Community Engagement Grant: Outcomes

Last winter, I applied for and won the $3000 Libraries Transforming Communities grant. I planned to host a series of virtual conversations with young families, thus combining community engagement and conversation with some of the principles of early literacy.  My experience of parents who are new to parenting is that the connection with other parents is invaluable.  Just knowing that other parents are having similar experiences is heartening, and often conversations will spark new ideas for successful parenting.  Unfortunately, even with a grant that helped to provide digital access, I didn’t get a great turnout for my virtual events.  The engagement I had with families was rich, but they weren’t engaging with each other. I’ve recently transferred the conversation project to an in-person, outdoor program and am having much more luck engaging with lots of families, but it’s not the focused conversation opportunity I was hoping for.

So at first glance, this hasn’t been a particularly successful grant project.  And I think it’s important to acknowledge that not all grant projects are successful and that we shouldn’t let that stop us from taking a chance on trying something new with grant funds.  While the program may not have gone exactly as I’d planned, the community still benefitted and I still learned a lot about engaging with my community.

​​Part of this grant process is to take the "Libraries Transforming Communities: Facilitation Skills for Small and Rural Libraries.Facilitation Skills E-Course" and I was lucky enough to take this course as part of a cohort with virtual get-togethers after each segment of the course.  (The course is also available asynchronously and free of charge.  I recommend it!) Taking this course greatly increased both my ability to host a facilitated conversation and my confidence and excitement about doing so.  As a result of taking this course, I now feel ready to plan a community conversation about food.  This new conversation ties in with adult and teen programming we’ve been doing over the last couple of years, and will also engage several community partners we’ve been building relationships with.  Participating in the grant process was vital to being able to take this next step, so I’m so glad that I did!

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Author

Susan Cackler
Library Supervisor/Programs Coordinator
Banks Public Library
​Incoming CSD chair