I was so happy to be included in the Diversity Leadership Pre-conference at ALA here in Anaheim. It was an amazingly inspiring day featuring presentations, discussions and brainstorming.<\/p>\n
The day started off with ALA President Loriene Roy speaking about her vision of “celebrating community, collaboration, and culture” during her tenure as ALA’s first American Indian President. A highlight was her vision of workplace wellness.<\/p>\n
Next up was Dr. Clara M. Chu (UCLA Department of Information Studies). She focused on institutional assessment, and helped participants find the best path to help bring best practises of diversity to their own institutions, whether they are academic, public, special or school libraries.<\/p>\n
Mark Winston (UNC-Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science) was the next speaker, and he presented an intriguing talk asserting that Leadership Diversity needs to take on a three pronged approach of demographics, social justice and economic imperatives. He spoke about the under-representation of people of color in the LIS profession, and stated that “we should define our organizational priorities around issues of organizational success and social responsibility.”<\/p>\n
Patty Wong (Yolo County Library, CA) was up next, and brought in the idea of recruitment. She wants us to look at diversity in the widest sense, and to think outside the box regarding issues of advancement, diversity inspired sabbaticals, bilingual pay, and changing job titles to reflect a commitment to diversity.<\/p>\n
Then came the panel that I was part of. Included were Judy Macaluso (Ocean County Public Library, NJ), Deva Walker (Cleveland Public Library), Kristin Shelley (Worthington Libraries, OH), Kawanna Bright (North Carolina State University), and myself (LREI, NY). We spoke of the importance of diversity committees, mission statements, and connections that libraries can make to support diversity efforts in libraries, schools and universities.\u00a0 Our panel was organized by the indefatigable Valerie Bell (Ocean County Public Library, NJ) who had energy enough to keep us all going!<\/p>\n
Last but not least was the poetic Sandra Rios Balderrama (Balderrama Consulting) who spoke about her global view regarding diversity. She spoke of the circular nature of acting and then reflecting and about new methods of working and serving that are based on and generated by difference.<\/p>\n
I was left inspired and ready for action after this pre-conference. Advocacy for diversity is the responsibility of everyone, and I suggest that we all get involved in any way that we can!<\/p>\n
–Stacy Dillon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was so happy to be included in the Diversity Leadership Pre-conference at ALA here in Anaheim. It was an amazingly inspiring day featuring presentations, discussions and brainstorming. The day started off with ALA President Loriene Roy speaking about her vision of “celebrating community, collaboration, and culture” during her tenure as ALA’s first American Indian President. A highlight was her vision of workplace wellness. Next up was Dr. Clara M. Chu (UCLA Department of Information Studies). She focused on institutional assessment, and helped participants find the best path to help bring best practises of diversity to their own institutions, whether they are academic, public, special or school libraries. Mark Winston (UNC-Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science) was the next speaker, and he presented an intriguing talk asserting that Leadership Diversity needs to take on a three pronged approach of demographics, social justice and economic imperatives. He spoke about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[7,61,14,13,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-call-to-action","category-diversity","category-mentoring","category-other-ala-divisionsprograms","category-professional-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}