Running Head: FERGUSON MUNICIPAL LIBRARY AS A SITE FOR STRUCTURAL
CHANGE
Ferguson Municipal Library as a Site for Structural Change
Liberty Miller
Pacifica Graduate Institute
Ferguson Library Community Relevancy Project
FERGUSON MUNICIPAL LIBRARY AS A SITE FOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE
Project Background
The Ferguson Municipal Library is an independent organization that has traditionally
relied on state tax levies to fund its operations. In August 2014, the killing of Mike Brown started
an uprising that transformed Ferguson in a matter of months as protests erupted and the National
Guard swept in to quiet the cries for justice. News of this community upheaval reached across
the globe and engaged the hearts of millions of onlookers. Shortly after, $450,000 in donations
flooded into the library which were allocated to facility improvements and the expansion of
programs since then. The events in Ferguson put the library on the map and it received the 2015
Library of the Year Award, “the highest honor a library can get” (Bonner, 2018). None of this
would have been made possible without the killing of a young man and an entire community’s
engagement in their own liberation struggle.
But even all of these donations were not enough to sustain the library in its new
popularity for the long haul. In 2018, after significant community campaigning, they were able to
pass Prop L, which increased the tax levy, nearly doubling the institution’s budget. The levy is
based on home values in the library’s municipal boundary. Ferguson, a formerly redlined
municipality of St. Louis has an average home value of about $64,000 which is less than half of
the average metro area home value. Because of this, the Ferguson library currently receives less
than half of the annual funding of other independent municipal libraries in the area. Webster
Groves Library, which is in a predominantly white neighborhood, is the next lowest funded
municipal library, still receiving over half of what the Ferguson Library receives, yet the two
libraries serves the same number of people. Structurally speaking, the inadequate and inequitable
funding sources for independent municipal libraries contributes to ongoing structural inequity
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FERGUSON MUNICIPAL LIBRARY AS A SITE FOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE
based on race and the historical barriers that have prevented black communities from
accumulating economic and intellectual wealth. Unfortunately, a $5000 grant from the Muste
Institute would not be sufficient to make major changes in how municipal libraries are funded…
but the community may be able to respond to its own issues with more precisely informed
constituents.
Community leaders, organizers and members invested in the relevancy of library services
to their community are coming together to participate in a hypothetical participatory action
research project in response to the events in Ferguson and at the municipal library. This project
will study if library materials and programming are indeed serving the community’s needs.
Following the major politicohistorical events of Ferguson, is the library doing its job to
relevantly serve its people? Is a need to increase access to community organizing and social
justice related materials and programming in the Ferguson municipal library? Is there a need to
increase access to the library in other ways?
The Liberatory Library, the hypothetical community group that has formed to facilitate
this participatory action research project has a mission to support libraries, community
organizations and their constituents in accessing the information and learning resources they
need to create positive structural and social change in their communities. This project has been
developed with the intention to serve that mission as one part of a larger intention to bring such
projects to libraries and places of learning nationwide. The following project proposal will
outline the goals, target constituency, relevance, participation, research and action components of
the project.
The Goal
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FERGUSON MUNICIPAL LIBRARY AS A SITE FOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE
The goal of this project is to get Ferguson library stakeholders involved in determining
the relevancy of library content and programming to the community in lieu of contemporary
issues facing Ferguson and to determine an appropriate response to the survey’s findings to
increase library relevancy. Within this goal is the hope of using these findings to take direct
action, in partnership with the library and potentially other agencies, to respond to the needs of
the community with whatever resources or services are necessary to do so.
In conjunction with participatory action research principles, this project will follow a
route from dialogue and problematization to research and then action (Watts, 2019).
Participants and Target Constituency
This project is designed to engage various leaders and members of the Ferguson
community as co-researchers in a participatory action research study. Stakeholders who will be
invited to participate in the Ferguson Library Community Relevancy Project will include city
council members, librarians, community organizers, activists, teachers, students, parents, elders,
business owners, police officers and other important stakeholders. All invited participants must
live, work or be directly affected by life in the Ferguson, Missouri municipality.
While the participants may include people in the target constituency, they may not all fall
into that category. Since this library was such a site for change and inspiration for the community,
it makes sense that the library would serve the community directly by providing the most
relevant information to its users. Therefore, library card holders and potential card holders would
be primary targets for the study and action. The research survey would need to include questions
about how the community members use (or would potentially use) the library’s services. This
will help the advisory board get more clear about how to reach and serve the target constituency.
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Relevance
Despite inequity in library funding, the Ferguson Library utilized and greatly benefited
from the large donations it received in response to the Ferguson riots. Regardless of the trigger
for this influx of money, the library does not offer any programming related to the incident,
community building or social action. This is a large oversight and failure to respond to major
defining events in the community. This proposal for a hypothetical PAR study incorporates a
focus on exploring what social justice and community action information or resources the
communities needs the most.
