Angie Andre
Head Children’s Librarian
Tredyffrin Public Library

by Angie Andre

ILEAD USA is a program that brings together public, private, academic, and school librarians from all over Pennsylvania to learn about leadership and technology. Participants form team groups and each group identifies a community need. The job of the team group is to fulfill the community need using participatory technology.  There are meetings in Harrisburg in March, July and October where participants meet face to face for intensive workshops, lectures, activities and collaboration. Between these face to face meetings teams will also work together online.

At the end of nine months, each team will present their project to the entire ILEAD USA audience. The outcome of the project is to create ongoing library programs or for future collaborative endeavors.

This year there are five teams that will be tackling some big community issues.

1.     Community Engagement

2.     Digital Information Literacy

3.     Services to Diverse Community Members

4.     Services to Immigrants and Non-English Speakers

5.     Workforce Development

Our group is working on providing services to diverse community members. We are creating a curriculum for youth services librarians and elementary school teachers to share with them the importance of providing an all-inclusive collection. We will share ideas about how to inspire their patrons and students to check out diverse materials. We are planning on doing a community project where we interview children about their favorite books and ask them about diversity. These videos will be included in the curriculum we create.We hope to create a platform that can be widely used as a teaching tool for professional development.

At the recent meeting in March, each group created a video to share their community issue.  You can watch the videos here: ILEAD 2016 Videos There were many speakers and webinars that shared their expertise on a number of topics.

This program is supported by the Commonwealth Libraries and made possible through a LSTA grant. This year each group is awarded $5000 to use to purchase technology and materials to solve their community problem. Each participant will receive $1000 to spend.

For more detailed information please visit the ILEAD page of powerlibrary.org. If you are interested in participating in ILEAD USA in 2017 please contact Diana Megdad for more information.

ILEAD USA supports PA Forward by supporting all of the 5 literacies: Basic Literacy, Information Literacy, Civic & Social Literacy, Health Literacy and Financial Literacy.