CLA Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund offers learning opportunity

“Nurturing Ourselves: Transforming and Thriving as Library Advocates”

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

10AM – 11:30AM Pacific Time

Direct Link to Registration: 

https://www.cla-net.org/events/eventdetails.aspx?id=1843514

Description:

Until now, library staff members have served their communities as “Gatekeepers of Knowledge,” guiding their patrons to information. Today, we are becoming “Masters of Inspiration,” sparking curiosity and nurturing individual genius. We are learning how to inspire members of all ages and teach them how best to develop their skills, to discover their potential, and to realize the joy of lifelong learning and creativity.

Join us for a highly-interactive online 90-minute free California Library Association Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training session designed to explore how to activate creative thinking and develop healthy habits to plan programs, develop collections, and offer excellent customer service as a form of advocacy. By nurturing ourselves, we engage in library advocacy without becoming drained; by sparking curiosity and inspiring individual genius in ourselves and others, we transform and thrive as library advocates. Through stories, examples, and audience participation, we will examine how to connect with the best in life to maintain a healthy work-life balance as library advocates and learn how to ask “right questions” to nurture our creativity in balancing too many projects and not enough time.

Goal:

To help advocates further develop their creative thinking and healthy habits while fully engaging in the work they do on behalf of libraries and the communities they serve

Objectives:

Participants, by the end of this session, will be able to:

Identify at least one way to get to the heart of connecting with the best in life—under any circumstance  

Cite at least three actions successful advocates take to maintain a healthy work-life balance

Demonstrate an ability to ask the right questions in order to successfully balance too many projects and not enough time

Cite at least three resources that can be used to further hone their skills in developing healthy habits

Session Facilitators: 

Dorothy Stoltz is a professional librarian, author, consultant, mentor, and trainer with decades of librarianship experience having served as programming and outreach manager and community engagement director. She is the author of “Activate Peer Learning” (2023) from Waldo Publishers, and, six books from ALA Editions, “Inspired Thinking” (2020), “Transform and Thrive” (2018), “Inspired Collaboration” (2016), “The Power of Play” (2015), “Tender Topics” (2013), and “Every Child Ready for School” (2013). She is owner of Waldo Publishers, LLC (WaldoPublishers.com) which presents books inspired by the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson to “activate from within.” Throughout her career, Dorothy has advocated for the quality of our thinking and our love of learning as being incomplete without support of each other. 

Paul Signorelli, a San Francisco-based writer/trainer-facilitator/presenter/consultant, serves as Library Advocacy Training Project Manager for the California Library Association. As author of “Change the World Using Social Media” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), he captured the stories of advocates working in libraries and a variety of other settings, and he continues to work with individuals and organizations to help them hone their collaboration skills to create productive coalitions to produce positive results, and to hone their abilities to foster a sense of work-life balance. He recently led a one-hour “Advocacy Basics” session at the American Library Association’s LibLearnX conference in Baltimore and is scheduled, over the next few months, to facilitate a variety of other similar workshops on advocacy, community, and collaboration for onsite and online conferences.

About the Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training Series

This program is part of an ongoing series of monthly online sessions organized offered through the Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training Series; sessions are generally held online on the second Wednesday of each month, beginning at 10 am PT. The series honors the memory of Ursula Meyer, 1977-78 CLA President, California Library Hall of Fame inductee, longtime director of the Stockton-San Joaquin Public Library, and fierce advocate for library services and intellectual freedom. The Ursula Meyer Fund was established to provide for the training of librarians in all stages of their careers, and library supporters, in political advocacy and political action, in honor of Ursula’s belief that librarians need effective political skills to advocate for library support at all levels of government. Archived recordings of previous sessions are available on the California Library Association YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@californialibraryassociati2705/videos.

To support the series through a donation, please visit the CLA website at https://www.cla-net.org/donations/fund.asp?id=23440.

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Professional learning announcement courtesy of California Library Association.
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