Of particular concern to these stakeholders is the community’s ability to access
information that can help them to make positive change within their community, especially as it
relates to current issues, such as poverty and police violence, circumstances that led to the
growth and popularity of the library in 2014. Since the library has benefited directly from the
oppression of the community, it is essential that the library grow and respond accordingly to the
community’s relevant needs. Libraries are a center of cultural proliferation and community
health and must be maintained as a relevant contributor to the community to justify their funding
and existence. Without this direct service and accountability to place-based constituencies,
libraries risk acting simply as institutions that perpetuate dominant forms of knowledge (as
opposed to forms of knowledge that empower the community to seek their own liberation). This
project seeks to survey and respond to the needs of the community as they relate to the library
serving community-based liberation. Additionally, the project seeks to engage the community in
a collaborative model of structural change that leaves all parties more interconnected and
practicing more mutually beneficial relationships.
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The library acted as a safe haven for people during the Ferguson uprising and with the
donations that came afterwards, it provided a site for potential collective hope. In a community
that has faced significant challenges, collective hope is a vital ingredient for growing resiliency:
“...collective hope is more than simply a protective factor in the calculus of understanding
resilience in challenging social settings. Rather, collective hope is the psycho-spiritual fuel that
drives community efforts toward the struggle for a higher quality of life” (Ginwright, 2015, p.
21). Therefore, it is possible that the Ferguson library could not only take action towards making
a better life for its community, but could host such “psycho-spiritual fuel” that drives the
community to strive for its own liberatory actions.
Participation
While the participatory action research project must include the participation of the
community through each step of the process, there must be some sort of organizing body to
begin this. The advisory board, we’ll call it, will form out of the first phase of the project:
dialogue and problematization, both parts of creating a collective critical consciousness (Watts,
2019). Through discussions between potential stakeholders, the advisory board will discuss and
debate the primary problem facing the community and library. Problematization will require the
stakeholders to critically doubt their preconceived notions about what the problem really is
(Montero, 2009, pp. 80-88). Each person must be heard and find reason in their criticisms of the
perceived problem. Stakeholders both inside and outside the institution must participate in this
process (Stringer, 2014, p. 169) to challenge stereotypes regarding the problem and transform the
group consciousness beyond the “domenstication of the mind” towards empowered mobilization
for change (Montero, 2009, p. 80). A failure to include stakeholders in each step of the process
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will run the risk of reproducing hierarchical power structures and damage the group’s trust and
ownership over the process.
Out of this process, an advisory board must congeal to consist of the aforementioned
stakeholders and any other parties that are deemed vital in dreaming and decision making
regarding the holistic picture of the library community. Other community members may continue
be intimately involved in various ways through each phase of the project from conception to
action.
Collaboration between stakeholders throughout the process is necessary to acknowledge
and manage the many differences that may be present in the community (and perhaps even
differences that contributed to the Ferguson uprising in the first place). A collaborative,
participatory approach will allow for many views to be considered and a more holistic decision
to be made (Gray, 1989). Likewise, participation will help the group to take ownership over their
decisions and increase commitment to the process (Gray, 1989, p. 21). The act of participating
across differences within a community that faced such a violent controversy based on race and
class differences may benefit from collaboration as it may increase collective identification with
the Ferguson as a communal place (Watts & Hipolito-Degado, 2015, p. 849). The advisory group
and the community members participating in the study alike may find that the process of
participation contributes to their political self-efficacy, or their confidence in solving their own
political problems (Watts & Hipolito-Degado, 2015, p. 849). The potential increase in collective
identification and political self-efficacy could go a long way in supporting the municipal library
in its efforts to become more relevant to community liberation efforts already underway.
Research
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After extensive dialogue, the forming and clarifying of the roles and responsibilities of
the advisory board members, the next phases of the study would likely require designing and
administering a survey to library community members as to which information they want and
need in their library that would help them to make relevant, positive social change. The advisory
board may also ask what community members think the library should provide to their
community in the way of programming, services and other resources.
The advisory board will compile survey responses to determine the top reported needs
that community members have in relation to library services. This compiling of data will serve in
the larger process of conscientization, whereby there is a “mobilization of consciousness aiming
to produce historic knowledge about oneself and about the groups to which one belongs, thereby
producing a different understanding and giving sense to one’s temporal and spatial place in the
society and in one’s specific life-world” (Montero, 2009, p.73). In other words, the research
process itself may help the advisory board and the community alike to become more aware of
their situation and trace the currents of power to potential actions. They may come to find that
their community needs more access to community organizing training, civics lessons on how
their government works or a more updated legal section. This will all be determined by the
survey results which means that the group designing and administering the survey must pay
special attention to issues of equity and who has access to the survey.
This study will require the $5000 allotted from the Muste Institute Grant for advertising,
administering and evaluating the findings of the study. To reduce costs, the advisory board will
use all volunteer labor and as many donated or pro bono services and materials as possible to
stay within the proposed budget. Since community participation was the source of the Ferguson
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uprising, it seems appropriate that every step of the process would continue in this spirit, hence
the soliciting of community donations of labor and services.
