Little bit, and then we're not going to be able to do it.

Coleman here.

Johnson?

Kim?

Here.

Naker?

Here.

Here.

Chair Jules?

Here.

Five present.

Two absent.

None being excused.

The first item on the agenda is the approval of minutes.

Minutes 26-20.

Library board minutes six three twenty twenty-six.

Great.

I will take a motion from Council Member Naker to approve the library board minutes from June.

Is there any discussion?

Seeing none.

All those in favor say aye.

I aye.

All those opposed.

Five in favor, zero opposed.

The minutes have been adopted.

The next item on the agenda is staff report, staff report twenty-six-106.

Equity, inclusion, and anti-racism coordination at St.

Paul Public Libraries.

Welcome, Coral, to give this presentation.

Really looking forward to it.

I am really pleased to be here.

I'm pleased to be doing this.

Um, good afternoon, Chair Jose, members of the library board.

My name is Coral Gessner.

I use sheher pronouns, and I am the equity inclusion and anti-racism coordinator for St.

Paul Public Library.

Again, I'm pleased, I'm really grateful for this opportunity to address you all, come before you and speak a little bit about equity inclusion and anti-racism coordination at St.

Paul Public Library.

So to get started, I just want to begin with a really high-level overview of the position as well as the different roles that it operates within both city and library structures.

As a member of the equity core team for the city of St.

Paul, I meet by monthly with equity staff from HR, Hero, and Public Works to coordinate the quarterly citywide equity change team meetings and support their central HR and city equity initiatives.

As the library equity inclusion and antiracism coordinator, a member of the senior leadership team, and the co-chair of the library's equity change team.

I've been with the library for three years now.

I have a background in museums, and so I consider it a very like sister parallel field, and I'm really really pleased to be sort of doing my dream job.

And I've focused in these past three years most of my energy and efforts in building infrastructure, implementing new tools, and strengthening the library's practices and skills.

Ultimately, I'm really guided by this goal and this idea to strengthen the library's ability to do equity inclusion in anti-racism work across all functions and levels of the work that we do.

I think about this question.

What can we put in place now that will help us sustain the work for the future?

This is still a new role for the library.

There is definitely more work to be done to define itself, to grow clarity on what the role is as well as what it's not, and establish the ways that it intersects with library functions.

As a part of those efforts to build better definition around equity inclusion, anti-racism in SPPL.

We've developed three pillars that guide the work, and the majority of the project's initiatives that I've been leading and coordinating for the library fit with on underneath these pillars.

The first is deepen and increase the impact of equity inclusion, anti-racism behaviors, and practices.

I also want to mention that this is the same language that is goal number four in our current SPPL strategic direction.

The second pillar is library equity change team, advancing the work and cultivating capacity.

And the third pillar is building community and new initiatives.

For the rest of this presentation, I've sort of decided to organize and share some of the specific work that the library has done under each pillar, and then we'll have time for questions after that.

So the first pillar of the work is executed mostly through trainings and learning and development.

This includes shared power and supervision.

This is an exciting partnership with Mia Henry and Freedom Lifted that is helping SPPL build a community of practice rooted in equity with our library supervisors and project managers.

By community of practice, I mean establishing the shared languages, practices, tools, and mindsets that guide our library leaders in executing their roles and that are consistent across our whole system.

Four essential things to know about racism and understanding and interrupting bias are the first pair of in-house racial equity trainings that are being rolled out to current staff later this year and will be incorporated into new employee onboarding.

We plan to grow the offerings of these trainings into what we would consider a foundations and racial equity that builds off of the trainings that are offered by the city of St.

Paul and serves to deepen staff's understanding of the key racial equity concepts and to strengthen their ability to apply racial equity practices and delivery into our public services and operations.

Councilmember Kim has a question.

Oh, council member Kim.

Yeah, just a quick one.

So is the four essential things to know about racism all staff is that that is just library stuff, or this training is meant to supplement or complement or maybe even replace the one that happens citywide?

Because isn't there, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there um great question?

An internal like coordinated like equity change team from that has representatives from each department that that help coordinate the DEI trainings for the city, or is that not happening anymore?

I'm sorry that question is.

Yeah, I appreciate your question.

Yeah, that might be directed to you at maybe a director Hartman if you're familiar with that.

I'm gonna take a tab at it.

Yeah, great.

So um there are a couple of different things, I think, to your question.

The first is um within central HR, there is a learning and development role, and the the staff in that area coordinate and um execute and sort of do all of the planning for trainings.

Um, what was previously the talent and equity resources, like the equity manager and the equity specialist, they've been partners with the learning and development staff in that area, but uh the library equity change teams, there hasn't been any really direct intersection of trainings and equity change teams.

