{"id":9400,"date":"2014-09-17T12:01:23","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T16:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/?p=9400"},"modified":"2014-09-16T23:50:39","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T03:50:39","slug":"sometimes-things-dont-work-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/sometimes-things-dont-work-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes things don’t work out…"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a result of my work with ALSC committee, Liaisons with National Orgs Serving Youth<\/a>, I’d had high hopes that this year’s Dia Day celebrations would be well attended by Big Brothers Big Sisters “Bigs” and “Littles” across the country. I\u2019d worked with my liaison at the org in the months and weeks leading up to Dia, our anticipation building, getting more and more excited as April wound slowly towards the end of the month. \u00a0I\u2019d even anticipated writing a blog post for ALSC featuring happy photos of Bigs and Littles participating in joyful parties celebrating multicultural books.<\/p>\n

Please note the absence of aforementioned photos in this blog post.<\/p>\n

While it’s possible that some Bigs might have taken their Littles to a Dia Day event, it definitely didn’t happen on the scale I’d imagined possible.<\/p>\n

Bummer.<\/p>\n

So, why did I choose to write about the experience of working towards a partnership initiative that essentially flopped? Because I think it\u2019s important for us to reflect when programs fail, when kids don\u2019t show up, or when the perfect book you picked for storytime turns out to be a dud with the audience. Go ahead and be bummed out, but don\u2019t dwell on it, and don\u2019t let it discourage you from trying again. More importantly, try to figure out what went wrong, and what you might do differently in the future.<\/p>\n

In trying to identify why this flopped, here’s what I came up with:<\/p>\n