Jennifer:

We have a learner guide for today's session.

That is resource guide to extend your learning on the topic.

It has a couple of questions for discussion or considerations considerations or lists you can take to make those next steps.

It's a great resource to bring to your team or maybe to your collaborators.

And you can customize it.

It's an adaptable tool.

Please don't hesitate to use our learner guide.

Okay.

I'm going to shift and I'm going to welcome our first presenter for today, Steph Harmon, my colleague here is the WebJunction is going to give us an introduction to this great work.

Welcome, Steph.

Steph: This is part of "Building Resilient Communities."

The goal of this project is to empower library staff and their local partners to work together on local challenges tied to environmental changes, changes that can affect community health, social equity, and sustainability.

Over the last year, this project has brought together professionals from public libraries with folks from other sectors.

These are policymakers, stem educators, and people working at scientific agencies, all of whom are focused on building awareness and understanding of how environmental changes affect community health, well-being, and equity.

We've discovered how libraries can and are helping communities adapt to these challenges.

This is going to highlight a few practical examples to address climate change effectively and collaboratively and whether hosting conversations, sharing trusted information, or offering hands-on Stem activities, they can help their communities stay strong for whatever comes next.

We've got some great presenters for you today.

Our first one comes from Holbrook Public Library in Massachusetts.

Kate Gomes will talk about the fabulous Blue Marble Librarians group, and she has suggestions for potential local partners to collaborate with so that you don't have to do this work alone.

Our second set of presenters, Sarah Kirn from the participatory siensce strategist, Gulf Coast of Maine research institute and Brenda Harrington from Belfast Free Library will talk about climate challenge, share insights from their 2020 project, all of Belfast dialogue, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The goal of their project was to enhance cultural and civic engagement that focused on climate change and priorities for mitigation and adaptation.

And they've had a positive impact locally.

I can't wait for you to hear about it.

We hope today's session will offer you some practical ideas and inspiration, whether you're just starting out or ready to take the next steps with your partners to build resilient and sustainable communities.

With that, I'll pass it on to you, Kate.

Take it away!

>> KATE:  I'm Kate Gomes, the director of the Holbrook Public Library in Massachusetts, but I'm here to talk to you about the blue marble Librarians.

I am a member of that leadership team.

We like to refer to ourselves as an activist librarian group and not a professional librarian group.

So even though the Massachusetts Library System are our guide, we're not officially affiliated with them.

We are our own special group and have numbers from all over.

So don't be Massachusetts and think, oh, I'm not welcome.

No, you are.

We want you there.

I'm going to put our -- the link to our guide in the chat.

So if you want to get in touch with us, you can do so immediately.

So why are we called the Blue Marble Librarians we got our name from the picture of -- from space, where we look like a beautiful, perfectly round royally blue marble and this started out about six years ago when like-minded librarians attended a program at the Boston Public Library and it was focused on how we can foster community resilience in times of climate change.

So in the months after these gatherings, librarians from all over the Commonwealth got together and from this passion, the blue Marble Librarians group was formed.

So what do we do?

We hold quarterly meetings to share ideas and foster collaborations.

We publish a blog with all kinds of programming ideas that you can access whenever you need to.

And we organize and promote Climate Week along with CREW.

Crew is an acronym that means Communities Responding to Extreme Weather.

I'll talk about that later on.

We maintain a libguide filled with resources that's available to everyone.

So how can you support your community climate resilience?

One of the first things you can do -- and you can do it immediately -- is become a CREW Hub.

It's free.

CREW is an organization based out of Boston, Massachusetts, but they do have hubs all over North America and to become a CREW Hub, all you have to do is sign up on their website to become a level one hub.

There are three different levels and the levels get more -- 

starting at level 1, you're offering resources and the resources are for your community, about how they can take care of themselves during heat waves, blizzards, how to protect themselves from tornado threats and hurricanes and things like that.

It's really -- really good stuff to have on hand and there's stuff for every climate.

And level 2, there may be a heating and cooling center, emergency center.

So many of the libraries are on the level 1 range.

With your commitment to CREW, your only obligation is to host one climate-related program a year, and they will also do that programming with you or for you.

