We were delighted to announce the awards for the 2024 iteration of our Library Innovation Lab (LIL) program earlier today, which will bring librarians from 10 California public libraries together in a learning community experience through the end of the year.
These librarians represent a wide range of professional experience (early, mid, and late career), backgrounds (children’s, teen, and adult librarians), and interests in working with different immigrant and refugee populations (including Afghan, Arab, Chinese, Latinx, Iranian, Korean, Russian, Samoan, and Ukrainian). Several are themselves immigrants; most are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. The participating libraries, located in rural, suburban, and urban areas, reflect the diversity of California’s immigrant communities, which makes up 27% of our state’s population.
With the selection of this group, our nationally recognized LIL program, now in its eighth year, is off to a good start. This year’s work began with a virtual convening held over three consecutive afternoons in March. Activities included a hands-on Design Thinking workshop led by museum educator and futurist Lisa Eriksen, an empathy-building exercise in which cohort members shared an object that represented their connection to the immigrant experience, and a presentation by our alumni mentors, Eric Cardoso (Long Beach Public Library) and Patty Mallari (San Leandro Public Library) about building connections with immigrants in their communities—the subject of their first “homework assignment.”
Over the next four months we will hold regular virtual meetings to provide additional skill-building sessions on public humanities programming, project management, budgeting, marketing and communications, evaluation, and working with external partners to enable the cohort to develop a plan of action for the public humanities programs they will conduct in the fall of 2024. During that time, California Humanities staff and mentors will be making site visits and continuing to support the cohort through informal coffee hours and individual consultations. After their programs are completed, we will reunite the group in winter 2025 to share results, debrief, and celebrate their accomplishments.
Stay tuned for more news and updates about the fall programming schedule and other LIL-related activities!
About Library Innovation Lab:
LIL provides a ten-month practice-based professional development experience to each librarian along with grants of $5,500 to research, design, implement, and assess a small scale, short-term public humanities project at their library. To date, 84 librarians representing over 50 library systems have participated in the Library Innovation Lab program. Oral history projects, film screenings and discussions, memoir and zine writing activities, podcasts and mini-documentaries, and art and history exhibits have celebrated the food, music, dance and cultural traditions immigrants have brought to our state, engaging over 107,000 Californians.
Library Innovation Lab was made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, California Humanities, and the generosity of individual donors. Learn more here.