Um, this one is these two trainings, the essential things to know about racism and understanding interrupting bias are meant to build off of those city-provided trainings and to contextualize them within a library-specific context.

So give us more opportunity to really think about now that we've we've had exposure to those key concepts.

What does that look like practicing them in a library context?

And those are trainings that I've personally been working on developing for library staff.

Does that answer your question?

It does.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Lastly, we are in the early stages of exploring a creative learning and development model through focused team level learning sessions.

In the first iteration of this work, I worked with our marketing and communications department.

I led the team through three two-hour sessions focused on the topic of white supremacy culture characteristics.

And over the sessions, the team of three deepened their understanding of the various ways that white supremacy culture impacts society and our work, and I helped them to identify new practices and approaches that the team can make to interrupt its continued influence.

On this slide, I have a quote from a member of the library's management team that illustrates some of the impact of this work underneath this pillar.

And on the right is a screenshot of the digital binder e-course that accompanies our shared power and supervision trainings.

This resource deepens staff engagement with the training materials and supports our managers in implying in applying their learnings to their day-to-day work.

The next pillar is executed primarily through the work of the library's equity change team.

Equity change team, just like a little background.

Equity change teams were created, as I understand, underneath Mayor Coleman's administration, instituting a citywide structure where each department has a change team, and then we all come together quarterly to share progress of our department's work and to coordinate our efforts.

In the library's equity change team, staff apply to serve two-year terms on the change team in which they grow their leadership, equity, and project management skills while executing projects.

We've led and partnered with our colleagues on many projects over the past years, including implementing the use of chosen and preferred names in our patron account system.

This happened in early 2024.

This was an important systems change for the library that allows for SPPL patrons to be recognized by the authentic names that they call themselves when it differs from the legal name and their identification.

Another project we are currently growing is organizing trainings for library staff to learn about the history and culture of the patrons that we serve through a project we're calling community competencies.

Library staff engage with patrons from so many different communities, and growing our knowledge of the culture and the history and the practices of those various communities will help us to provide more culturally responsive public services.

Customer service.

And the last project I want to highlight is a trans and non-binary inclusion effort that we led in celebration of Trans Day of Visibility in 2024.

Our team organized a really lovely printmaking activity.

We created kits and we sent them out to branches and held two in-person events where staff and a few patrons, a few curious patrons created styrofoam relief prints, expressing our support and our celebration of our trans colleagues and community members, and then they were sewn together into quilts and put on display at our Arlington Hills and Rice Street Libraries.

This next slide again is I have a picture and another quote to just help illustrate the impact of this work.

This one is from a library staff member who attended the community competencies training last fall.

This and the training, this and the training offered the year before were both focused on increasing our knowledge of the indigenous communities in Minnesota.

Our first training was delivered to staff of was delivered by staff of the Minnesota Historical Society's Native American Initiatives Department.

And our last training was delivered by Oglala Su, Educator and Program Director of Awamini Omini of Kodaiapi, Barry Hand.

This last pillar of the work that guides our equity inclusion and anti-racism work in the library holds our efforts to build community, to strengthen library culture, and to lead new bold initiatives.

The two projects that I want to highlight here under this pillar are the managers of color cohort and our staff well-being initiative.

The managers of color cohort grew out of multiple sources of engagement and data from staff that illuminated the isolation and the unique challenges that our managers of color experience.

The graph on the right shows that managers of color make up about half of our management team.

This cohort was created for the purpose of building a space for participants to deepen our connections with each other through shared peer learning and support, to problem solve with each other in order to successfully navigate organizational systems and culture, and to collectively build our skills and tools to be successful in our roles and support our advancement in the library field, wherever that may you know bring staff.

And lastly, the staff well-being initiative grew out of our efforts to build a deeper understanding of the various ways that public service impacts the well-being of library staff, and then to begin exploring possible ways that an employer might address those associated issues in the workplace.

Phase one led a multi-part staff engagement process, and now we're in phase two of the initiative.

We're a cross-functional staff team.

We'll build a plan for the library to implement low barrier, accessible and sustainable habits to support staff well-being in our management practices and daily culture.

So this last slide features a photo from our first or ignored inaugural session of the managers of color cohort and a participant quote that I really think underscores the cohort's unique value in offering a dedicated space where we can gather, build community, and grow together.

And that concludes my slides and my overview.

Thank you.

I'll open it up for some questions.

Councilmember Kim.

All right, Council Worker.

Sorry.

I've got uh kind of two questions.

One, um, oh no, they're like escaping me.

Um, I'll go with the second one first.

