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North America Regional Hub: Introduction to Prevention — The Role of Libraries in Preventing Hate and Targeted Violence and Maintaining Social Cohesion

Publication Date:

03/06/2025

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Introduction to PreventionLibrariesNorth America Regional HubPreventing Hate and Targeted ViolencePublic SpacesSocial Cohesion

— 16 minutes reading time

This report provides a summary of discussions during the event and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Strong Cities Network Management Unit, Strong Cities members, event sponsors or participants.

Summary

On 20 May, the Strong Cities Network continued its series of webinars on Introduction to City-Led Prevention of Hate and Targeted Violence with a session on the role of libraries in prevention and maintaining social cohesion. The webinar featured a scene-setting presentation from Brooks Rainwater, President and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council, detailing the unique role that city and other local libraries play in whole-of-city approaches to prevention and maintaining social cohesion. Strong Cities Executive Director Eric Rosand then led a discussion highlighting promising practices with Alice Knapp, CEO of Ferguson Library in Stamford (Connecticut, United States); Kelvin Watson, Executive Director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library (Nevada, United States); and Vickery Bowles, City Librarian of the Toronto Library (Ontario, Canada). Speakers shared examples of how their libraries are evolving as community spaces, navigating the challenges posed by the current increasingly divisive political and social environment and how they work to strengthen resilience at both the community and individual level.

Key Themes

1. Libraries are uniquely positioned at the crossroads of society to play a core role in city-led prevention efforts. From welcoming all members of a community to offering a variety of services and programming to maintaining high levels of and/or helping to restore trust in the community, few other public institutions have as much credibility within local communities and as many interactions with city residents as libraries do. This makes them natural partners for cities to include in city-wide prevention efforts.
2. By functioning as a public commons within a community, local libraries are capable of bringing community members together across differences to gather in a trusted, safe environment. These convenings serve to break down barriers, build mutual understanding and promote social cohesion in a welcoming, non-partisan environment. In doing so, libraries can help strengthen the social fabric within a city and help foster a sense of belonging that is essential for resilient, connected communities.
3. Library partnerships with city agencies and community-based organisations, and other non-profits that provide social services can expand the reach of support services to vulnerable populations and increase access to library resources while helping to address the complex, interconnected needs of the communities they serve. These partnerships function best when libraries are included from the outset, so they are involved in the ideation process and can contribute to the identification of the challenges and the development of solutions, rather than assume a passive role by simply responding to requests for support.
4. As cities grapple with the flood of information online about potentially divisive and controversial topics, digital literacy skills are increasingly vital, and libraries are well equipped to help city residents build or strengthen these skills, leveraging their long history of developing and delivering literacy programming. Increasing access to information has been a goal of local libraries since their inception, and they have incorporated both digital literacy and technology skills into their programming as the informational needs of communities evolve. From tackling the introduction of AI to providing early childhood reading materials, libraries continue to adapt and innovate to meet the changing informational needs of their communities, ensuring equitable access to knowledge for all ages and backgrounds.

The Active Role of Libraries in the Prevention of Hate and Targeted Violence

Brooks Rainwater, President and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council (ULC) – with its 189 member libraries across 45 states and provinces in the United States and Canada – began the webinar with a presentation outlining the unique role libraries play in their communities and offering examples of how library programs serve as “engines of civic renewal”. ULC members view libraries as “people-centred systems”, in contrast to their more common public perception as book-centric. Through this people-centric lens, ULC supports research, innovation and advocacy to strengthen and promote the value of libraries as essential public assets. Rainwater explained, “Libraries are more than just places of learning and information. They are dynamic spaces where social networks are formed. Trust is built and communities come together across differences”. Through their physical, digital and programmatic offerings, libraries strengthen social resilience, prevent hate and foster a sense of belonging.