If you're in the immediate area, they can come to your library.

If not, they can do it virtually, and they do all sorts of programs from the paving, how you can community can benefit from removing the concrete and tar surfaces in your area, or they can do things on how to build your go bags in case of emergency.

So CREW is a wonderful resource and a great partner.

So providing climate resilience programming.

So I'm giving you a list of some of our favorite programs.

All of these programs have more information available for them on the blue marble libguide.

I have firsthand experience with almost all of these programs, so you can feel free to ask me questions about anything in the Q&A or reach out to me.

Always available by email and I don't mind receiving emails from strangers, so feel free to be friendly.

So Fix It Clinics.

So the Brewster library hosts great Fix It Clinics that have such great attendance, they have two of them a year.

I don't have pictures from the Brewster Library fix it clinic, but this is one I hosted in Plymouth when I was there.

If you haven't heard of them, you get local experts to come and people learn how to fix their items so they don't end up in a landfill.

And you see in the forefront there's a -- a lot of time when we get a broken hem that's fixable, we might throw away the item and a lot of the clothes are ending up in landfills.

Well, you can bring your shirt, your trousers, whatever, to a fix it clinic and someone will help you fix them yourself.

It fights against our sort of disposal consumerism culture, keeps items out of landfill and helps the patrons save money.

If they teach them to fix a coffee machine instead of throwing it away and buying another one, that's helpful.

We did one in Plymouth and I have firsthand experience, but the Brewster's Ladies Library, they do two a year, they're always well attended.

So check out the slides and you can more about how they do it.

So the Climate Ribbon Project.

This is like an art installation.

You can have at your library.

We did this at the Holbrook Public Library this year.

So in this program you have participants use a piece of discarded ribbon or scrap of fabric and they answer a question, what do you love and hope to never lose due to climate chaos?

These are added to a tree, a fence, whatever.

And other participants are able to read what other people wrote.

Which that helps your community with anxiety because then they realize that they're not alone.

And it's very -- it's filled with connections to people.

So that they can realize that there are other people in their communities who have these thoughts and feelings as well.

It's a great way to sort of let everybody know that they're in this together.

So Free Winter Coat Rack.

We did this for years at the Plymouth Public Library when I was working there.

We would ask for donations of winter coats in the months leading up to the cold season and we would just put the coats on a rack in the library and people could come and take the coats as needed.

We would always have a variety of sizes and any coats that were unclaimed at the end of the cold month, which for us is about March, would be donated.

So this really helps your patrons who, for example, in Plymouth, we had a literacy program where we had students from other countries who were coming who had joined our community but who maybe had come from Haiti or Guatemala or some other warm climate where they were experiencing their first winter, and to go out and buy all the stuff you need for winter is very expensive.

So this was very helpful for our students but can be very helpful for the community.

Kids grow out of coats quickly.

This year in Holbrook we did a prom dress swap and it was amazing.

People brought in their unneeded formal wear and the people shopped for their prom dresses.

People brought accessories.

We had suits and tuxedos as well.

People were so generous.

It was great.

You could do something like a Halloween costume swap, a teen or vintage clothing swap because they're all in secondhand fashion these days.

Maybe people want to change out their holiday style every year, instead of going to Michaels -- 

which admittedly is fun -- or Home Goods, they can go to the library.

In Plymouth, we used to do house plants and seedling cuttings as a swap.

It was annual, very successful and a seed swap.

You can also do craft supply swaps.

These are keeping things out of landfills and getting people to think about what they're throwing out versus what they could be exchanging with other people.

So it's not just an economic impact, but it does build community.

I watched strangers become friends, people with the same gardening passions would come and strike up conversations.

So it's really a good program to have some of these swaps.

App-based scavengererer -- 

scavenger hunt.

We're doing this as Holbrook now.

You have them download the iNaturalist or the Merlin Bird ID, and how many can they collect during the fall month and we have them receive a prize if they get ten, ten different species, they can come in here and get a coupon for a free book from the front.

So it's fun.

We've had a lot of people participating.

They're getting out into the HolbrookHolbrook town forest, one of our partners, and it's great to see people get outside.

You can also have program parties, for things like this.