So uh I really love the the cohort for the uh managers of color.

I'm wondering around like while you know people of culture also have our own work to do to like undo unbraid like the ties of white supremacy in ourselves, and I wonder then if there's also a cohort for our like folks that are not from places of well from culture but are identify as white.

I wonder if there is a cohort for them to do that work also separately, but then those spaces can come together because part of what we end up teaching ourselves, and this is presumptive, and I'm sure yours sounds like it is different, but what I sometimes worry about is that then we train ourselves and condition ourselves to receive white whiteness and white supremacy and white violence at work by creating systems of care within each other while not asking for behavior and accountability change in the folks that are sort of perpetuating white supremacy.

So that's maybe more of a thought, but an offering, and then the for the first question is um around uh, oh my gosh, today is not my day for thinking.

I someone had to tell me Rebecca to tell me what a chainsaw was this morning.

Um, folks are just lucky I didn't make the sound.

Um, oh, was around, I know, at least I am at least I'm here.

It was around if you can in general terms or speaking, share what some of the early findings were and what are some of the actionable steps that you all were taking when you were able to identify ways that white supremacy is being enacted and maybe like daily, you know, policies or practices or assumed cultural things.

What are some of the things that you discovered, and maybe not to like point fingers, but maybe generally speaking, what are the some of the things you discovered, and then what are some of the action steps that you're you're taking to sort of right size?

Yeah, that's a really great question.

Um, so and also I really appreciate um the the feedback and the food for thought about um affinity spaces, and I think it really highlights the need to think comprehensively, right?

When we have sort of an affinity space for managers of color, there it also mirrors I think some longer term work that I would like to build into in doing those uh accountability spaces and really engaging our um staff more broadly in their roles right to make those experiences and to strengthen our culture that make the conditions of which our managers of color can be successful right there there's so many layers to that and I think I've heard that I've heard that comments from other staff and that really also informs what sort of the growth and the evolution of that work in the future will look like so thank you so much for that comment.

Yeah because I think what we find is that we become more culturally competent of the ways that white supremacy affects ourselves and yet we I think that learning should be universally provided as well.

Yeah.

So it's a curiosity and a food for thought for your consideration for sure absolutely and you want to interrupt the uh unequal distribution of the burden of carrying that right on people of color absolutely and to your question then about the white supremacy culture um we uh focused on two characteristics and I think the one that I want to highlight as an example is around urgency.

So in our marketing communications team right that is probably the one that's the most prevalent the most visible and how urgency some of the things that we specifically talked about is how the perpetuation of urgency impacts us to sort of revert to some of those defaults and especially in a workspace those defaults more often than not continue to perpetuate the status quo so we default to the decision that's maybe easiest because it needs to be the quickest decision right or we um we come up with reasons for why we can't talk to just that one more person to get another perspective or how our engagement more broadly can't be as robust and timeline and urgency can be one of the biggest impacts of that and so we explored we talked about how to to build do take specific uh actions to build relationships that allow us to do those things and have those relationships in place so that we're not starting from the relationship building point in those moments of urgency where we've done that we're we're being proactive in building that up so that when it comes time to activate that actually all of that effort done earlier on makes things a lot smoother in those moments later on so we we work to I helped to work with the team to identify some commitments from their team on specific things that they will do to be proactive to help them in those moments I hope that answers your question.

It does awesome great um we have councilmember and then council thanks Charjos really appreciate the presentation and the work I'm curious at kind of as Ms.

Kim was asking very eloquently when in her first question and her subsequent questions um about the relationship between the library equity work and then the broader city equity work when you were talking specifically about the community competencies which I love that framing it's so important for library staff to have it strikes me as important for every staff member to have in the city we think about front facing staff like libraries, parks and rec as sort of the first two but um DSI, public works, police and fire like there's so many of our departments and it's often the ones I think that we don't first think of as being the ones who are front facing and need the sort of competencies that are the ones who when they don't have those competencies are the most damaging.

So I'm I'm none of this is to say you know we don't need also it I'm curious if you could say more about what is very library specific and really has to be kept to the libraries versus what of these trainings that you're doing could really be extrapolated to the rest of the city, offered to more staff, whether through you and the libraries, which is of course a place of learning, maybe also for city folks, um, or through HR.

Thank you very good question.

Uh Councilmember Naker.

And I love your question because it gives me an opportunity actually to highlight some things that the city is doing, and um, kind of connected to that equity core team space that actually is in particular around these sort of community competencies work, it has very much been a space that allowed for the that overlap to happen.

Um, so um the city does some parallel work and has been um recently working with the Minnesota Humanities Center.

