It Takes a Community to Create a Library

Over the course of four years, Working Together Community Development Librarians in Vancouver, Regina, Toronto and Halifax worked in diverse urban neighborhoods and with diverse communities, traditionally considered marginalized or socially excluded. This practitioner-community-based project allowed community voice to drive the projects process, not librarian generated beliefs, literature or other professional discourse. The Working Together Project conceptualized and reviewed the traditional library service planning model and developed a new community-based service model: the Community-Led Service Planning Model. Community-led service planning builds upon the traditional library service planning model and provides a new method that brings library staff together with community members in an effort to identify and meet community needs. Socially excluded community members are involved in each step of the community-led service development process, from needs assessment to evaluation. This non-prescriptive model is flexible and can be applied in all library settings, by all librarians, and to all program and service development.