Seattle City Council Public Assets & Homelessness Committee 5/18/22

We are recording.

Thank you, Son.

The May 18th, 2022 meeting of the Seattle City Council's Public Assets and Homelessness Committee will come to order.

It is 2.01 PM.

I'm Andrew Lewis, Chair of the Seattle City Council's Public Assets and Homelessness Committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Herbold.

Council Member Morales.

Here.

Vice Chair Mosqueda.

Present.

Council President Juarez.

Here.

Chair Lewis.

Present.

Chair, there are three members present.

Thank you.

Chair, I see Council Member Tammy Morales.

Council Member, would you give me a here so you can be listed as present?

Oh, sorry, here.

Chair, there are four members present.

Thank you, Mr. Clerk.

If there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Chair's report.

Today we will have one agenda item from the Seattle Public Library, a presentation on the race and social justice initiative from the Seattle Public Library with an appearance by our new chief librarian, Tom Fay.

So looking forward to that.

and we will get to that presentation by way of public comment.

So why don't we proceed to the public comment period.

Mr. Clerk, is anyone signed up for public comment?

Mr. Chair, no one has signed up for public comment.

Okay, then I will just declare the public comment period closed for lack of having any registered callers.

and we can proceed to the items of business.

Mr. Clerk, will you please call item one into the record?

Item one, Seattle Public Library's Race and Social Justice Initiative, RSJI report.

Thank you, Mr. Clerk.

We are now joined by a panel from the Seattle Public Library and Librarian Fay, do you want to introduce your panel and then go ahead and begin the presentation.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

And good afternoon, Chair Lewis and council members.

Thank you for the opportunity to present our 2021 RSGI report.

I'm Tom Fay, Executive Director and Chief Librarian of the Seattle Public Library.

And with me today is Alex Yoon, who's the Director of Administrative Services, as well as our Executive Sponsor for the Library's Race and Social Justice Change Team.

We also have with us Mahino Oshi, who's Special Collections Librarian, and Juan Rubio, who is our Digital Media Program Manager.

Next, please, Alex.

Next slide, please, Alex.

Thank you.

Before I start, I just want to acknowledge that the Seattle Public Library is on Indigenous land.

These are the traditional unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, specifically the Duwamish people.

Next, please.

As you all know, the library, much like the rest of the city, spent 2021 moving towards reopening, and that is one of our accomplishments for 2021 in the broadest sense.

As we started our reopening processes all the way back in 2020, safety and equity were our driving factors.

and how we reopen.

In 2021, we reopened our buildings to the public, although with many equity considerations along the way.

We started in-person services and branches that were large enough for social distancing, and in neighborhoods we felt were most in need of in-person library services, especially those computers, information referrals, et cetera.

Those branches included Ballard, Beacon Hill, Broadview, Douglas Truth, Lake City, Rainier Beach, and Southwest for the first few branches that came on.

Next, please.

On our road to reopening, obviously, we had many steps along that through the various quarters.

In the first quarter of 2021, we were still expanding curbside services to 15 locations, and we then began our prep work to begin in building services in 2021. We worked with the mayor's office to allow library staff to be eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations earlier, a bit earlier, so that we could safely return to in-building services, protecting both our staff and the public who would be coming in.

By the end of April, the library reopened its first three branches for in-building services, and by the end of the second quarter of 2021, we had added an additional 13 branches in the Central Library building for a total of 17 branches open to in-building services.

Fortunately, with the graces of the Mayor and Council, the influx of the federal CLFR funding allowed us to began rehiring our staff positions that had been previously cut due to budget reductions.

This allowed us to open more branches and ultimately add more in-person services.

We were very close to pre-pandemic hours at the end of the year until Omicron hit us, as well as everyone else in the city, and that put us on some reduced hours for a month or two.

We're now happy to say that we're back to those pre-pandemic hours.

Next, please.

Alex.

Thank you, Tom.

As we were focusing on reopening of the library for in-person services, we also had other RSJI accomplishments that we wanted to highlight here.

One of the accomplishments was that we brought on, particularly with RSGI change team, worked really hard to bring on a consulting firm who is equity focused.

Their name is Epiphanies of Equity.

They have brought on a presentation related with the actionable allyship.

at our 2021 virtual staff week back in April of 2021. That was really well attended and this presentation really was particularly really well received during the time when The anti-Asian crime was really highlighted at the national level.

So it was really good.

And our change team is also working continuously with Christiana, who is the founder of the Epiphany of Equity to bring on additional trainings for our staff.

