THANK YOU AND NEXT STEPS
POST EDI TOWN HALL
March 21, 2022

Dear Colleagues,

We wish to express our profound gratitude to all of you who attended our EDI Town Hall meeting on February 24, 2022. The turn out was amazing, and the conversation was exceptionally rich. Thank you to our program facilitator, Rosie Grant; and thank you to all our presenters: Kate Jaggers, Jennie Pu, Ralph Bingham, Juliet Machie, Jen Nelson, Ellen Pozzi, Kurt Wagner, Pat Pavlak, and Keisha Miller. Most importantly, we thank all of you who contributed to the dialog and chatroom exchange. We are humbled and inspired by your candor and authenticity. 

The town hall successfully fulfilled its goal to introduce an EDI Framework for New Jersey’s libraries. It is now time for all of us to do the work that is needed to begin to effect the changes that we all desire. To this end, we are proposing the following as immediate next steps:

EDI WORKING GROUPS
We invite you to sign up to lead or participate in any of the following working groups:

• Policy Assessment
• Collection Development
• Hiring Practices
• Leadership Development
• Training

Are we missing any areas of inquiry? Please feel free to email and let us know.

NJ LIBRARIES EDI COALITION
We are inviting all our partners (many of them presented at the town hall meeting), to join us as a strategy group, as we continue to frame additional next steps. Any New Jersey library group that is already doing EDI-related work is invited to partner with us.

CONTACT US
To nominate yourself or someone else to participate in any of the areas listed above, please reach out to Ralph Bingham, Juliet Machie or Jen Nelson.

Thank you for embracing this EDI Collaborative Initiative for New Jersey’s Libraries. We are looking forward to working with you to make a difference for all of us.

Sincerely,
Ralph, Jen & Juliet.