Urban Libraries Council
December 13, 2022
by Ellen Samples, Central Arkansas Library System
“One of the ways that I chose to implement our plan was to connect with organizations already serving youth that might not have access to the library and to provide outreach to those sites. I found an eager partner in Our Club, an out-of-school time program housed at the Our House homeless shelter serving children and teens experiencing housing insecurity. Their program has many shared goals with the work we were trying to do through the Building Equity cohort. Our Club also valued STEM as one of their key programming areas and integrating youth voice in the design of their program. Working with their staff, we determined that a team of programming staff from CALS would provide weekly STEM and literacy enrichment to their middle school students over the course of their summer program.”
“On our first visit, we set out to get to know the students and involve them in our summer plans. We worked on a community learning agreement to guide our interactions for the summer. We did not plan out each week’s lesson in advance, but rather had a running list or menu of things that we could provide based on the time constraints and our resources. This allowed the students to guide what activities we engaged in throughout the course of the summer. For the most part, we chose to focus on activities that fit within the timeframe of a single session rather than ongoing projects that might have to be moved or stored or that might be started by a student who was not able to remain in the program for the entirety of the summer. The team of library staff who implemented the activities did a terrific job of building on the prior knowledge and experiences that the students gained from each week’s sessions.”