We also had worked on bringing the equity training to our public services management team, and we'll be continuing to do this training throughout the leadership of the library.

Additional work that we have worked on also is under the leadership of Tom, we had started working on developing more comprehensive and long-term look at our equity journey and equity work as a system.

So we began developing an equity roadmap, which we will continue to work on.

and plan to roll this out throughout the library this year.

This work will be laying out what will be our priority work related with equity, as well as laying out the long-term work that needs to be done at the library.

We're also happy to report that we have actually enhanced our language access plan, really centralizing the work within our marketing and online services team.

They are the ones handling all of our translation needs for the library and where they are now leading the rest of the divisions within the library to put together an annual exercise to really commit ourselves to bring more outreach work to our non-English speaking communities.

And then finally, we have also implemented the language access pay to our qualifying library staff.

Next slide, we'll talk about challenges within our 2021, particularly with RSGI work.

I'm sure we have seen that throughout the city, as well as the state and nationwide.

Pandemic definitely had played a critical and very challenging role in terms of delivering our services because we were so stretched, particularly with a reduction of our budget.

and, you know, focusing on reopening of our facilities.

One other thing, the in-person community engagement had been completely disrupted, and we're happy to report that we are resuming that work in 2022, especially as we begin the work of the strategic planning process under our new chief librarian.

So we're really excited to get this rolling, and we'll see how successful this will be for the library.

Also, due to pandemic's impact on our workforce, we have definitely seen capacity issues with our staffing level.

You know, at the beginning of 2021, we definitely saw the reduction of our staffing due to the budget cut.

And then throughout the year, particularly with Delta, variant as well as Omicron variant, we have seen increased illness and leave use among our staff and definitely staff turnover as well.

Another thing to highlight is the fact that many of our staff have expressed burnout and also fatigue around the pandemic, especially with our staff of colors.

They were definitely expressing concerns and challenges with pandemic fatigue and how challenging it is to really work through RSJ work throughout the system.

Tom?

Sorry, all.

Earlier this year, we submitted a racial equity toolkit summary sheets for the following efforts in 2021. The digital media learning program series, a food justice project called Bloom, RSGI change team training, and the beginning stages of implementing RSGI change team input on library budget development.

We'll go over the digital media learning in RSGI change team training projects in a little more detail today, but you can definitely read more about all four efforts in those previously submitted summary sheets.

Next, please.

And at this point, I would like to introduce Juan Rubio, who is our digital media program manager, and have him talk about the four programs in this series.

Juan.

Thank you.

It's an honor being here today and I like to highlight these four programs for the digital media program at the Seattle Public Library.

Kids Team, it's a program where teens design workshops in collaboration with librarians.

and students from the information school at the University of Washington to later on facilitate them with their younger peers.

So it's a near peer mentorship program that offers opportunities of leadership for teens in Seattle.

We also developed a digital art program that it's going for the second time this year.

It is taking place at New Holly in which teens learn digital art skills to create an advocacy poster of issues that are important to them and their community.

Some of the issues have been gender equality.

Now, Black Lives Matter is another one, and then the environment, for example.

We also launched a new website, VRtality.org.

This was a program for teen mental health in collaboration with DC Public Library and Fayette Public Library in LaGrange, Texas.

where we use virtual reality to create experiences and encourage discussions in support of teen mental health.

And we develop a curriculum that can be used by other libraries throughout the country that you can find in the website.

And then we also have an eSports for Wellbeing program that is also being offered with a community organization in South Seattle called Aspire Growth, in which a group of teens engage in eSports, competitive gaming.

to learn better ways to engage with video games and we incorporate social emotional learning through rituals and it also provided a space for them to combat a little bit of isolation, which was a product of COVID-19 pandemic.

Next one.

So one of the things that we learn in terms of equity by implementing the DML programs.

First, it was the practice of learning or what elements or strategies, we could incorporate with the equity framework.

but also interrogating programs that are happening to see what are elements that are already existing in there so that we could use those elements in future iterations of the programs or support other developmental programs across the library.

We are also being intentional about reaching non-dominant populations in Seattle and connecting with communities in those areas that have been mostly impacted historically by oppression.

We have created a strong relationship with community partners and that has been a key success for our programs.

And then lastly, we want to point out the intentionality of developing programs such as DML by the use of frameworks such as the Connected Learning Framework, Participatory Design, and the Equity Framework.

Thank you.

Thank you, Rubio.

And I would like to introduce Mahina Oshi.