If you have people in your community who are expert on native plants or if you have people in your community who could lead nature walks, for example, in Massachusetts, we sometimes have county extensions and they will -- Blake, he actually -- we're in norfolk county, but butterflies or just to explore the different insect populations in your community, so check out your extension offices if you have the availability because the entomologists there are really amazing.

Installing library garden is a great way to educate the public and allows for continuing opportunities, passive learning, and a great way to work in conjunction with some community partners.

So Sturgis put in an amazing rain garden, you can see we have a great photo of the Sturgis Library rain garden and the installation of this was funded through multiple grants and different agencies, and you can go to the Sturgis Library and rain garden page from this link and it will tell you about they got that funding.

So the rain garden -- a rain garden is a depressed area that collects waters from a roof, driveway, or street, and allows it to soak in the ground.

Yes, I had to read that off my notes.

Did I -- I did not have that memorized.

All the runoff, they contaminate some of our water supplies because what's coming off of our roof or coming from our driveway, tar is not a natural substance.

So the rain gardens reduce the runoff and filter from the runoff and can help localized flooding.

So definitely something to look into.

So this is the Terryville Public Library Pollinator Garden.

So I wanted to include this one because this pollinator garden is beautiful, but more importantly, they have an amazing website associated with this garden with resources on books to use for storytime and different like plants that they have in the -- it's a wealth of knowledge that you can get that link through the -- pollinator garden, the feeders and the breeders for pollinators.

You do need both, in a successful pollinator garden.

You need the feeders for the Nectar so Echinacea or a blackblack-eyed Susan, and milkweed, which is what Monarchs lay their eggs on would be a breeder plant.

So keep in mind when you're planning a pollinator garden that you want to get your breeders in the middle and the feeders around the perimeter because they're there to look beautiful and attract the insects.

So Terryville put this in with the help of a local landscaping company and this is maintained by volunteers.

So the Pottsboro library community garden.

So Pottsboro, Texas, I love talking about them.

To me, they're the little library that could.

If you Google them to discover their amazing projects, they're impressive.

They received a half a million dollars in grant to help them put in a ton of different services for their community.

If you were to look at their website, you would think that they were a large city library.

Instead, they're a library that's small, rural.

A population of under 3,000.

But they have worked very hard to be able to accumulate all of these resources and provide all of these services.

So community gardens foster a sense of community.

We did install a vegetable garden ourselves in Plymouth in 2021, so I do have experience with that, if anybody wants to reach out to me about that.

I had learned since creating this slide that Pottsboro Community Garden has now been transferred into a dog park, which I think is still a win and incorporates some green space for their library.

So potential local community partners.

Garden clubs.

When we were installing our garden in Plymouth, the garden clubs were so generous with us.

They donated plants, helped us maintain them, shared their knowledge.

And they were just incredible.

Your town or county Emergency Management is a great source of programming.

Just recently, our -- here in Holbrook, our community emergency manager, which is also our fire chief, did a program on safety and how people can protect themselves in extreme weather.

County extension office, I know I mentioned the entomologist.

In our county extension office, we also have representative of 4-H who can do different gardening programs.

Local agriculture schools.

So we have Norfolk here in Holbrook.

We have kids who want to be involved in community gardening projects as part of their volunteer work.

So that is a great resource.

Master gardeners.

So every state has a master garden association there, and the master gardeners association will send speakers.

In Massachusetts, it's very affordable, it's $250 a program.

They can do them virtually or come in person.

They have amazing programs available.

One of the ones that we did in Plymouth was called chickens in the Garden, and they did bring chickens so that was lots of fun.

But they did programs an native plants, how to set up frames, how to prep your soil, all sorts of different subjects.

So the state department of Environmental Protection, our EPA office here in Massachusetts is going to help with us in Holbrook to do a presentation on environmental justice community, about 92.4%, so she's going to come to the library and explain to people, what does that mean, how they will be impacted.

And they do all that programming for free.

Here are some additional resources.

Please check them out at your leisure.

There are tons of great community resources out there.

I might pop a couple of more in the chat.

So keep an eye out for that because I didn't link all the ones I wanted to put on here on this slide.

