All right, next up on Big Talk from libraries, Big Talk from small libraries, 2021 is Diane Connery, who is a returning presenter to Big Talk. She's presented for us in 2016, I believe it was. And she is back again to talk to us. She's from Texas and she is going to talk to, I can hear us, about writing grants, which is something very important to all libraries, but especially I know I have a lot of our small libraries here in Nebraska get the grants that they need to help supplement very small and sometimes unfortunately shrinking budgets. So I'll just hand it over to you, Diane, to tell us all about how we can get all the funding we need. No, Brad. Okay, Krista, don't over promise. Yes, I am here to share what I've learned about grant writing and I hope this will be a conversation because there's always more to learn and people can share different resources because some resources are state specific, but I'll talk to you about my experience with grant writing, I am here in Potsboro, Texas and our city is so small, the tax base could not pay for all the things, the great things that we wanted to do. And so board members started looking for grants to get extra funding and it is this circular thing, the more grants we got and programs we were able to provide, the more the city was willing to kick in additional funds because they saw the great things we were doing and that it leads to new grants and then even beyond grants, it has led to community donors. I've taken several workshops, professional grant writing workshops from Center for Nonprofit Management and while I'm thinking about that, a message to tune in, while I'm thinking about that, that I think could be a great service to provide to your community. Our little community has a ton of nonprofits and so we were able to hire a grant professional to come in to teach grant writing to other nonprofits in the community, which was a great resource for them and connected us with them. And one of the things that that grant writer said that really struck with me is this hierarchy of fundraising and a lot of libraries, and I know the Potsboro Library 10 years ago, we were really big in fundraisers and it was very labor intensive, especially when we would look at the return on investment and I think it put a lot of stress on our board members and volunteers. So that fundraisers are actually the lowest level of raising money. If your fundraiser disappears due to COVID or whatever, then that income disappears. The next level of fundraising is grant writing, which we'll be talking about today. And then above that is just donations. And so so much of donations and grant writing in my opinion is tied in together through relationship building. I've gotten to the point now that sometimes funders reach out to me to say, please write a grant for fill in the blank, we want to fund that. So that's a great phone call when you get that. 10 years ago, I had never written a grant, had no experience with it, but it was essential for our small library to have this extra funding to offer the services we wanted. And so one of the most helpful things I've done throughout the years is to volunteer to become a grant reviewer. I've reviewed for IMLS, I know right now in Texas, the Texas State Library is looking for reviewers, so seeing grants from the other side of the table was so helpful to me because when I started with writing grants, I would try to be sound sophisticated and flowery language and lots of history of the library and statistics. Yet when I was reading grants, I wanted a clear picture written in simple language. I had no idea anything about the library that was submitting the grant. And so people didn't need to use up their whole word count or character count. I just wanted a clear, compelling picture painted. One of the highlights of my life, I think, is in Texas, there is a foundation called the Topper Foundation. And the only thing they fund is libraries in the state of Texas, in towns with populations below 12,000 people. So I got to serve on their grant review committee for three years and see the needs that are out there, which all of us in small libraries know the great needs. And one of the things I learned from that experience was is to think big. And an example I had early on when I was on that committee, a small library had requested two six-foot folding tables and 12 folding chairs so that they could offer summer reading. And the Topper Foundation denied that request. No, you can't have that, but you can have $50,000 to remodel your whole library. And so their mantra is always think bigger. Don't be afraid to include marketing costs. For some reason in the beginning, I thought that was a no-no, like that would be wasted money. But let me tell you, that is fun to be part of an organization that says, no, think bigger, that was just great. The other thing I've learned, and again from these professional grant writers, is sometimes you can write a fabulous grant and not get it. So don't take it personally, even though I always give myself a day to feel sorry for myself, because I feel like I did everything they asked for and I didn't get it. Sometimes you're just not a good fit for it. They're looking for something slightly different. If they will give you feedback on it, you may be able to reapply. And some of the organizations, again, going back to Topper as an example, they want you to call before you submit and talk things through with them. They want you to succeed. That was a huge learning for me, for I have trouble asking people for money. But what I learned is these funders, foundations, whatever funders have this money, they've got to get it out. They don't have a way directly to do it. They need us to ask for it so that we can help them do their jobs. That being said, going back to the professional grant writer, she charges, in my mind, thinking from a small library budget, she charges quite a bit of money to write a grant and this professional grant writer has a 50% success rate. So if you write a grant and don't get it, you're in good company. Don't feel like you did something wrong necessarily. Ask questions and the bottom line we'll be talking about is there really is no magic. It is making sure you answer the questions that they ask. I'm always surprised how many people don't directly answer the questions that are asked. So what we have funded in Potsboro nine years ago are, well, 10 years ago our budget was zero from the city. We were all donations, all fundraisers, that kind of thing, no money from the city. Then nine years ago, they said we'll give you $4,000.  