Applying Appreciative Inquiry to Community Engagement

January 27, 2013

In all honesty, I am not usually one for interactive sessions, so I was a little concerned when I walked into Peggy Holman’s “Community Engagement Conversation” session today and saw the small-group seating arrangement. However, I could not have been more pleasantly surprised with the results.

During my tenure as both an ALA staff member and as a library school student, one of the things I have always been interested in are the notions of community engagement, public awareness, outreach, and advocacy. The question we in the profession often face is how to cultivate those ideals from the public, something that this program addressed beautifully.

Appreciative inquiry focuses on increasing what an organization does well rather than on eliminating what it does badly, and how to analyze that success in order to achieve greater success in future endeavors. In my group we primarily focused on this with regards to partnerships and community involvement.

I sat down with a Friends member from a library in an underserved area who was looking to transform the atmosphere of her library to resemble that of a community center where everyone feels welcome. I spoke about a nonprofit literacy organization that I volunteered with (I’m not a full-time librarian yet) and how we do outreach. We took notes and compared positive experiences, and both walked away with information that we had not previously considered.

After our one-on-one session, we convened with our small group to expand on the discussion, which took a natural turn from outreach to buy-in from the community and different methods that worked for everyone in creating a library that meets the needs of the people they serve.

At the end of the session my partner walked away with a lot of new and positive information for accomplishing her transformation plan by working from the community up.

The thought-provoking and empowering session truly helped me rethink how I will plan and implement programs in the future, not by considering what didn’t work, but by concentrating on what did.

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