Creating and Strengthening Family Service Partnerships through Community Outreach Programs

Four-week Course | November 4 - December 1, 2024

The spirit of collaboration is a natural force within humanity. This course celebrates that spirit and is designed to help us better understand the value of collaboration. It provides a framework to help us create and build collaborations and to strengthen and celebrate existing partnerships with families, organizations, and public officials.

Our overarching goal is to magnetically draw families to library service opportunities inside and outside library buildings. Our objective is to connect families to the love of learning and thinking for themselves, creatively and inclusively. A special emphasis will focus on reaching expectant families and those families with young children who do not currently use the library.

Research has shown that individual child, family, and community factors such as participation in reading/singing/storytelling by family members strongly influence a child’s ability to be healthy and ready to learn (HRTL). The library is in a unique position to facilitate these factors, offer early literacy training, and extend them to unserved families.

The library’s efforts would include developing top-notch community outreach programs, and collaborating with families, early care providers, and education centers.

Course content presents strategies for:

● Planning inclusive outreach family storytime programs,
● Offering early literacy trainings for parents, early care providers, and education centers, and,
● Creating and strengthening community partnerships with family service organizations in your community.
After taking this course, successful participants will be able to:
● Describe ways in which outreach programs can meet families where they are, engage family interaction, parent/child bonding, and promote and celebrate literacy and learning.
● Review existing partnerships and identify how to strengthen them.
● Identify other organizations in the community with which the library can build a partnership to reach families.
● Choose books and resources that families can use at home to help their child develop early literacy and school readiness skills, including helpfulness, kindness, and goodwill.

Presenter: Dorothy Stoltz is a professional librarian, author, and consultant. She has served as programming and outreach manager and community engagement director. Dorothy advocates for the quality of our thinking and our love of learning as being incomplete without the support of each other. Dorothy retired with the Carroll County (MD) Public Library in 2021. She is author of six books for ALA Editions, and more with her own company, Waldo Publishers, which presents books inspired by the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson to “activate from within.” She offers mentoring, consulting, and training services on creativity, advocacy, collaboration, and peer learning for libraries and other organizations, through Stoltz Creative Consulting. https://www.instagram.com/stoltzcreative/

CALL Training Partner for this Event: Library Juice Academy