Community Engagement

Family Support

Although you may not see or interact much with the parents and caregivers of the tweens and teens you serve, it is important to remember the vital role they are playing in the lives of your tween and teen library patrons. Many studies show that tweens and teens consider parents, caregivers and teachers to be their most important role models and influencers. Finding ways to work with these adults can help you make stronger connections to your library patrons and provide more relevant programming and services.

Some examples are:

• Host a Family Game Night and spend time chatting with both teens and their caregivers.
• Reach out to the local high schools about participating in any family engagement activities they have scheduled.
• Plan a weeknight cooking program that focuses on deciding what to eat, buy, and cook as a family each week.
• Create programs specifically for families and caregivers, perhaps around parenting topics and college prep/post-graduation career planning.

Educator Support

Creating a strong partnership with your local middle and high school teachers is a great idea, and can help you design library programming and services that complement what your patrons are experiencing at school. Here are some potential topics that you can talk about with your local teachers:

• Important research assignments that students have during the year: The library can help with creating book displays on relevant topics during the assignment period, and by making sure that the library collection has ample materials to support student research.
• Topics or trends that have come up in school that students have expressed interest in: Programming ideas could potentially come from this!
• Career and college guidance resources: If these topics are covered at school, it would be helpful to know in what capacity, so that you can provide resources that supplement.
• Media literacy: Offering support and resources to help students find reliable sources and evaluate results.

In general, keeping lines of communication open with school staff can only better inform your offerings, and provide you with another channel of suggestions and ideas.

Outreach and Teen Engagement

Library outreach refers to any engagement or programming, usually outside of the library’s walls, that ensures equitable delivery of services to your community. Especially with tweens and teens, it can be difficult to get them inside the library, so you will need to be creative and find places outside of the library to meet with them, and provide services. Some questions to help you guide your outreach efforts:

• Where do tweens and teens hang out in your community? After-school programs, church, coffee shops, sports games? Are there ways that you can partner with these organizations to provide library programs in their spaces?
• What community events can you attend that have high public attendance? Farmers markets, local fairs, parent-teacher night, PTA events, etc. Can you set-up a booth at these events to talk about resources and programs?
• Grocery stores, laundromats, pharmacies, and other businesses also see a high number of visitors daily, and might have a different group of patrons than who you see in the library. Providing information to these businesses to distribute, or doing a pop-up booth every once in a while can be a great way to reach new groups of patrons.
• Nonprofits who focus on youth development and empowerment can be another great resource to work with.

Please see the workbook for a reflection activity on Programming and Outreach.