A sustainable model for library advocacy

IN July 2018, EveryLibrary’s Executive Director, John Chrastka, and I were invited to be keynote speakers at CILIP’s conference in Brighton. We spoke about the success of EveryLibrary’s methodology for building public support for libraries in the US, and to share insights from our advocacy work. It was wonderful to meet so many people who are doing amazing work supporting and advocating for libraries across the UK. Over the next few months, we worked closely with the CILIP leadership team to explore the feasibility of a national advocacy partnership between our organisations. In April 2019, we were excited to announce that CILIP was given a grant from the Arts Council England to allow us to build and provide similar tools, data, and support for library advocates and campaigners in England.

EveryLibrary Institute

Through our partnership project, The EveryLibrary Institute (ELI) will provide consulting and training for the construction of the underlying infrastructure to help CILIP provide better tools, training, data, and funding to local campaigners. The methodology and infrastructure used by EveryLibrary will be adapted to support the British model and the approach to advocacy in order to establish a financially sustainable model for advocacy that builds support for libraries in the UK, while securing the resources needed for continuous growth and maintenance. Our goal is to help CILIP and other library advocates identify, cultivate, and empower supporters, as well as to allow CILIP to provide resources to partner library advocacy organisations and projects.

Large not local

In our discussions with campaigners and advocates, we found that there are similar institutional issues in England to those in the US. One of the biggest is that large associations simply don’t have a culture of working on local library campaigns, don’t have the resources, and lack many of the skills. This is true in almost every country, state, and locality that we’ve worked in and this isn’t an issue that is limited to libraries in the UK. So, while we do believe that much of the criticism of CILIP’s lack of engagement with local campaigners is relevant and mostly accurate, it’s important that we realise that we now have a new opportunity to work together to establish a new era of library campaigning.

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Expectations

However, this is a multi-year project and we need to set realistic expectations. Unfortunately, it isn’t a magic silver bullet that will save libraries in a single year. You won’t see an immediate shift in local and national policies and funding after just a few months. There are dozens of issues affecting library funding in the UK and it would be impossible to address them all in the first year of the project. While funding from Arts Council England for the first year will allow us to establish the initial tools, strategies, training, and early funding to local campaigners, we can’t expect to immediately reverse the cuts to funding. A reasonable expectation for the first year is that local campaigners will gain access to new tools and resources to assist them with their campaigns. As this project continues to grow, so will the resources available to local campaigners.

CILIP conference launch

While we’re launching the early tools at the CILIP conference in Manchester, we are also very interested in working with many of you to build the next generation of resources that local campaigners need to succeed in their fight for their local libraries. So, over the next few months we are going to be meeting with library advocacy experts to talk about their needs and bringing library supporters together to build a network of communication so that local advocates can tackle the large problems that exist with funding libraries across England. That’s also why we are so excited to return to the CILIP Conference and learn from you about what you need to be successful. We truly look forward to working with all of you.