Active Advocate

As an early career San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) teen librarian in a racially diverse, working-class neighborhood, Shawna Sherman enjoyed early success with a community quilt project, bringing a sewing instructor to teach teens. More than six years later the quilt, a memento of their neighborhood, is still on exhibit at the branch. She then served as the inaugural tech librarian for SFPL’s new techmobile.

As SFPL’s first transitional age youth–dedicated librarian, Sherman earned a grant from the Friends of the Library to provide independent living skills training to young adults 18–25 who were leaving home for the first time or transitioning out of foster homes or the justice system.

“She is very passionate about equity issues for youth,” says former manager Alice Chan. “She has a special interest in making sure this age group is taken care of and does not slip through the cracks.”

Currently SFPL’s African American Center manager—her “dream job”—Sherman works to improve the library’s support for Black youth and families. She’s partnered with San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) African American Parent Advisory Council and Black Student Union, 100% College Prep Institute, and the San Francisco Alliance of Black Educators, attending their meetings to share what’s going on at the African American Center and connect with Black families in the district. She also received an ALA Great Stories Club grant; the center partnered with the African American Achievement and Leadership Initiative on a book club for district youth focusing on truth, racial healing, and transformation.

Since March, Sherman has been temporarily deployed as a disaster service worker performing contact tracing. Nonetheless she continues to host programming centering topics of interest to Black patrons, including a quarterly Social Justice Book Club. She also cochairs the Library’s Racial Equity Committee, which has launched a new REAL (Racial Equity at the Library) Talk educational series, and with cochair Alejandro Gallegos, Sherman has worked closely with the city’s newly formed Office of Race Equity to develop a robust and ambitious first-ever Race Equity Plan for the Library. She says, “This is the most exciting to me because it offers us a chance to dig into the data and really study how the library has served BIPOC [patrons] in the past and make concrete and measurable plans for change.”

Sherman models the librarian as activist: “I believe in a library service that actively goes out to advocate for the library, an embedded librarianship where the librarian is part of the community.”