So if you have any questions for me, I will be keeping an eye on the chat and like I said, feel free to speak up.

>> JENNIFER:  Fantastic, Kate.

It's so exciting to see your examples and great work.

I think we're going to go ahead and continue on and have Brenda and Sarah take us into the next part of the session and we'll circle back with questions, but if people have questions specifically for Kate, don't hesitate to put those into chat.

Welcome, Sarah and Brenda!

>> BRENDA:  Good afternoon, this is Brenda, I'm the librarian and assistant director of the Belfast Free Library in Belfast, Maine.

I don't see our slides there.

I'm sorry.

>> JENNIFER:  Can you advance it?

>> BRENDA:  Okay.

Sorry for that little confusion, folks.

Start over.

I'm Brenda Harrington, the adult librarian, Belfast Free Library, and I'm joined by -- go ahead, Sarah.

>> SARAH:  My name is Sarah Kirn.

I do work at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute by I'm the participatory science strategist for NASA.

I was doing this with Brenda as an independent consultant.

We are giving you a surface of a three-year program, but if you have anything online, you can go find out more.

I'm going to give you a quick orientation to Belfast Maine so you understand, we're going to talk about where this project came from.

A lot of some highlights of what we did, again, three years, we can't talk about all of this.

And we'll spend most of our time talking about our reflections on what worked for us, really thinking about how you in your local library can do some more work.

So today, we're going to give you a quick orientation to our community of Belfast, Maine.

Here's a map.

Maine is up in the northeast corner of the United States.

Right along the Gulf of Maine, and we are that -- where that triangle is where Belfast is, at the top of the PanapScott Bay.

The state is -- I think it is the oldest state in the country, last I heard.

So we have an older population, a lot of retirees have moved here, and they are highly educated, according to this snapshot, so they come with lots of expertise and those are a lot of the people that we partner with in our project.

>> SARAH:  So this project began many years ago.

The City of Belfast was one of the first municipalities in the state of Maine if not to have a climate crisis committee that was looking at the impact of climate change.

And they made a report to the city council and identified the need for more specific detailed information about coastal flooding and the desire to collect those data with citizen methods.

So that's the work that I've been doing at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute for many years and when I heard about that, I approached the Climate Crisis Committee.

We wrote a grant to give us funds for this project.

When we were starting the project, we reached out to the library to see if Brenda could host us and invited her to be a part of the design team.

We had community input, pulled together giving people to observe where flooding was happening but also start thinking about what that flooding meant to them.

And we noticed, though, even though they're a group of well-chosen participants to create this project, some of what you might think are the usual suspects and we wanted to reach more people in the community.

So we had an opportunity to write -- oh, yes.

Can't forget Katharine Hayhoe.

Remember, this is six or so years ago that we were thinking with this.

It was under the first Trump Administration.

There was a lot of control about how climate control could be talked about and a lack of conversation around it and Katharine Hayhoe was articulate about the need for us to do more in normalizing conversation, concern, conversations about problem solving and action about climate change as a way to support one another in dealing with this.

So we had an opportunity to -- 

from the institute of museums and Library Services to put together a proposal and reach out to Brenda and the history --

>> BRENDA:  The fall of 2019, Sarah, as she just said, came to me with the idea to create a climate conversation on project to get more people talking about climate change and so we applied to the institute of museums and library services for the practices promising practices for small library projects, and we got the grant, which was amazing.

And that was back in June of 2020 that we found out we got the grant.

As you recall, that was when social distancing with COVID, we were just starting in the COVID pandemic.

So that was -- gave us some really good things to think about.

How can you do this with social distancing in mind.

So Sarah and I started meeting on Zoom.

Zoom is how we did a lot of this.

We started meeting weekly or more than weekly to figure out ways to implement these project goals you see here.

And design our community engagement project with an emphasis on discussion in the midst of this period of time that we were living in.

So the ABCD in action slide here, the QR Code links to our archives for all the programs we did as a community memory project.

We saved everything into an Omeka digital archive.

It's still there and continues to be a resource.

So for now I'm going to give you -- we are going to give you a couple of highlights of things that we did.

We designed many ways to engage the community to think about climate change.