Rainwater offered three examples of libraries that are actively engaged in this role and demonstrate how libraries are not “just a backdrop, but instead, [are] the platform for social cohesion”. Firstly, the Fairfax County Public Library System (Virginia, United States) addresses loneliness through a Library POD – a hands-on makerspace that provides materials, equipment and space for creative activities like craftmaking and 3D printing. The space, he said, “creates an environment where people learn together and form social connections” alongside developing skills. A second example was from the Baltimore County Public Libraries (Maryland, United States), where libraries host shared meals and facilitate conversations for the community in their Be at the Table initiative. This brings together community members who might not otherwise typically interact with each other to build trust and bridge social divides by creating space for civil discourse. Rainwater’s final example comes from the Los Angeles County Library (California, United States), where a Faith, Culture, & Community initiative promotes inclusivity through interfaith dialogues and resources to help libraries educate the public about faith-based observances and bring people together “through shared learning and respect for diversity”.

Looking at the role of libraries more broadly in the 21^st Century, he said that they serve as a civic commons where “people come together across differences across income, race, politics, age, and interact, not as consumers, but as members of a shared society”. Rainwater emphasised that libraries are incredibly unique in this function because they are “among the last trusted public spaces that are free, accessible, and open to all. Libraries play a significant role in social infrastructure, which includes public spaces and community programs that facilitate human connection”.

How Partnerships Amplify both City and Library Services

With libraries deeply interconnected to their communities, they interface with the full spectrum of societal challenges and changes. As Alice Knapp, CEO of Ferguson Library in Stamford (Connecticut, United States), recounted, the library “reflects all of the turmoil that’s…going on out in society. So, if homelessness is a problem and affordable housing is a problem, you’re seeing it reflected in your library. If addiction issues are a problem, you’re also seeing it reflected in your library”. This leads libraries to partner with myriad city services to ensure that they can provide the necessary support to its patrons. While the Ferguson Library, like many libraries, cannot afford to hire a full-time social worker, they do contract with the City’s Human Service Agency to ensure a social worker is available to consult with staff to identify problems and resources to address them.

The Ferguson Library’s membership in the Youth Mental Health Alliance is central to its collaboration, with Knapp noting that the library is able to identify ways in which they can assist the Alliance proactively, rather than simply responding to requests for partnership. For example, when the Youth Mental Health Alliance wanted to print a resource guide compiling all the health agencies in the county, the library not only responded to the request for printing assistance, but they also proposed putting the guide on a website, so the material was more easily accessible (and available in different languages) to more residents.

The Toronto Library partners with agency staff from the Gerstein Crisis Center in Toronto, which operates as a part of the City of Toronto’s new Toronto Community Crisis Service. In this partnership, crisis workers come to the library, not to manage incidents or conduct social work, but to identify and build connections with individuals who may need food, housing or employment. These crisis workers form relationships with people who frequent the library, follow up with them and ultimately make referrals to other services.

Vickery Bowles, Toronto’s City Librarian spoke to the partnership’s impact, stating that “this is something that we’ve found to be really successful in being able to welcome everyone into the library and to provide them with the support they need to make connections in the community to get the help they need.” Recognising libraries as meeting points for all of society, she said, is a key step cities can take to improving access to services and ensuring all of their residents are taken care of. But speakers highlighted how just as important as partnerships that bring city services into libraries are, those that bring library services out into the community also bring tremendous value.

For example, the Las Vegas-Clark County Library provides digital and physical resources to Hope for Prisoners – an organisation that helps those in prison re-enter their communities upon their release — to bring into prisons for use during family visits, so parents can read to their child and children can read to their parents. The library also partners with a halfway house, so when formerly incarcerated individuals are in transition, they have direct access to library resources. This is part of “a concerted effort to put libraries where the actual community,” as Kelvin Watson, Executive Director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library (Nevada, United States), puts it.

 As Watson says, “we kind of see ourselves as not just being at the table, but we want to be a leader…people know that the library is there as the supporter, but we are at the core of those partnerships”.

