By now, you’ve likely heard of ALA Forward, the initiative that has resulted from more than a year’s worth of conversations and focus groups among members, leaders, staff, and affiliated folks, and has set a course for reinvigorating ALA with a clearer strategic vision and a defined process to realize that vision.
As I write this, still in my early weeks at the Association, I’ve been asked often about my own priorities for ALA. Well, my primary goal is this: to support us in achieving the vision outlined in the ALA Forward initiative. This includes ensuring ALA’s financial stability, fostering membership trust and growth, and bolstering advocacy.
I liken the process to the very founding of our organization—wherein a group of concerned library advocates today band together to create a new entity to achieve ambitious goals that, when realized, will reshape the profession and our nation. This sums up our current moment as well as our beginning.
We must prioritize financial stability; that’s job one. Doing that will achieve all our other objectives. Tied to that is a more tenacious approach to our services and value to members, so that members see themselves in the Association. Put simply, we have to increase membership numbers. A larger ALA means a more powerful ALA, and that leads to increased and more successful advocacy.
With the multiplying and increasingly dangerous threats to librarians, reading, and the freedom to access materials, our position as America’s premier defender of the right to read must be unquestionable. I invite you to join ALA (and bring colleagues on board as well) and become more deeply involved.
As we begin ALA’s sesquicentennial year, I thought it useful to read about our founding. (A special thanks to ALA Librarian Colleen Barbus for tracking down terrific historical materials for me!) ALA’s founders met in Philadelphia in 1876 and signed the articles of association to create ALA “for the purpose of promoting the library interests of the country, and of increasing reciprocity of intelligence and goodwill among librarians and all interested in library economy and bibliographic studies.”
Amazingly, 150 years later, that statement remains a concise version of what ALA is about. It doesn’t capture all that we do and stand for now, of course, as we’ve grown and developed significantly over a century and a half. But it’s hard to argue with its bedrock values. And the ALA Forward goals are a timely update on the foundation laid in 1876.
There is another pronouncement from our history I would like to call attention to: the Freedom to Read Statement, adopted in 1956. It begins, “The freedom to read is essential to our democracy.” More than at any time in recent American life, that freedom must now be fought for; it speaks to the need to strengthen our advocacy in defense of our core values.
My friend and teacher-union leader extraordinaire, the late Karen Lewis, liked to ask three essential questions when confronted with a question about what a union should concentrate on: Does it unite us? Does it strengthen us? And does it build power? I believe that if we get it right by prioritizing our finances, growing membership and member engagement, and fortifying our advocacy, we will answer Karen’s three questions with resounding yeses.
I look forward to working hard with you this year and celebrating our 150th as we roll ahead into the next 150.
