Reducing Staff Stress and Trauma

Half-day Online Webinar + Three-week Asynchronous Course 

Time Commitment: approximately 12 hours

Learn holistic strategies for reducing stress and trauma in your team. 

How can supervisors best support their teams when stress and burnout are at an all-time high? This interactive, half-day workshop will support library supervisors in learning how workplace stress impacts them, their staff, and their library. You will learn how to plan and implement strategies to increase support for staff, reduce avoidable stressors, and respond effectively to unavoidable stress. You will leave understanding how to assess your library’s unique needs, and you will get support creating a plan to take actionable next steps to address stress and trauma in your library. 

This course includes one half-day (4 hours) of live, online presentations from an expert speaker, as well as three weeks of a guided asynchronous workshop with facilitated peer cohorts and assignments. In this workshop, you’ll have the opportunity to practice what you’ve learned through prompted activities, share and crowdsource issues with peers, and get feedback from peers and your facilitator. 

The live session runs on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024 from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm (recorded for on demand viewing) with an asynchronous workshop over 3 weeks. 

Learning Outcomes

After you attend this course, you’ll be able to:

• Synthesize research about changing library user needs and how these needs impact staff at all levels
• Understand how organizational factors impact workplace stress and experiences of trauma
• Assess your library’s unique needs and plan effective next steps to address them
• Identify potential collaborators in your local area to assist with staff and patron needs
• Identify strategies for assisting staff with personal self-care and building resilience to stress
• Identify ways to implement “community care” strategies throughout the library to improve well-being for all
• Articulate effective advocacy strategies to increase buy-in and support from the “powers that be” in your libraries and communities

Who should take this course?

This course is for library directors, managers, or anyone in a supervisory role.

Course Features 

This is an online course with a half-day of live, online speaker presentations and an asynchronous 3-week workshop and will include:

• Live sessions: Guest speaker presentations by leaders in their field. (All sessions are recorded for on demand access for six months after the course ends.) 
• Facilitated discussions: Audience participation in Q&A and discussion with guest speakers.
• Interactive working sessions: Optional breakout groups during live sessions to practice skills with peers.
• Asynchronous workshop: Project-based weekly assignments to connect what you’re learning to your professional life. Includes written feedback from an expert in the field who functions as the workshop facilitator, as well as peer conversation via discussion forums.
• Early access on-demand resources: Access to a series of past live session archives from Library Journal and School Library Journal courses to explore at your own pace. 
• Online Classroom: The virtual learning platform that holds all course content and is accessible for six months after the course ends. 

Presenter: Dr. Beth Wahler, PhD, MSW is founder and principal consultant at Beth Wahler Consulting, LLC and associate research faculty and previous director of the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina- Charlotte. Dr. Wahler is a social work consultant, researcher, educator, and experienced administrator whose primary focus is trauma-informed librarianship, addressing public library patrons’ psychosocial needs (needs related to mental health, substance abuse, poverty, etc.), supporting library staff with serving high-needs patrons and reducing work-related stress/trauma, and various kinds of collaborations, services, and programs to meet these types of patron and staff needs. She has worked with multiple public libraries- urban, suburban, and rural- as well as large library systems and state library associations to provide personalized training opportunities, conduct needs assessments, and develop individualized plans to help meet the needs of their patron populations and staff. She has also published and presented internationally on library patron and staff needs, trauma-informed librarianship, and library/social work collaborations. Her recently published book, “Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons,” focuses on strategies for supporting patrons with psychosocial needs while simultaneously supporting library staff.

CALL Training Partner for this Event: Library Journal