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Shaped the Library’s Role in the City and Emphasised Building Social Cohesion through Civility

In many cities, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare underlying issues that had previously gone underdressed, and the heightened social tensions exacerbated other issues. Libraries were not exempt from this environment, and in many cases, stepped up to meet the increased needs of their communities while grappling with new challenges themselves. In Las Vegas, Watson explained how “after COVID, we heard that in our community there’s a high rate of suicide in our senior population”. With social isolation being a large contributor to suicide risk, Watson saw libraries as a natural fit to help respond to this crisis in their capacity as conveners. The Las Vegas-Clark County Library now partners with Three Square – Southern Nevada’s only food bank and the area’s largest hunger-relief organisation – to host meals and give out food from libraries in urban and rural communities, simultaneously fighting loneliness and food insecurity.

With COVID relief funds from the federal government, the Ferguson Library was able to introduce new programming, like their Digital Navigators, which have since been incorporated into their operating budget.

The COVID pandemic, however, presented just as many new challenges as it did new opportunities. Bowles noted that the pandemic amplified inequities and spurred more visible anger. Debates over masks and vaccines directly impacted libraries, as did closures and limitations of service. In the face of these tensions, Bowles commented that they “validated what we already knew, which was that the library is the heart of the community, and when the library closes there’s a real loss in terms of having that connector, that community hub for people to go to either physically or online”. Rainwater concurred that libraries are at the centre of “coordinated responses to crisis and trauma”.

Panellists pointed to a post-pandemic rise in disruptive behaviour and incidents within libraries, with increased intolerance for opposing points of view and challenges to library programming and room bookings. The response to this, Bowles contended, was to lean into the role of the library as the “heart of the community” and a driver of social cohesion, rather than lean away from it by helping the community understand “the Public Library is a strategic civic asset”.

To this end, the Toronto Public Library commissioned a research firm to produce a study on the social impact of their library, adding to the more commonly studied economic and educational impacts of libraries. The empirical study collected quantitative and qualitative data to measure the social, intellectual, creative and emotional impact of the library. Bowles says that the results of this study have “really been a powerful tool for advocacy and for helping others understand the important role of the library in developing social cohesion, and as an example, the dimension that across all the dimensions programs”. The study found that programming that brought people together had the greatest overall benefit to social measures by demonstrating that the library is a “welcoming and trusted space where [community members] could express different points of view and connect with people in a real way”. The results of this survey and the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic led the Toronto Public Library to develop more programming with social connection and social cohesion in mind.

With this goal in mind, the library operates a Civil Forum where, before a lecture or event, the library will host a small forum with round tables and facilitators for participants to engage with one another and discuss the topic of the event. Other libraries have responded to the social isolation and heightened tensions exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as well, with a focus on civility programs. For instance, the Ferguson Library hosts a civility lecture series that invites experts to talk about what civility means to them while generating conversation specifically about how to coexist with people with differing views. In Las Vegas County, the library takes a unique spin on promoting social cohesion through their Tales and Cocktails events, which bring together over 100 people each month for drinks and book discussions, creating routine social interaction for people who did not know each other previously. Knapp added that for libraries to continue to expand their convening programming, resources are needed to help adapt library infrastructure to this new goal. She elucidates, “When I look at my facilities, most of them were built as warehouses for books, and yet that’s not how we’re being used at all. One of our most recent additions to our facilities …was built as a great big warehouse … and it just wasn’t enough for how people were coming in and using the library”.

Libraries’ Historic and Emerging Role as Digital Literacy Educators

As individuals try to navigate the flood of online content (and differentiate between fact and fiction) that can spark or exacerbate tensions within or between communities, libraries have been at the forefront of efforts to promote information integrity, including through digital literacy education. Bowles explained how this role fits neatly into the traditional mission of libraries even as contexts change: “We teach people how to verify information, how to find the facts, and the library is the place to go even before the Internet and technology. When it was all about books, you came to the library to find the facts and to get the information you needed. And so that’s just building on the traditional role of the public library moving into the 21st Century, where technology and social media and the digital environment has had such an impact on everyone’s lives”.

