Kind & Connected 

Christina Jupp Grove has fond childhood library memories, but one bad experience gave her insight that influenced her future. During college, she offered to work off library fines. Library staff rejected that and suggested she pay by credit card. “It made me super cognizant of the default middle-class expectations of public libraries and the barriers that exist for accessing library services for a lot of people,” she said.

As a result, Grove started thinking about what it really means to serve and know your community. As Alameda County Library’s manager of mobile and outreach services (MOS), and head of the library’s Community Based Services Action Team, she’s determined to meet community members where they are and bring them into the library.

To align MOS with the library’s new justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion priorities, Grove built a county map to identify mobile service locations that can promote race equity.

Pandemic service disruptions that affect lower-income, predominantly BIPOC neighborhoods led Grove and her team to launch a new, pandemic-friendly, outdoor mobile library service, complete with a custom-designed vehicle.

Thinking about how the library can remove barriers to serve and truly welcome all people led her to partner with a local shelter to bring library services there, and to start outreach libraries at a youth mental health facility and an assisted living site. To help people feeling isolated during the pandemic, Grove developed Kind, Connected Conversations, a phone service that hosted more than 200 one-to-one conversations with library staff over 10 months.

All of Grove’s efforts “come from her desire to be entrenched in the community,” Learning Group Division Director Erin Berman said; her work illustrates “the kindness of libraries” at their best.