Author: ALSC Library Service to Underserved Children and Their Caregivers

In July, the Library Service to Underserved Children and Their Caregivers committee announced our plan for the 2020-2021 calendar year:  creating a vibrant, dynamic toolkit that provides ALSC members with up-to-date resources for working with marginalized populations.  As a dynamic document, these pages will continue to grow and develop as we find new resources, share our experiences, and continue to learn from each other. In August, we released our first toolkit page with resources for autism and other sensory processing disorders.  In developing this resource, we realized that in order to provide relevant, meaningful content we need to also provide ourselves time and space to curate those resources.   As much as we would love to bring you a new toolkit page every month, we’ve found it’s much more realistic to plan for a new resource every other month.  In the other months, we hope to highlight a program or “unpack”…

In the past several years, one of the critical responsibilities of the Library Service to Underserved Children and Their Caregivers (LSUCTC) Committee was to administer and oversee all components of the Light the Way grant. It was a mighty responsibility, and one we quite enjoyed. With the grant moving to the Programs & Services Recognition Committee this year, our committee saw this as an opportunity to provide more resources to children’s librarians who serve marginalized populations. In 2015, our committee rolled out a toolkit for librarians. It was filled with resources, community organizations, and research related to eight different underserved populations. Long have we sought to revisit these resources and update them. Last year, we solicited feedback from ALSC members about the toolkit, and we were disheartened by two pieces of evidence: 1.) the information in our toolkit was perceived as outdated and/or not particularly useful and, perhaps more alarmingly,…