Watson set out the three pillars of digital literacy programming at the Las Vegas-Clark County Library: accessibility, discovery, and delivery. For his library system, where some communities are only recently gaining internet access, helping residents obtain information online is step one. That is why the library partners with the housing authority to offer devices and provides unhoused individuals with an internet-enabled cell phone, preloaded with social service contacts.

Knapp shared some of the innovative ways that the Ferguson Library is promoting digital literacy, including through the Digital Navigators programme. This initiative provides trained staff who can assist community members in a wide range of technological needs, from setting up an email address to apply for a job, to learning how to access government services online, to setting up a new smartphone. The library is now taking the programme into barbershops and parks throughout the community to ensure that everyone can access the digital support they need.

In Toronto, the digital literacy education now extends to instructing about AI with a new tech course to get certified in how to use AI, as well as housing AI tools on the library website for residents to use. Bowles reiterated the power of these education programs: “In the 20th century, education and access to information were the great equalisers. But in the 21st century, access to technology and knowing how to use it well are just as important. And so digital literacy is a core function of public libraries. And it’s not just teaching people about how to use digitised technology. It’s also how to use it well and to be informed about how to use it”.

All of these digital literacy efforts build off what is still a robust commitment to literacy and reading comprehension programming for youth, since early childhood literacy rates are a tremendous predictor of success later in life. Libraries offer literacy support for children of all ages and are capable of meeting a wide array of needs. For the Las Vegas-Clark County Library, supporting literacy begins at birth with a partnership with local hospitals to give new parents a My First Library card for their child to educate the parents on what the library has to offer and “how we support them and getting them into their children into the library early for those story times, hopefully, for those opportunities like deep reading”. Deep reading – in contrast to skimming – is a recent focus of literacy programs to promote true understanding of text. In Toronto, this focus continues at the preschool level with a reading programme designed specifically for children of that age.

Libraries in Stamford hire literacy specialists to go into the summer camps so that there is a holistic approach to including literacy in the camps, but also for those children who are having trouble reading. Students through high school can also use their student ID number as a library card to reduce barriers to access.

Libraries’ transition to providing digital literacy services builds on their history of providing traditional reading and writing literacy education and encapsulates the evolving role of the library in the 21^st century. As libraries expand into new arenas, they do so by building on prior success, embracing intersectionality, and staying true to their core mission. The Toronto Public Library does this with a policy framework guided by two mutually reinforcing position statements with one focused on intellectual freedom and one focused on equity. This consistency helps maintain trust in libraries as institutions, as Rainwater remarked at the session’s closing: “People are seeing library spaces as places where they can come together where they do feel safe…overall libraries are seen in a positive light. They’re one of the local public institutions seen in the most positive light, and I think we’ll continue to see that”.

Next Steps

This webinar was presented as a part of the Strong Cities Introduction to City-Led Prevention of Hate and Targeted Violence webinar series, focused on sharing best practices and building awareness of the foundational aspects of city-led targeted violence prevention. The next webinar in this series will be in July and will cover ‘How to Launch a Behavioural Intervention Team in Your City/Community’. Please sign up for Strong Cities Network’s mailing list to receive invitations for upcoming webinars and other events.

Additional Resources

• A Guide for Mayors: Preventing and Responding to Hate, Extremism & Polarisations, Strong Cities Network (updated March 2025)
• A Guide for Cities: Preventing Hate, Extremism & Polarisation (see Navigating Difficult Issues), Strong Cities Network (updated March 2025)
• A Ten-Step Roadmap for Enhancing City-Led Support for Community-Based Programmes to Address Hate and Extremism, Strong Cities Network (February 2025)
• Community Resilience Study: Kumanovo, North Macedonia, Strong Cities Network (updated February 2025)
• A Guide for City-Led Response, Strong Cities Network (updated February 2025)
• Bridging Differences Playbook, Greater Good Science Center & Bridging Differences (February 2025)
• Countering Hate Speech in Times of Crisis: Considerations for Mayors and Local Governments, Strong Cities Network (December 2024)

Contact

For more information on this event, the webinar series or Strong Cities North America programming, please contact the North America Regional Hub at [email protected].

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