We tried sharing stories around campfires, poetry and art contests as a way to normalize the conversation around climate change.

One of our most visible programs was "The Art of Re-climation" in 2022.

We put out a call for art which I co-curated with the artist, 30 poets and artists on display.

It was well received.

People were really moved by it.

Early on, Sarah and I began creating websites, we curated videos written from all types of people, from 2020 to 2022.

Then we also began hosting informative programs on Zoom.

We had over 40 programs over the years.

Most of them were recorded.

Another really good benefit of Zoom.

And uploaded to our YouTube channel and to date, they've had over 3,000 views of those programs.

I want to point out that a key to our success was partnering with local organizations that had used the library for events before COVID and offered -- and I offered to cosponsor all of their programs and the library Zoom -- oh, by the way, we're going to talk about climate change!

So they all agreed to do that, and it was really successful.

So our partners included the Belfast learning club, the watershed coalition, county extension, local land trust, to name a few.

Early on as we were connecting with people, we kept hearing, you know, there's a sense of despair.

What can I do about climate change?

People really wanted to know what they could do.

We did try to provide educational programs with that -- that included some actions they could take.

>> SARAH:  She also curated a collection of books that you saw.

>> BRENDA:  Forgot about that.

>> SARAH:  This is an example of one of those community conversations that we had on Zoom.

The screenshot in the letter left was from a panel of local farmers, how they were experiencing impacts of climate change, beginning to see it and what they were needing to do to adapt their practices to weather the storm, if you will.

They were well attended by the community, but one of the things we found really heartwarming or interesting was that the people on the panel itself also found value in coming together and having conversations about climate change.

This is -- the farmer on the left was saying that after sharing her story and hearing the stories from the other two farmers, she felt less alone in the struggle.

So we also continued, if you go back one, Brenda, we continued to work with the climate crisis committee.

One of the interesting things we did, a whole Saturday morning in February and we had over two dozen organizations show up.

The climate Crisis Committee was finding out who else in the community was in the action and doing something related to climate.

And it turned out that many, many were.

But they didn't know a lot about each other.

So we brought them all together, they did this lightning talk about who are we, what are we doing, just shared, again, with that idea of building momentum from things that were already happening in the community.

Brenda and I really tried to amplify what was already going on and connect those pieces so the whole community could feel the value of all of those efforts and we really focused on doing that rather than creating our own new things.

And as we did all that, the promising practices emerged, and these are the three big ones that we noticed.

Collaboration.

Whenever possible, we created collaboration and did things with other organizations.

We were well read, we had a three-year grant and we wanted something to continue beyond us.

We couldn't be the hub of the wheel.

We had to be connecting other organizations and, again, amplifying what they were doing.

We took advantage of every opportunity that came our way, and we did get opportunities brought to us because we were visible, on Zoom and doing things about it.

So anytime we could, we said yes.

And we tried to follow the energy, again, thinking about how do we create conversation, create momentum and create excitement and energy and doing that in a way that would last beyond this grant.

We were also -- we quickly learned that whenever we were scratching our heads about how do we do this or how do we do that, a little bit of Googling would inevitably find one or half a dozen or more examples of other communities that had tried to do something similar.

They weren't always perfect.

They rarely were perfect for the community of Belfast.

But they always gave us a really strong place to start and something to think from.

So we really valued the models we found in the state and around the country.

And again, in collaboration with that Climate Crisis Committee, we held a series of community climate conversations which were designed -- and this was kind of a request we got from the climate crisis Committee, they were drafting a climate plan for the city and they as a -- had no venue for doing that and the library was a perfect partner for them and they appreciated that the -- the work that we'd been doing.

So we worked with them to have a series of four community meetings.

The first one was really kind of a blue sky, like what are the big topics that the city should address in that climate action plan?

So we had a wonderful list of daydreaming, what people are imagining the future of Belfast that they would like to see if everything went as well as it could.

And we also came up in the bottom left of this slide, came up with some ideas for guiding principles for this action plan.

It was really important to people that it balanced human needs, but also environmental needs.

People were really committed to thinking about systems, so not just what did Belfast need, but what's upstream for Belfast and downstream for Belfast, both literally and figuratively.