She is our Special Collections Librarian, but also RSGI Change Team Co-Lead to present the RSGI Change Team Training Program.

Mahina Oshiro, Ph.D.: : Thank you, Alex.

Good afternoon.

As Alex said, my name is Mahina Oshiro, my pronouns are she her and librarian library co lead on the change team.

Mahina Oshiro, Ph.D.: : And it's been great.

So the change team consistently gets requests from library staff for diversity, equity, equity and inclusion training opportunities.

So as Alex mentioned earlier, for the library's virtual staff week in 2021, the change team sponsored a session, actionable allyship with Christiana Obey Sumner with Epiphanies of Equity.

And feedback from that session from staff was really positive.

And so the change team decided to move forward with them as a consultant to develop more trainings for staff.

We'd hoped to offer those in fall of 2021. COVID provided some challenges to our timeline.

So the bulk of our work creating those trainings was done in 2021, but the actual training themselves just happened in spring of 2022. Christiana had suggested that they would like to roll out a survey to gain an understanding of staff's knowledge and understanding of equity, and we would use that survey to inform a better customized training for the library.

The survey had 19 questions, including some demographics, and some of the key questions that were used to help shape the training were How would you rate your attitude towards social equity and diversity, equity, inclusion?

How would you rate your understanding of the following?

Disability justice, social equity, inclusion and belongingness, intersectionality, liberatory and justice framework, implicit and unconscious bias, LGBTQIA and equity, anti-racism, power and privilege, and gender equity?

Another question was, please share any stories You may have experienced around in equity at Seattle Public Library.

What are some concerns or difficulties you would like to see addressed in training that would help the organization move forward?

And then how can the consultant and SPL support and affirm you in your equity journey wherever you may be?

Next slide.

So at the high level overview of the survey results, it included some general commitment and understanding or caring about DEI from staff.

Many of the responses that were shared had personal work that was done on staff's part or trainings that they had taken in the past.

And there was an expression of interest in staff wanting more opportunities to go beyond a one-on-one approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

So out of the survey and the work that we did with Christiana, a training session was created with an accompanying workbook.

And that was created based on those survey results and then follow-up sessions between the full change team and Christiana.

So we were able to provide four training sessions of this one session for all of the staff.

Those were offered in March and April, and one of those sessions was recorded and is made available to library staff via Cornerstone.

The modules in that training include reasoning backward, critical consciousness, risk, change, and discomfort, process of change work, and community actionability.

And out of the work that we did with Christiana, a recommendation that they had was that Seattle Public Library should consider working with community-facing staff and additional diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants to help develop processes and accountability structures that speak to unconscious bias and disparate impacts for Black, Brown, and Indigenous staff and patrons.

Tom, you're muted.

I keep doing that, thank you.

In an effort led by our public engagement program manager, Davida Ingram, the Bloom Food Justice Leadership Program was the Seattle Public Library's first COVID-era rapid response program.

The program was inspired by families experiencing insecurity who were reporting that hunger was on the rise in their communities due to the pandemic.

Bloom provides young adults of color free access to education about food justice and food sovereignty.

A number of people and organizations are involved, including the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, Lanawari, the Black Farmers Collective, Friendly Hmong Farmers, and more.

In 2021, we continued this work with the following goals.

Create community-led civic leadership opportunities, create accessible space for BIPOC communities to explore the issues of food justice, increase access to green space for communities of color and low-income families, and develop a culturally informed curriculum.

Participants called Bloom Fellows learned skills such as baking, garden planning, soil remediation, urban planning, and more.

In 2021, the program still hosted eight fellows as it did in 2020, but it now also engages 25 young people in the work via a partnership with the organization Young Women in Power.

The program also now includes two indigenous artists in residence, one scholar in residence, and two food justice mentors.

All right.

Aligning with the City Budget Office as well as the Office of Civil Rights in terms of providing transparency on our budget, our library budget team and RSGI change team co-leads have also partnered together.

to develop a budget 101 presentation for the library.

This was really the presentation to provide not only citywide budget process timeline and the key deliverables within those timelines, as well as the library specific budget development process.

We have also incorporated interactive survey to instantly really see improvements on the budget knowledge amongst the participants.

This budget implementation, we also focused and provided training on budget implementation and monitoring where our staff really have the direct impact in terms of work related with budget.

So we had over 200 members of the library, staff, management, and boards all taking this training.

And I think we really brought additional transparency around our budget process.

And lastly, we are already well underway in 2022 with our equity work.

