Ultimately, I'm really guided by this goal um and this idea to strengthen the library's ability to do equity, inclusion, and anti-racism work across all functions and levels of the work that we do.

these two trainings, the essential things to know about racism and understanding interrupting bias are meant to build off of those city provided trainings and to contextualize them within a library specific context.

I'm wondering around like while you know people of culture also have our own work to do to like undo unbraid like the ties of white supremacy in ourselves and I wonder then if there's also a cohort for our like folks that are not from places of well from culture but are identify as white I wonder if there is a cohort for them to do that work also separately but then those spaces can come together because part of what we end up teaching ourselves and this is presumptive and I'm sure yours sounds sounds like it is different but what I sometimes worry about is that then we train ourselves and condition ourselves to receive white whiteness and white supremacy and white violence at work by creating systems of care within each other while not asking for behavior and accountability change in the folks that are sort of perpetuating white supremacy.

we explored, um, we talked about how to to build do take specific, uh, actions to build relationships that allow us to do those things and have those relationships in place so that we're not starting from the relationship building point in those moments of urgency where we've done that. we're we're being proactive in building that up so that when it comes time to activate that actually all of that effort done earlier on makes things a lot smoother in those moments later on.

It strikes me as important for every staff member to have in the city. We think about front-facing staff like libraries, parks and wreck as sort of the first two, but um DSI, yeah, public works, police and fire, like there's so many of our departments. Um and it's often the ones I think that we don't first think of as being the ones who are frontfacing and need the sort of competencies that are the ones who when they don't have those competencies are the most damaging.

I, you know, for me personally, I think it's been a while that I've been at this table here and and then heard a department even just utilize that term too. And SPL has just really been a leading department um with in bringing this equity lens, anti-racism lens into your work.