And people are committed to equity and they want the climate action plan to put forward solutions that would serve everyone in the community and also be accessible to everyone.

As we brainstormed ideas for actions that might belong in this climate action plan, we quickly noticed that it helped the people who showed up in our meetings -- and they were really well attended -- to think about actions in three buckets.

Things that individuals could do on their own, without having to talk to anybody or needing anything really special, things people could do on their own.

People that required people -- 

things that required people to come together and collaborate on together.

And things that required something bigger, either a policy change or a municipal leadership for one reason or another or significant fundraising.

And just breaking our brainstorming invitation into the three buckets helped people dig into one of those ideas.

So as an example, one of the things we addressed was building big storms and flooding.

Some were rain barrels, which you can get cheap or get a free rain barrel and kind of make your own.

Or if you had more money, you could resurface your driveway in a room that would be curvy and impermeable for water.

This was a fun meeting.

The idea about building a functionalfunctional and educational rain garden came forward.

You could feel the energy light up.

People got excited about working together and also had a lot of participation from our local garden club.

So Kate, we hear you.

Libraries and gardening seem to come together and be a wonderful energizing project for communities, and also talking about being a good neighbor.

It wouldn't be okay if you fixed the runoff on your property or if you were causing problems for people down the street.

So that came up too.

It needs to serve everyone, that people were true to those guiding principles.

It turned out the municipality had underway a stormwater study and they found that something to understand.

And throughout this conversation actually the firsthand that went up in the very first conversation or first meeting we had, somebody said, who has the power?

And we recognized that -- you can go forward.

We recognized that this is a really important thing for all of us to recognize and think about in the time of climate change.

That we all live in a democracy.

But what does that mean?

We've all forgotten -- speaking for myself -- a lot of what we've learned in freshman government class.

This lays out, how do citizens of a place influence the local policies, state policies, or even the federal?

And that question of who has the power is part of what got us organizing into things individuals could do, groups could do, people could come together and do together and what needed something bigger.

But we also recognize that there's a real need for us to relearn civics and learn is in kind of applied sense of where are the levers, where are the opportunities, what are the phone numbers that people should be calling and what are the messages that they should be saying.

I think this is a really important place for libraries to influence both their local communities but also under the broader picture around climate change because there are a great resources for learning in libraries and librarians are so wonderful at pointing people in the right direction to learn these things.

Next.

Yes.

I think that's you.

>> BRENDA:  Yes, it is.

So our fourth goal was to archive everything that we did to create a place where people could get resources and just learn more from everything that we did.

So here's a snapshot of what it looks like on our Omeka page, which is available through our website.

And everything we did is there.

There's essays there.

There's copies of all our newsletters.

There's links to all the YouTube recordings.

And it is still very much a resource, as I said before, and earlier, I put a QR Code up for that.

So the end goals, we wanted to give you a little glimpse of what has been happening since ABCD grant ended in the summer of 2023, which was not that long ago, but we came together after our final presentation.

A lot of people just wanted it to keep going and keep going and, you know, I thought about keeping the name and all that, but we didn't.

We formed together a group of interested people who all happened to be a part of other organizations, so we created the Waldo County Climate Action Coalition.

Right now, it's being formed still.

We've been meeting for about a year, and trying to figure out how we can come together as a group of organizations and individuals as well to help build more resilient communities.

We also have more of a county focus now rather than just Belfast, which it's different, but we're managing it.

We're tackling it.

It's bigger.

So, you know, there's a lot more management that needs to happen with it.

So we can continuing the work of ABCD with fewer resources.

We don't, obviously, have all the funding that we did have, but we've been finding enough funding to build a website and to -- we've been -- there's a group of us working on educational programs, so we're continuing to do programming and outreach to help work on, you know, building resilient communities and I was really inspired by a lot of the things that Kate said, so I'm over here writing them down also.

And so just quickly, examples of some of the grassroots climate initiatives that people took on as inspired from programs from ABCD, we had a compost drop-off site after a dedicated group of four or five people and the other two there, the plastic pollution solutions still working on getting an ordinance through the city council, and we have instituted refillable water stations in downtown.

