public library, employee listserv, so we turned to our social

media sites for helpover the holidays Dr. Chow had been busy recruiting over 100+ friends for our

Facebook page. We sent out a message to our friends asking them for stories and by the end of February

we had eighteen more stories. Our steam was building. By mid-April, when we were really gearing up for

our visit to Washington DC, we had forty-one stories. Our website had over 6,500 views, and we had over

640 friends on Facebook. We had worked towards an excellent platform with which to lobby to our

national legislators about the positive impact libraries have on North Carolinians.

Gearing up for DC

In the weeks before our trip to DC, while continuing to ask for and collect library stores and get

more friends on Facebook, we were putting together a presentation for our legislators. We really wanted

to hit a personal and emotional chord in the legislators hearts with the library stories we had worked so

hard to collect, and in the end we accomplished that goal with an eight minute movie that tells what we

had come to call our stories. That, coupled with the hard hitting stats about budget cuts to libraries,

gave us all the confidence in the world. We felt that if our work did not do something to positively impact

the funding for libraries in North Carolina, there was nothing more we could have done. Either our

national legislators hands were tied, they could not allocate the funds our libraries need to continue

making such awesome impacts on the lives of North Carolinians, or our legislators do not care about the

people who elected them to serve.

The Bus

On the morning of our departure to Washington DC I woke up with a feeling of excitement and

anticipation. I was hopeful that all the work we had done would make an impact, I was curious to see and

experience democracy firsthand, and I was about to board a bus with twenty-plus vetted librarians from

across the state. We were all embarking on a trip with the potential to really make a difference for

libraries, and in turn, make a positive impact on the lives of others.

For being such long drive, it went by fairly quickly, probably due to the fact that I spent most of

my time talking with as many people as I could. We made two stops on the way: the first was to pick up

the second half of our group, including Brandy Hamilton, Regional Manager of Wake County Public


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Libraries and organizer of this trip; and the second stop was to get lunch. In between those stops I had a

few conversations with people who had gone on the trip before, so I got a good idea about what to expect.

We had a great group for the trip. Everyone was energetic and as excited as I was to make a difference for

our libraries, and that was a good thing because we all had a very busy schedule ahead of us.

We arrived at the hotel around four-thirty p.m., and that gave us about thirty minutes to check-in,

change our clothes, and freshen up before we were supposed to be back on the bus at five to make our

way to the Dirksen Building on Capitol Hill, where the ALA reception was supposed to take place. It was

an unseasonably cold and rainy day for April, so our bus driver dropped us off as close to our destination

as he could without getting ticketed. The reception room in the Dirksen Building was packed to the brim,

and most of our group could not get inside until after a few speeches were made and awards were given

out. At that time the crowd dissipated a bit so we made our way inside for some heavy hors d'oeuvres and

beverages. The highlight of the reception was that our group was recognized for the second year in a row

for bringing the largest delegation, thirty people! What a great kickoff to our trip!

After the reception we made our way to Union Station to re-board the bus. We got back to the

hotel about forty-five minutes later and some of us got a bite to eat from the hotel restaurant. After that

Dr. Chow and I met back up at our room so we could prepare the iPads and flash drives we had brought

for our presentations. We figured that each group could show the legislator or their aide a few minutes of

the movie, coupled with someone speaking about our main funding goals. Before we left we would give

each legislator a flash drive that contained our movie and links to our Web site and Facebook page.

Uploading all of our content to the iPads and flash drives took about two hours, and by the time we were

finished it was 11 oclock. Dr. Chow seemed to fall asleep easily and quickly, but I was too excited. I

stayed up reading for at least another hour.

The Big Day

At seven a.m. my alarm went off to signal the start of the big day. After showering a getting

breakfast it was time to get back on the bus again. The mood on the bus was one of excitement.