This includes turning up our entire senior management team and leadership team on how to apply racial equity toolkits in our work.

We'll also be finalizing communicating and socializing an equity roadmap later this year.

And we're very glad to begin more in-person community engagement this year, including a series of conversations I'll be having with library patrons, community partners, and other library stakeholders.

This work will help us lay the foundation for our new strategic plan that we hope to have completed in the late summer or fall of 2023. And the four projects we'll be reporting back to you next year include a review of our rules of conduct, revisions to our book group program, and Begin with Books program, and a directed fieldwork program with five BIPOC student librarians from the University of Washington.

And with that, we'd be happy to entertain any questions you might have.

Thank you so much, Chief Librarian Fay, and thank you to all the presenters.

What a great, thorough update on the RSGI activities of the library and just the service delivery components of the library in general, especially during COVID.

I did see earlier Councilmember Herbold indicating a question, so I'm happy to start with her.

So Councilmember Herbold, take it away.

Thank you so much.

I just wanted to thank the library for the VR-itality program.

Just in recognition that last year Governor Inslee declared children and youth mental health crisis to be existing throughout Washington state and the U.S.

Surgeon General also warned that the pandemic intensified a crisis specifically in teen mental health.

I just want to really thank you for your emphasis on addressing mental health challenges in this particular population.

It is critically needed and we really want to make sure our young people are thriving as we come out of the pandemic.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Are there other questions from council colleagues?

Council Member Juarez, Council President Juarez.

I was going to say Madam Chair, I'm sorry.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just want to say thank you, Tom, Mr. Fay, and your team.

As you know, I used to chair libraries.

And so every time you guys have done your RSJI, you've always done a phenomenal job.

In fact, when Jesus Agadir was still here at Parks, I used to give them your example for them to use for RSJI.

That was like a runny joke between Marcellus and Jesus.

So thank you so much for that.

And also thank you for eliminating library fines fees.

That has made such a big difference.

And I can't remember, what was the percentage that it went down?

Like 30% or what was it?

It was a great number.

Oh yeah, it was a, there was a Times article a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah.

A lot of interest in if material was returning and material is returning and, and people are returning and kids.

When we did the opening, the new opening two years ago of Lake City and everyone was hair was on fire that you're eliminating fines.

How dare you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

What we thought happened did happen.

It got better.

The whole point is, Marcella, she used to say, is a library is the people's university.

More access, more equity is what we're supposed to be doing.

So thank you for that.

And if you keep us, and of course, Mr. Chair, Council Member Lewis, if we can keep on top of the statistics on that, that would be great.

Because I know that in District 5, we have three libraries.

And they're used a lot.

And you guys were great during the pandemic.

to opening your doors and the social worker downtown, opening your doors so people could come in, could use the restroom, could use the computers.

Just the things that you've done that some of it wasn't quite library services, but you did it.

Just like the park people did at community centers, we've all taken on different job responsibilities because of the pandemic.

I want to thank you for that.

I know you guys work really hard and I just want to acknowledge that and you're in good hands with Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you.

Council Member Morales.

Thank you, Chair.

Well, I also want to thank all of you for this work.

There's been a lot happening for everybody the last few years, and I know that the staff has been going the extra mile, as Council President said.

I do have a question about that.

One of the slides addresses the challenges of you know, staff being fatigued by the compounding challenges.

I know doing this kind of race and social justice work is itself pretty It can be emotionally taxing and exhausting work.

And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your current staffing and what supports staff who are charged with doing this work might have.

That's one question.

And then I would like to learn just a little bit more about Bloom and the, or most of the organizations you mentioned, I think are in the South end.

So I'd love to hear just a little bit more about that program and some of the outcomes that you've had from there.

Sure, as far as, yes, I agree wholeheartedly about the staff who do this work, especially the heavy engagement and equity work often are People of color as well, so have additional emotional burden that comes with that work.

Also maybe experiencing the same things that this disparate issues within those communities.

So we do realize that we, you know, we did try to provide a lot of flexibility and how those program managers were working during the pandemic.

because it was impossible to try to meet in person, so making sure that they had full access to work from home capabilities, et cetera, to try to maintain those engagements.

When we look at the staff in general, they too have experienced a lot during this time.

We know that the number of issues that we've seen within our branches or libraries have increased.

Those things can be mental health issues, drug issues, addiction issues, and everything in between.

Sometimes the violence directed at them or harassment directed at them.

One of the things we've been working on here in this last six months, especially with our staff support group, is working to develop a trauma-informed care package that includes an internal website, but also other tools.