So all of those little things are actions people can do, really go a long way to helping people feel like they're making a change and thinking, thinking bigger and broader about what things we can do.

So what contributed to our success?

First of all, we have an essay with that title, and it's right there with that QR Code.

But for now, we're going to share four of the things that are the top four things that contributed to our success.

Number one, we had funding.

Thank you, IMLS, for supporting our project proposal and it allowed us to have a team to work for three years together, creating all the things we did with our programs and our outreach and our newsletters and everything.

This team that we comprised was important because we had someone with local knowledge, that would be me, the librarian.

Someone with outside perspective, which was Sarah, and we had a community organization talented person, which was Misty, and together, we worked really well.

It was just a beautiful thing.

>> SARAH:  Yeah, and it's -- 

listening to this, you talk about that, Brenda, it reminds me too that one of the things that's so special about library is trust.

People know the library is going to be there and we have a grant to do a program like ABCD or anything else in a community, having it stay long enough so people expect it to be there is really important.

So the three years of this project, I think, really helped it to be successful.

Two other things that were helpful for our success, again, I said it before, we collaborated, co-hosted, convened and facilitated.

It wasn't about us.

It was finding the people who were active in the community and boosting them and giving them some energy to continue the good work that they were doing.

We used all the tools we had to reach people.

We literally used social media, Zoom, emails.

Brenda gave a story of a campfire.

We gave people cookies.

We had in-person meetings, we had art and poetry, did tabling as the farmers market.

We did all the different ways to reach people trying to get a broader and broader exposure and a broader access and participation from the community and it was really a tremendous experience.

I think it was wonderful for Belfast.

It seems to be.

There's things still going.

But it also made a difference for Brenda, Misty, and me.

As the project was concluding, we were thinking about it, reflecting what we had learned from climate change, literally, how it's impacting communities, but also how to work in the community.

And it was really a privilege, Brenda, to work with you and the marvelous community of Belfast.

>> BRENDA:  Thank you for your attention, and I guess we have Q&A if there is any.

>> JENNIFER:  Fantastic.

So exciting to hear.

You know, it's always so funny when people talk about a three-year project because, oh, you make it sound so simple.

But you can also really see all the work and all the powerful connections.

I mean, your emphasis on trust really, really shows through, your community obviously really does trust you.

Let's see.

If folks have questions, please put them in, or comments.

Folks have been sharing other links.

Somebody asked about your actual grant link.

I'll put that in there for folks to see what that looks like.

Someone asked, is "The Art of Re-climation" a traveling exhibit, or could it be?

Did you have a travel anywhere else?

>> BRENDA:  No, it wasn't, because when you hang an art show like that, people submit their works and they want them back.

I had never organized a traveling exhibit so I don't even know how you would do that.

But it's all in our Omeka page.

You can see all the comments by the artists in the Omeka page under the "The Art of Re-climation."

It's an exhibit.

You can see, a digital exhibit.

>> JENNIFER:  Yeah, and we were positing in chat if you had a number of chapters you could create a traveling exhibit as well.

>> SARAH:  It was so local.

Belfast is a small community, but having local voices and local artists seen their work seen and collected under that umbrella, it seems to be what was so engaging for the community.

And on that note, one of the things that Brenda and I neglected to say here, but I didn't emphasize enough, I think, climate change and challenges that face all of us can feel really overwhelming.

And somebody said this.

Coming together and getting an action together really is the antidote to despair and it's why people got excited about working on the rain garden.

Kate, I imagine you saw this on your project.

When people come together -- 

when we don't feel alone, when we feel there are other people who care about the things that we care about, it really is energizing.

>> JENNIFER:  Yeah, doing some work on loneliness and how libraries create connections, it really shines through this work.

And I would say that art piece, like you say, there are folks who are interested and willing to share their art.

But to have this sort of topical context to it deepens that engagement as well.

Yeah, you've done such a great job of creating a sense of belonging around this work in your communities.

I mean, that's the other thing.

Everybody belongs in this work but they may not see themselves in it.

But you all have done such a great job of really helping people see that they belong in this work and in collaboration with the community.

I loved hearing that you all were appreciating Kate's pieces.

