Into the Room No Longer on Zoom
UNLT Trustees met in August, one metre apart in the Library to discuss all things strategy! Like many other Trustee Boards, we have been meeting frequently using Zoom to keep in touch during lockdown and plan for a return to the “new normal”. Nothing beats zooming back into the room though especially enticed by a fresh locally sourced breakfast!
The purpose of an Awayday is to avoid looking at the operational performance but instead have time for some bigger thinking and future planning. Our question was
What does a financially sustainable 21st century library look like?
We began by reflecting on the definition of a library. The Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 gives local authorities a statutory duty “…to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service for all persons desiring to make use thereof. Note the term is a service not a building. So once a building houses a library service then we have a library or as we like to think; a library of possibilities.
The UNLH is a library which house a library service. It also provided many other services so is now termed a Community Library Hub. Our library in Crystal Palace is a leading light in the Community Managed Libraries Peer Network (CMLPN). Of course, we have fielded complaints from traditionalists who are frightened that we will lose the focus on books and fail to deliver a statutory library service because we are trying to do too much beyond reading. This is not a risk here. We love books and reading, and the Lambeth and Croydon library services and we will work hard to protect it.
At our strategy meeting we reflected long and deeply on the important social function community hubs have to bring people together from a cross section of the community with the social benefit of addressing isolation and offering a safe space to anyone who wants to drop by. How many beautiful civic buildings are available these days so that anyone no matter what their circumstances are welcomed into the building? Very few, look around and see just how few places you can sit and stay safe at no cost, all day if you want, without having a long look or a tut!
The community network organisation, Locality, says that community hubs should not only provide services for the community, but some of those services should be provided by the community. Power to Change have started to describe this approach as community businesses. We recognise that using the term business in the same sentence as library may be too much for some people but loosely defined a community business is locally-rooted, trades for the benefit of the community, play a supportive and non-competitive role in the communities, aligning and not duplicating their offers, is accountable to the local community and has a broad community impact.
What has this got to do with UNLH? It opens up the conversation about how we as trustees and custodians ensure the sustainability of the building. But do local people understand the challenge of doing this? Are we telling the library story well enough? Is there a solid shared understanding among the local community as to what is needed to keep UNLH safe? For example, do you know that our traditional local authority grants are diminishing to zero over the next two years. Which is why we have developed our community trading to achieve 45% of our income. We did this by:
Performance, Arts, Theatre, Music
UNLH Events
Space Hire
Community Space
Education services
Café/Bar
Library
Sales/merchandise
Projects
Business Consultancy
Streaming Channel
Did you know that all these services increased the footfall to the library, so it was a mutual benefit? But we also have more to do to ensure that the space works for us all and we can balance the quiet of the library with the joyful shrieks of the toddler rhyme time.
(c) David Monteith-Hodge
We must make sure the cost of hiring rooms includes the wear and tear on those rooms. We need to know how to balance access of groups so not just one group dominates the library. Many libraries are beginning to rely entirely on volunteers to run activities and services but that poses a huge risk to sustainability and security of services. Without income we may face this risk. Now we are trying to navigate through the Covid-19 challenges and how we encourage people back to the library. We have raised some Covid grants to tied us over, but we are not out of the danger zone yet.
But while we agreed these are all challenges to address our biggest task is how to better communicate our story to the local people. To succeed we need people to understand, trust and support our passion to save the library by reshaping it so we continue to provide a library service but in a building that is well loved and the first point of call for many local residents. So, we took decisions and agreed some changes that we hope will make it clear who we are, what we do and why we do it.
More to follow in my next blog, however I will leave you with one of the discussions we had around the library hub becoming a Modern centre for lifelong learning opportunity and possibility, aptly reflected in our case study in the report launched today by the CML National Peer Network: Community Managed Libraries as Community Hubs.
