The 12 Steps to a Community-Led Library

Barbakoff (CEO of Co/lab Capacity; Adults Just Wanna Have Fun) and Lenstra (library science, Univ. of North Carolina; Healthy Living at the Library) offer a practical guide to community-led planning, which puts power in the hands of the community to collaboratively develop programs, services, and spaces that center historically excluded populations. The authors introduce their 12-part CoLaB model for enacting change, which can be broken down into three primary overlapping, iterative phases: inspirational, transformational, and operational. This model is likened to a garden, with the inspirational phase as cultivating the soil, the transformational phase as planting the seeds, and the operational phase as tending the plot. Each phase is necessary to enact long-lasting change, but the transformational phase, which requires considerable time and buy-in, is arguably the most important, as it is here that organizational culture and mindset can be transformed. This guide is both energizing and practical, suggesting actionable, research-based steps for adapting the process to libraries of any size or budget.