I wonder if between the three of you you have any questions or thoughts or each other or any other things that came up, Kate, as you saw Brenda and Sarah present that you'd like to speak to.

>> KATE:  I had a question in the chat about how we got people [indiscernible], I'll answer that first, because I do have questions for Brenda and Sarah.

So we started advertising for what we call fixers a month ahead of time and we put out two community groups.

In Plymouth, we had a group, Sustainable Plymouth, which had a big email list and they sent out the applications to their members.

We put it up on the Town Hall website.

We also put it out to town employees because we have a lot of really talented town employees.

We also went to speak about the fix it clinic at the rotary clubs.

We went to the Council on Aging.

So we leaned heavily on our community to find people who wanted to be involved in the fix it clinic and that's how we ended up with 100% of our fixers.

It takes some doing, but once you have them, you have that Rolodex and it's easier to do it again the following year.

Brenda, I really want to know how you were able to, even come up with the idea for such an incredible program.

And obviously, the Omeka is fabulous.

I did spend some time on your Omeka, and it's so wonderful.

And when you -- when you came up with the idea for this program, were there ever times where you felt overwhelmed or did you, because you had so many great partners, did you feel like maybe I can't do this by myself, but together, we can make it happen?

>> BRENDA:  Probably I did feel overwhelmed, but I was also encouraged by the momentum that we built because this project launched at the very same time here in the state of Maine, the state of Maine published its first Maine climate action plan and so we were able to gather some topics and partners from them as well.

And it was just sort of something that was being discussed more and more in the community and as Sarah shared in that slide, that we didn't have to reinvent the wheel.

So there was, again, power in numbers and I would get ideas from programs from other people and things.

And so I think maybe at first I was overwhelmed, but then the momentum of things going, it was like, oh, my gosh, we had so many different topics here.

We had to limit it to focus it.

Yeah.

>> JENNIFER:  That's great.

I'm going to jump in with a question.

Somebody is asking for suggestions for similar community-building climate responsive initiatives for academic libraries.

Have you all through your networks been hearing of the work that academic libraries are doing in this area?

>> BRENDA:  I can answer that here.

Here in Maine, the Mitchell center For Sustainability and they have a focus of sustainable initiatives in a lot of their --

the staff at the university participate in it, and they have seminars and they offer educational programming, all online, and you can watch it.

And, you know, that said, I'm sure a lot of the other colleges, that was just the first one that popped to mind because it's very visible.

>> JENNIFER:  I'm going to do a little searching for that and add anything I find to the event.

>> SARAH:  I think that's another place they can take a page from Katharine Hayhoe.

Anytime we can make it visible that a library has collections that relate to climate change and relate to libraries and climate change, it invites people to talk about it and engage, and libraries do a wonderful job with that.

I don't have any specific suggestions, but -- academic libraries.

>> JENNIFER:  It does lend itself.

Academic, means you have Public Libraries in the areas, it seems like a no brainer to talk about how it could be done as a community-wide initiative based on all the great work we've seen here.

Excellent.

People are super excited about the clothing swaps and the Fix It Clinics.

Definitely.

Well, if there aren't any other final questions, I appreciate you all have shared your emails, so folks can reach out and get any additional input from there.

And a reminder, too, that we have one more webinar in this series with "Building Resilient Communities" on December 5th.

We'll be talking about communication.

So I know that lots of folks have shown interest about how do you communicate this work, just like you said, Sarah, in our communities.

So very much looking forward to that, and a reminder that the past session recording is available as will this one as well.

So fantastic.

Thank you so much, all three of you, for your amazing work and for Steph for her great work on this project.

We really look forward to continuing to bring learning in this area and are so glad you were able to join us.

A reminder that I'll send you an email today once the recording is posted and I'll automatically send you your certificate and I'm going to send you right now as we leave to a short survey.

If you don't have time to complete that now, it will be in the email.

But we really appreciate your feedback.

We'll share that with our presenteders presenters and helps with our programming and there is a page for you to also provide your feedback.

Thank you all so much.

Have a great rest of your week, and the rest of your year.

Thank you so much!

>> SARAH:  Thank you.

>> KATE:  Thank you.