Becky Hass creates brave spaces for community conversations as the Programming & Outreach Manager at Anne Arundel County Public Library. She has spent the past 15 years connecting public libraries to community goals through effective partnerships. Currently, she and her team support over 5,000 programs annually in 16 libraries in Anne Arundel County by convening hundreds of community partners, non-profits, and presenters through a process she describes as "program matchmaking." Becky has represented her library system on many Anne Arundel County initiatives, including the Early Childhood Commission, Project Re-entry, and Community Plan task forces on homelessness, food insecurity, and transportation. She chairs the AACPL Workforce Quality and Diversity Committee and has brought and supported diverse and inclusive programming to the library community, including Drag Queen Storytime, Human Library, STEM Day, Trade School Fair, Comic Con, the Glow Up, and countless others.
How would you describe what Programming & Outreach does, as far as its role in the library system?
That's a great question! So, Programming & Outreach are the ways that we connect with and serve our public, to do community education. We do programs with all 16 of our branches [and] we average 1,500 programs a quarter, and that's not including all of our outreach efforts, our class visits, pop-up programming.
Was program attendance consistently high, even through COVID with the transition to virtual programming?
So, it definitely dipped at the beginning when we were still trying to figure out virtual programming and transitioning, but within the first weekend, we actually started doing Facebook Story Time. It's pretty amazing how quickly we were able to problem solve and find some creative solutions. We're really lucky that we have so many staff that are familiar with social media . . . Many of our staff are trained in early literacy programming, so they were able to use those skills. And then, we were able to get Zoom® accounts for all of the branches, [which] really gave us way more versatility for virtual programming so that it didn't have to be all centralized . . . At the moment, we're taking a break from our [programming for] preschool and younger for the month of January, but otherwise we still have programming going for school-age, teens, adults, and everyone in between . . . I would say that we are actually doing more outreach because we've done [partnered events] like food distribution sites and things like that, which we had done some pre-COVID, but you know, like everywhere around our community, that increased exponentially during the COVID crisis.
How else has P&O pivoted during COVID to meet needs?
Well, one of the blessings, I would say, is that we have more virtual community partner meetings. So, we've had way more branch staff have the access and availability [for those gatherings]. We have a huge county! So, if we have a meeting up in Brooklyn Park, that's an hour drive for staff from Deale Library, but now with virtual meetings, we're able to have more representation from branch staff at some of these community initiatives and collaborations, task forces, et cetera.
We've also had a really active relationship with the Department of Health, even pre-COVID. You know, we did stuff with Not My Child and the opioid epidemic and some other county initiatives, but certainly the library's role with COVID recovery has been tremendous. So, we've helped to distribute over 45,000 COVID testing kits. And there's more on the way, so it's pretty amazing. Also, our library's one of the very few that are doing vaccine clinics at our branches. I co-chair a group with the Maryland State Library for statewide programming and we actually had a meeting this morning where we were talking about some of the different responses around the state and yeah, I'm really grateful for how our library has been willing to be in the trenches, so to speak. And I recognize that part of it is because of the size of our county, [that] we have a unique role because we have 16 branches and because our population is as dense as it is . . . But I've been really grateful for how our community has engaged the library -- we get calls all the time [saying], ‘hey, can you help us with this?, ‘hey, we're doing this outreach event’, ‘there's a community resource fair. Can you host it?’ You know, we've hosted those out in our parking lots. And that's all built on the relationships that we've been establishing in our community for years.
Would you say that AACPL has been unique in taking that holistic point of view of caring for the whole person, beyond just learning?
I mean, I think that the trend is absolutely [growing]! ‘Wholehearted librarianship’ is a term that's used that I really resonate with -- that we really are here to serve the very wide needs of our community and mental health is part of that. For our staff and our community, we want to hopefully do the wholehearted whole service approach, but recognizing that we're not trained social workers, we partner with our social workers at the library, for example, and have them come and do trainings with us and help us build our collection and make recommendations -- we've even done bookmarks together! There's a Tough Topics bookmark that the Mental Health Agency had been distributing for years with us. And we helped get thousands of those bookmarks all over the community, which had information about crisis response -- a huge part of our county's COVID recovery. We're really fortunate to have county agencies and partners that work together well.
What does Programming & Outreach recommend library customers do to get the most out of what AACPL has to offer?
So, I would absolutely recommend grabbing a Happenings. I get a highlighter anytime I'm sitting with a new partner or a new customer, and I'm like, ‘okay, tell me what is it that you care about? What are your passions? Tell me about your family, your friends, you know, tell me about your educational goals. What is it that's part of your lifelong learning?’ Well, the moment they start giving me nouns, chances are very high I'm going to be able to connect them with programs that we've got going on, whether it's in person or now virtual. And I love that! I love that moment [when] their eyes get really big and they're like, ‘I had no idea!’ I mean, this is my favorite part of my job is figuring out what people's passions or interests are, or just where their curiosity is. You know, maybe they're into airplanes, maybe it's history, maybe it's genealogy -- who knows? And chances are, we've got a program -- or five! -- for that! And it's such a fun part of being with the library, right? There's no grades and you're allowed -- in fact, we encourage you! -- to come and try and play, and there's so few, few places like that on our planet that really want to support people's curiosity. So, Happenings is my favorite because it's sort of my cheat sheet of all the fun, creative, passionate library staff and the programs and our community, and what the community's needs are. So yeah, that's the first thing, of course, for me that I’d recommend is checking out the programs.
I also recommend just talking to the library staff! I think there's just something really beautiful about the library space and the desk and the permission to ask questions. There’s that relationship moment. I mean, I know for myself, anytime I move to a new community, the first thing I do is I go get a library card and then I just sort of [explore] around the library and check out what's on the bulletin board . . . It's just amazing to me what is always present in a public library.
Is there anything else that you’d like customers to know about AACPL or about P&O?
One of my favorite parts of my job is being a librarian for my partners, for my people, for my customers. I love that moment where people come, and they have an idea they want to pick my brain about. So, then I get to go through the Rolodex, right? Which is all the amazing partners and businesses and agencies that I've gotten to work with in the last seven years. And then I can respond to the person with the idea, ‘well, have you heard about this? What about this person? Do you know about this group?’ And it is amazing how much they don't know about each other. It's like, they're doing the exact same thing, but they've never heard of each other. This happens all the time. So, connecting people to information is the librarian's job, but my favorite is when I not only get to connect people with information, but I get to connect them with networks! . . . And then all of a sudden, it's like all the light bulbs [go on], which is beautiful. I lovingly refer to it as the Venn diagram moment where you've got this thing over here and this thing [over there], and the library gets to help connect those pieces.
I think that we're stronger as a community for it when we're able to allow and support each other's goals. So yeah, it's always fun for me when I get to support those alliances and connections. Connection is absolutely one of my core values. So, I get to live that in this job and that's not a small thing.