Everyone was sipping coffee, saying good morning, making the usual small talk about how they slept, but

listening to the talking together sounded like a nervous buzz. We were like an energized AA battery, all of

us like fully charged electrodes waiting to bring our powerful message to our legislators. We were on our

way, each of us with three to four appointments at different legislator offices throughout the morning. Our

last stop would be on the steps of the Capitol Building to take a picture with Senator Burr.


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Just like the night before, the bus driver dropped us off as closely as he could to the buildings

where our first appointments were. For the first two meetings we broke up into two large groups to go to

Senator Burrs and Hagans offices. I went with the group to Burrs office where we met with his aide

because Burr could not take the time to meet us. All fifteen of us packed into the offices lobby where we

surrounding Toppings eager to begin our presentation. I was personally a little nervous, but our fearless

leader, Brandy, jumped right to the point, giving facts about the recent cuts to librarys budgets. Before I

knew it, it was time to show our video. I already had the iPad cued up, so all I had to do was hit play.

Toppings watched for about three minutes, intensely reading each of the stories we collected, until I told

him a little more about how we collected the stories and that he and Burr could view the rest of the movie

using the flash drive I was about to give him. After that some of our group members spoke to the

importance of libraries while throwing in hard hitting facts here and there. We gave him the flash drive so

that he could watch the rest of the movie, and more importantly give it to Burr and encourage him to

watch, and then we were out the door. The whole meeting took about twenty-five minutes.

From there our group broke up into smaller groups while some of us met up with people from the

group who went to Representative Hagans office, whose meeting seemed to have gone just as well as

ours, and then we were off to our next appointment. My groups next stop was at Congressman Brad

Millers office, and justlike at Burrs office, we met with his aide. With a smaller group I felt the meeting

was a little more personal, and I could tell that from our previous meeting gave us practice and confidence

because we were building of what each other said. We went around the room like clockwork giving facts

or telling personal stories from our hearts. We showed a portion of the video and were soon out the door

in about thirty-five minutes, off to our next appointment with Representative Virginia Foxxs aide. And

that meeting went just as well, if not better than the first two.

After wrapping up our last meeting we grabbed some lunch in the cafeteria and made our way to

the Capitol Building to have our pictures taken with Senator Burr. After waiting for about twenty to

twenty-five minutes, Burr showed up, from seemingly out of nowhere, and quickly took his place for the

picture. A few seconds later he was off to the group of elementary school students who had been patiently

waiting to have their picture taken with the senator.

It was a whirlwind of a trip. Almost every minute seemed to be packed with an agenda, but it was

still hard to believe it was almost over. Our group made its way back to Union Station where we boarded

the bus yet again, and we were quickly on ourway back to North Carolina. On the ride home the

talking slowly tapered off, and more and more of us stopped fighting the urge to take a little nap. As we

went down I-95 I reflected back on everything that had gone into that trip: I thought about Brandy


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Hamilton and the monumental task she had so effectively conquered in organizing this trip for the first

time; I thought about Carol Walters who had organized the trip the previous three years, and all the work

she had done to help Brandys job a success; I thought about Dr. Chow, and all the tireless hours he had

put into this advocacy campaign, and the fact that he did it because of his true passion for libraries and his

strong desire to put his students into positions where they can grow, learn and excel. I thought about how

we had truly given it our best shot and are successful because of that if nothing else.

And then I thought about myself and all that I had learned over the past five months; I thought

about how the job was not truly done and it probably never would be. In just two months we have to be

ready for State Library Legislation Day in Raleigh. In fact we had, and still do have quite a bit to do to

prepare for that trip. I thought back to all the amazing stories we had collected about all the positive

things libraries had done for so many people and all the stories we hadnt heard. And then I realized that I

was not going to be finished with library advocacy just because the semester was coming to an end. I

realized that I had developed a passion for libraries, and one morning around mid-April next year I would

be waking up early to get on a bus to DC with people who I would automatically consider friends because

they shared the same passion.

advocacy independent study final paper

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