Leadership & Management

The work above, "Group Advocacy Plan", was completed as a semester-long project in Community Engagement and Service (ISCI 702). This was my first partner-focused project and as such taught me the importance of learning from my peers. This was my first real community analysis and needs assessment work, and it changed how I interpret user data and demographics holistically.

This project allowed me to recognize the shortcomings of Stanley Library's previous vision, mission, and value statement so while completing the community analysis I also worked with my institution to change Stanley Library's vision, mission, and values statements. Additionally, as this was my first partnership project, I think I learned grace quickly and found myself growing more comfortable admitting 'I know in theory how we are supposed to do this, but I have not done it in practice, could you talk me through it again?' The programs that my partner, Kevin, and I worked on conceptualizing for our target groups (First-Generation, Commuter students, and LGBTQIA+) will be rolling out this coming fall as part of Ferrum College's retention plans for first-year college students.  

Before I started this project, I was still in the honeymoon phase with my academic institution. I was a former student who mistakenly thought that everything was rosy behind the scenes. As this project was my first attempt at diving into the areas within Stanley Library that had room for improvement, I realized it was important to understand the historical 'why' of something before dismantling it, so to say. There were large programming gaps, not because we lacked the staffing or the budget, but because programming was perceived to be something public libraries did. I came from a different background than most of my fellow library staff and quickly realized that our similarities can make us strong, but our differences can make us even stronger.

From community analysis to programming, I discovered that not only was librarianship something I deeply loved, but I wanted the ability to work with my community one-on-one; I wanted to be able to work with students, faculty, staff, community patrons, and interlibrary loan users; I wanted to plan programs that brought users into the library, that would breathe new life into instruction and retention. To me, this project, demonstrates my ability to identify and define goals by developing measurable and single outcome objectives for each goal while also defining effective strategies for achieving objectives as part of the strategic planning process; my ability to design and conduct community analysis, needs assessment, and/or outcome evaluation which I built on over the course of my master's program; and demonstrates my ability to both explain and design effective strategies for community and institutional advocacy.