Advocating at TASL Forum
Grassroots advocacy. It has to occur constantly. It must permeate an organization. Every person who has dealings with any staff member or patron of your library must receive, know, and project the message you need delivered because they understand it must be conveyed–they must have a sense of urgency of need. Marketing must occur which truly is focused upon the needs of the user, not just the PR message you want delivered.
Last Friday and Saturday 100 people met at the Nashville Public Library for the Tennessee Association of School Librarians (TASL) Library and Literacy Forum. They keynote speaker was Steven Layne and he wowed all the groups with his messages on literacy and leadership. This forum was not just attended by school librarians, but also by administrators, grad students, two of my H.S. students, community members, business members, classroom teachers, and more. You can view the Flickr photos here The handout with agenda is available here from the TASL website.
I will be adding information to this site about the results of different breakout sessions. It was an amazing event that couldn’t have taken place without the help of Scholastic Library Publishing, Coughling Publishing (Capstone Press, Picture Window Books, Stone Arch, and Compass Point) and SLJ. This was inspired by the SLJ Library Leadership Summit from March, 2005. Stay tuned for comments.
You are so right! My work centers around helping people effectively communicate with Congess and I’ve done a great deal of work with the American Library Association on this topic. If it helps, I have some of the materials posted from recent presentations at www.advocacyguru.com/2006/ala/legconf2006.htm I hope they’re useful as you go forth and advocate!
Comment by Stephanie Vance — August 5, 2006 @ 10:08 am