They do a learning from place, which is an incredible sort of series of programs where um they bring those kind of community learning experiences, but um at in place.

So there are Badote tours.

I part recently participated in a Hmong Minnesota one.

So we went to uh the Hmong Cultural Center and Monktown Market, and those were city um provided trainings, and I think that in conversation of sharing around library work at the equity core team space, that's helped them to kind of also be able to see where additional and parallel opportunities exist, and then to be able to act upon them.

So I really love to see that.

I also want to highlight the one thing that sort of guides doing this work, also specifically at the library level, in particular, is informed by our sort of front-fracing public service accessibility issues that come along with that.

So our library staff experience a lot of challenges in being able to participate in those city-provided opportunities because of our our public service schedules and things like that.

So it's really um important then that we're also designing some of those kinds of experiences with the library specifically with library staff specifically in mind.

Thank you.

Council.

Thanks, Chair Joels.

I wanted to say thank you for your presentation.

I was thinking to myself how neat and special it is to know that we have a coordinator position dedicated to equity inclusion and anti-racism work, especially during a time when we know that the federal government has worked aggressively to slash and and um eliminate a diversity equity and inclusion programs and initiatives positions overall, and so your position is really important.

I really enjoyed learning about the um the managers of color cohort that it has been convened, and I was wondering if you can share a bit more about what sort of what sort of pipeline is there within SPPL to have um our current staff, like I'd say even frontline workers be able to get invested in so that they can move up in these sort of managerial supervisory positions.

Not everybody I'm sure like is interested in it, but there definitely are folks, and one thing that I have noticed every time when we get to budget conversations is that many of our frontline workers are folks who are from marginalized communities, um, are folks of color who tend to be making the lower end when it comes to wages, and so I'm very invested in just that um conversation overall and supporting them and being able to move up if that's their interest.

Yeah, thank you for your question.

Um, you know, I don't know if I can speak to like uh sort of a a direct line, but I think that that is one of the intentions behind the managers of color cohort, especially in that goal around helping to um do skill building and thinking about it not just from the library but also as professionals within the library field, that is the way that we've sort of built in designing the sessions where we're typically we'll will have a resource that either is something that I'm bringing or someone a member of the group has been like, hey, this has been really helpful, this has helped me to build a skill, and we bring it to the team space.

We have some conversation, we do small group like breakouts, we we dig into those things.

And I think that um I also want to say that I think that's also been one of the things that again, I I could speak anecdotally to.

We're in the equity change team space.

That's also been a good incubator.

I always know the acronym better than I am.

Thank you were speaking to like your our um library associates or cost, you.

And then that space being an incubator for growing staff.

And I think that it does matter to by participating in the equity change team for the staff that have been a part of this can speak to the projects and their roles in the projects that we've been that we've led or that we've collaborated with our colleagues on, and the sort of leadership skills that our staff develop in that space.

And uh really commend SPPL for your work, especially in anti-racism.

I, you know, for me personally, I think it's been a while that I've been at this table here and then heard a department even just utilize that term too.

And SPPL has just really been a leading department with in bringing this equity lens, anti-racism lens into your work, and I just always remember the survey that you director Hermann shared about when you all surveyed our communities, especially really trying to understand and wanting to understand what we can do better in terms of serving our communities of color who come into our libraries, and so I really appreciate that.

The work around dismantling white supremacy, racism, it has to be really intentional because we know that these are systems that were built to be this way, and so it's not accidental at all that it is this way, and so I just really again appreciate all the efforts and the leadership.

Thank you.

Any other questions.

So thank you so much, uh, Coral for the presentation today.

Thank you.

And in closing, I just want to express my gratitude and my pride for being in this role and having the support of the city, um, the unwavering support for, you know, as an equity practitioner to be able to continue to do this work and to be really brave and in um stating its support for this.

I feel very proud and very grateful to be a Minnesota and a St.

Paulite.

Yeah, well, we're so excited to have you.

Um, well, this is the last item on our agenda.

Before we um end for the day, I also want to share again that the Hamlin Midway Library opening is going to be Saturday, July 18th from 10 30 to 2 30.

And the library will be open that day, so it's the library is open for longer hours than that.

Uh, but it kicks off with a story time at 10:30, which I'm really excited about, and then the ribbon cutting will be at 11.15.

Uh there will be tours, there will be two scoops ice cream, which I love ice cream, and there will also be um artists and um there's going to be music and the doodle booth, and just so much celebration and excitement.

So I hope all of you can be there.

I plan to be there, and if you can't make it there that day, please come and check out our new library.

And um, also our next meeting is going to be uh Wednesday, August 5th.

So with nothing else to come before us, we are adjourned.

Um, yeah.