Successes and Impacts: In each city, stories of success relate how the slow process of community development through relationships, listening, understanding and working together is making change. The four city project is built on collaboration, connection and support that the libraries give each other. Testing approaches, talking with peers, reviewing work together encourages new thinking, careful examination and more impact across the country. In Halifax, staff training was also part of the initial plan so that library staff could benefit from the findings and work of the project. In its initial stages, the current training is discussion-based and offers staff the opportunity to examine issues such as who the library serves and doesn’t serve and why some people don’t feel comfortable in the library. Like the project with adult learners, the training works with the experience of the staff, strengthens relationships and follows an emergent path rather than a linear one – following up with the needs and interest that emerge as the project and training progresses.

Challenges: Libraries and HRSDC, the funder, work with a linear model of plans, implementation and deliverables. Community development works with an emergent model so that program direction and activities follow people’s needs and interests as they emerge over time. The community development model also works differently than outreach, an institutional mainstay in libraries, where the library offers versions of its successful programs in community locations. Working with these challenges to institutional norms is ongoing. The initial challenges were how to reach populations that don’t use library services and how to establish and sustain relationships with individuals and agencies.

In Halifax, the challenge after the first year was to move beyond the meeting room with learners and into the library. The laptop computers as tools for learning and exploration helped to open doors literally and figuratively.

Future Plans: Nationally, the project will continue its community development work as well as develop a tool kit to help others with this approach, set up a website for basic resources, try to establish a CLA interest group for community development, and work with library schools to develop an online community development course.

Advice to Others: The key point is that the library has to change, not the community.