Staff have to go home because we've had to have a lockdown in a building because of an incident.

And folks are traumatized and or if someone was injured in the case of an assault or something like that.

Making sure that we have all the tools at their disposal that will help guide them through whatever that recovery process is.

Looking at some additional peer-to-peer support in that trauma-informed care process as well.

Much left to do in that area.

We're trying to be better at this and have learned a lot during the pandemic and continue to learn more.

We have a great team of staff working on this as we speak.

The balloon project, Council Member, I don't have a lot more details today, but if you have those questions, I can most certainly get them back to your office.

Any follow-up, Council Member Morales?

Great.

Chief Librarian Fay, I want to ask just a couple questions on the looking ahead slide, the discussion of potential revisions to rules of conduct or reassessment of rules of conduct.

Is there a particular area of focus for reexamining library rules of conduct?

And I also maybe want to ask in terms of the implication for library staff and personnel in terms of enforcing rules of conduct and what kind of supplementary training you might anticipate for staff to be prepared as branches are opening for some of those rules.

I'm just curious if you could maybe expand a little on that as a 2022 work item.

Sure, absolutely.

Well, that is one of those items that we are using the racial equity toolkit, and we'll likely use a consulting partner to help us through that.

And there'll be a staff team designed to, or put together to move us through that as well.

Our goal, as you know, is to keep people in the library.

So as we look at our staff and our security, when we have interactions that may not be going well, we have a lot of de-escalation tools and training at our site and our staff implement those daily.

When we talk about the rules of conduct, one of the things we want to look at is a couple of things.

Do they have disparate effects on people of color, most certainly.

Are there elements of the rules of conduct that actually escalate situations instead of de-escalate?

Can we look at that?

Are there rules that maybe we no longer need to apply?

That would also bring down some of those incidents.

And I use simple examples of something we did a few years ago when we had so many teens being excluded at the Rainier Beach branch.

And what we looked at was what rule of conduct was being violated.

And it was eating.

And so from that, we said, look, we need to actually, when we redesign and remodel this building, let's put an area in the building where teens can eat.

And that took those rules of conduct violations down 25 to 30% and kept teams in the building where we wanted them and where they wanted to be.

Otherwise, they wouldn't have been in our building trying to eat and do their other activities.

So being able to look at this holistically, there might be a number of ways that we can bring down those what are considered exclusions, but also bring down some of those issues that also escalate into bigger issues.

Tom, I really appreciate that anecdote about the analysis, especially around why so many young people are being excluded.

I mean, we want desperately for our young people to be in the library.

So breaking barriers down to make sure we can facilitate that and really analyze what rules of conduct we're putting out there that are creating barriers and ignoring ways we can figure out how to accommodate or solve for it short of banning them is really critical work.

As you go forward and do this work more in 2022, I'd love to stay in touch about how I can support it.

When I worked at King County, I had been involved in some efforts around looking at sort of similar things around like how school discipline leads to school-to-prison pipeline, leads to excluding young people from wholesome spaces, education-based spaces, libraries, public spaces, and then not depriving them of those supports by banning them.

And just keeping that open being a really critical foundational part of the work we do as a city.

So thank you so much for that answer and that analysis of that work.

Council Member Morales, a question?

I just wanted to echo what you said, Council Member, which is how important it is to understand, particularly in some under-resourced, historically under-resourced communities, the impact of things like food insecurity.

I mean, this was an issue, this particular issue of kids, you know, trying to access food has been a long-standing issue in Rainier Beach, not just at the library, but, you know, for for the young people who are, you know, going into the neighborhood grocery.

And it really is important to understand how all of the different ways in which people don't have access to resources affects their ability to perform and to be healthy and to thrive.

And I do think that taking that perspective and that approach to trying to problem solve is really important rather than, you know, discipline, law and order approaches, really trying to understand what supports people need in order to be healthy is an important shift for us.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Any other questions from colleagues?

Okay, seeing none, I want to thank our panel and Chief Librarian Fay, I'm going to see you, I believe, tomorrow evening at the Magnolia Branch of the Seattle Public Library.

Very much looking forward to that.

And I will see you then, if not sooner.

I want to thank the panel and appreciate the presentation.

And we will send follow-ups on the presentation as we get them down in an email.

So thank you so much.

Thank you.

All right.

Council colleagues, that is our only item of business for this afternoon.

Is there any further business before the committee before we adjourn?

Seeing none, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon, and I hope that you have a pleasant rest of your day.

Thank you.

Recording stopped.