This will not be the first time that a participatory action research project is carried out to
gain knowledge about the usage of a library. Such a study was published in 2012 which explored
the use and design of a common study space in a library at a school that had many commuter
students (Brown-Sica, 2012). This study employed multiple research methods including surveys,
focus groups, focus groups, observation and more. If the community advisory board deems it to
be necessary based on survey results, they may decide to expand beyond the survey method to
incorporate other research methods as well. For example, if they find that transportation to the
library is a major issue cited by community members, they may choose to carry out a
transportation-related focus group that involves those most affected by the issue. Or, if there are
compelling or complex issues that need deeper exploration, they may choose to do individual
interviews.
The survey phase of the project is essential for determining proper actions with which to
respond to the community’s needs. In lieu of survey findings and the findings of other
collaborative research methods, the group will institute some sort of appropriate action. Perhaps
they will be compelled by the data to organize necessary training in the library, solicit donations
for books or simply inform the library of their findings. In the event that the survey discovers
community needs outside of the scope of normal library practice (e.g. childcare needs for single
mothers needing computer access) the advisory board will take action to reach out to or connect
the library staff to relevant agencies that may be able to partner to do further research or directly
address the need. Regardless of the findings, some sort of action must be taken to complete the
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PAR cycle and the advisory group would be best to the task of creating a recommended action
plan to present to the library administration for more formal movement (Stringer, 2014, pp. 169171).
Action
Creating an action plan in response to the research findings will help to clarify priorities
for action, who will carry them out and what exactly they will be doing (Stringer, 2014, pp. 169173). The library may choose to incorporate the action plan into the administration’s regular
strategic planning.
In the event that the research project produces findings that require specific actions that
the library is not willing to take, the advisory board may choose to respond with their own direct
action. Whether it is additional programming that uses funds from others sources or another
relevant campaign, the advisory board will determine some appropriate way to respond to the
findings such that the community ultimately benefits from the research. Programming that must
be supplied by the libraries must also be funded by the libraries, but the advisory board will do
whatever it can within its power to hold all stakeholders and responsible parties accountable to
the needs of the community. For example, if the results of the survey show that the community
needs either better transportation to the library or for the library to go to the target constituency, a
creative strategy may need to be employed. Whether it be a transportation scholarship fund
provided by library donations, lobbying for additional bus pick ups, a library transport vehicle, or
an independent mobile library (*wink*), the advisory board must come up with a response
proportionate to the need. Additional research may be needed to find a solution that best uses
community assets and resources to address the need. Additional fundraising efforts could be used
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to respond to such a need in the event that the library does not have funds or if the need is
outside the library’s scope of practice. Whichever way it goes, the project must be prepared to
respond to research findings with action, as per the PAR principles (Watts & Hipolito-Degado,
2015).
Considerations for Ongoing Action
As a final step in the PAR process, the advisory board must reflect on and evaluate the
PAR project that they have carried out to assess its efficacy (Stringer, 2014, pp. 182-183). Did
they find what they thought they would find? Did they indeed reach their goal to increase library
relevancy to the Ferguson community? Did their actions reach their target constituency? In
accordance with evaluation guidelines, the group must take time to see how their work actually
addressed the community needs. Likewise, it may be helpful for the advisory board to record
their own reflections as a part of a community team, if not for the sake of project evaluation, for
the sake of maintaining, reconciling and strengthening their relationships as a potentially
ongoing group. Personal reflections will help the next generation of library action researchers to
improve and develop the process of fine-tuning library relevancy.
As a part of the ongoing public discussion about reparations for African Americans, this
PAR could be the start of a deeper exploration about how reparations can be granted through the
restructuring of library funding. Since the tax levies currently in place to fund the libraries are
based on an inequitable and ultimately race-based system, the advisory group may choose to take
this exploration one step further. It is possible that the group could go on to form a focus group
that discusses and determines alternative funding sources from the federal government or other
parties responsbile for repairing sociocultural harm (perhaps various industries that benefited
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from the labor of enslaved peoples). Additionally, they may choose to join forces with local
reparations campaigns such as the one facilitated by Dr. David Ragland. Either way, this is an
ongoing exploration that will continue into future generations of the library relevancy advisory
group.
References
Bonner, S. (2018, April). State of the Library 2018. http://ferguson.lib.mo.us/state-library-2018/
Brown-Sica, M.S. (2012). Library Spaces for Urban, Diverse Commuter Students: A
Participatory Action Research Project. College and Research Libraries. May 2012. Pp.
217-231.
Ginwright, S. (2015). Hope and healing in urban education. New York, NY: Routledge. Chap. 2:
Transforming trauma into power. pp. 16-37.
Gray, B. (1989). Collaborating: Finding common ground for multiparty problems. San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. pp. 1-25.
Montero, M. (2009). Methods for Liberation: Critical Consciousness in Action. In C. C. Sonn &
M. Montero (Eds.), Psychology of Liberation: Theory and Applications (pp. 73–91).
Stringer, E. (2014). Action research (4th Ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
Watts, R., Hipolito-Degado, C. (2015). Thinking Ourselves to Liberation? Advancing
Sociopolitical Action in Critical Consciousness. Urban Review, 47, 847–867.
Watts, R. (2019). Liberation Studies and Action Session #3 Power Point Slides.
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