University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Collaborations between public library educators and practitioners to apply a theory of change and promote civic engagement for racial justice in the American South

Mehra, Bharat; Black, Kimberly; Jaber, Baheya S.; Williams-Cockfield, Kauri C.

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130759

Description

Title
Collaborations between public library educators and practitioners to apply a theory of change and promote civic engagement for racial justice in the American South
Author(s)
  • Mehra, Bharat
  • Black, Kimberly
  • Jaber, Baheya S.
  • Williams-Cockfield, Kauri C.
Issue Date
2024-10-16
Keyword(s)
  • critical librarianship
  • public libraries
  • social justice
  • American South
  • civic engagement
  • collaborations
  • racial justice
  • theory of change
Abstract
The Institute of Museum and Library Services’ National Leadership Grants for Libraries program recently awarded a $332,939 grant titled “Civic Engagement for Racial Justice in Public Libraries” (RJ@PL) to the University of Alabama and the Chicago State University. The grant’s purpose is to build the capabilities of public librarians and selected communities to promote civic engagement for racial justice and achieve the following objectives: 1) Assessment of public library efforts to advance racial justice (externally and internally); 2) Operationalization of strategic participatory planning process using a theory of change to develop roadmaps and action plans that further racial justice in select community domains (economy, education, health, etc.); 3) Implementation of key strategic components of information-based offerings in six/eight library settings. This paper reports ongoing collaboration to further the three design components via applying a theory of change for an intended impact of increased community wellbeing resulting from improved racial climate.
Publisher
Association for Library and Information Science Education
Series/Report Name or Number
Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference, 2024
Type of Resource
text
Genre of Resource
  • Conference Paper
  • Presentation
Language
eng
Handle URL
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130759
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21900/j.alise.2024.1654
Copyright and License Information
  • Copyright 2024 Bharat Mehra, Kimberly Black, Baheya S. Jaber, Kauri C. Williams-Cockfield.
  • This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

Owning Collections

Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference: ALISE 2024 PRIMARY
The Ethics and Evolution of Truth and Information