We're right at 40,000 now, but from our city that's a huge show of faith in what we do. So if we wanna do fun things, the things that energize us, we have to look for outside funding. And so right now, upper left, I'm speaking to you from our telehealth room. This is a service, one of the first in the country, in rural communities. A lot of people don't have internet or at least not sufficient internet and there are very few healthcare providers. So people actually have worse health outcomes in rural communities. Often they'll put off going to the doctor. So now we have a virtual health room set up so that people in the community can come in and connect with their doctors remotely. This was funded through a network of National Library of Medicine gave us $20,000 to do the hardware and the software and set it up. And while I love that $20,000, I think what's even more important that has come from that is the incredible partnerships we have made with healthcare providers, academic facilities in getting this up and running. Like how do we make this work? So, and then the healthcare providers let me know that there's huge federal money on the way. It's in the pipeline for telehealth. They need us rural libraries to make this happen. They've got the healthcare providers but they don't have a space and a connection in a rural community to make this real. And that's what as rural libraries, small rural libraries, we're the doers. We are on the front lines. And so we can connect these people with theories and ideas and money to the people who really need our services. So telehealth I am super excited about. You'll be hearing more about that. Below that you see our, that's half of our library, the back room, the computer area. And originally Krista had called me about doing an eSports presentation, how we got the funding for that. And so we just evolved from there. That was an IMLS grant, about $50,000 for an IMLS grant. Again, that grant was targeted to small and rural libraries. So it allowed us to get screaming fast computers and the best internet connection in town. And I will tell you, and this is just my bio, our library is not very much about books. We are about technology. We connect people with information and more and more in today's society. Information comes via the internet. So not only do the gamers get to use that screaming fast internet connection, but everybody who comes in here all week long and then our Wi-Fi 24-7 outside of the library is using that internet as well. And we pay coaches, players from the eSports team at a local college come in and mentor our teams who are in this program. And then we had a private foundation when I reached out and said, ooh, we need better gaming chairs. These chairs aren't very comfortable. They gave us, I believe it was $3,000 for these super deluxe gaming chairs that are just awesome. So one grant leads to another and you get this funding. People wanna be part of something exciting and positive going on. And a little less positive, I guess at least in how it started, the bottom left, you'll see Potsboro internet and it's a little bit cut off. But the blue markers you see that on that were students who were identified when school shut down last spring who did not have internet in their home. And so the colored markers you see, we received funding through a nonprofit gigabit libraries network said, hey, how about if we send you money to put in neighborhood access stations near where the students are so that if they don't have cars, which is a thing in Potsboro, a lot of people don't have cars and there is no public transportation and really rideshare is not a thing here. Like Uber or Lyft is not a thing.  So we installed those neighborhood access stations. We checked out hotspots, but in rural areas, hotspots can be just paper weights in a lot of places if you don't get a cell signal. But we knew that those weren't the real answers. The real answer was to get these kids internet in their house. So we applied to the Texas State Library for a COVID grant and we got $25,000 grant to pilot a program that students come to the library, low income students check out a client device like a router that they take to their homes. They get internet directly in their homes. So we got funding for 40 homes to do that. And then through that, the word spreads. So just strategically a lot of times what we do on grant writing is we want things that attract media buzz because the word spreads, things that people get excited about, non-traditional. They talk about libraries transforming libraries 2.0 and 3.0. What is our role? Christa mentioned budgets are being cut and in our town, the town does not have enough money to devote to us providing what they call quality of life. They want essential services. So if they want essential services, let's do something that gets their attention. And then in July, when I go before budget hearings, I say look at what we're doing. So center program, there is the Potsboro Library of Things. We got some funding again through the Texas State Library to be able to check out non-traditional items. So outdoor games, bicycles, a lot of things that were related to health and movement. So things you could go to the park and play horseshoes, that sort of thing. But we check out pressure washers and carpet cleaners and canning supplies and just all manner of things. And that's our library of things. So we got initial seed funding through the Texas State Library. And then in one of the best days of my life, somebody walked in here, a generous citizen, handed me a check for $10,000, no strings attached and just said, Diane, we trust you to do something that is meaningful for the community. And so that funded the bulk of the library of things. We are an area with a lot of older adults, I myself am a grandmother now, but I don't wanna buy all the high chairs and everything because they don't visit that frequently. And so the library of things has those things that you just use occasionally, but don't want to pay for or to store at home. Up and right, Diane. That's awesome. Obviously, your work on doing these other grants and what you've done made that community member say, I trust you, you can go for it. That is amazing, that's awesome. That's one of the trickle-down things of this too. You do the more you do this, the more people notice it and it keeps, you know, just rolls. And we have two questions that just came in, two different people ask the same exact thing and I'm not sure if you're gonna talk about it more because I know we're talking more about the grants, but they wanna know and I think other people need to. Where do you, and how do you store all those things? I mean, you just said, you don't have it at home, where to keep it, but we do hear, how are you doing that? We, I don't have a picture of it in this slide show, but we bought a metal shed, a metal building with some of the money. So it's actually out in our back parking lot. Now some of the things that are more sensitive to temperature, like cameras and GoPros, that sort of thing we keep inside the library. But library of things is absolutely scalable because I've heard of other libraries who start with cookie cutters. We keep our educational games inside. So people can check out things that help, their games that help kids learn, their letters, numbers, that sort of thing. And one other question, just quick human, and I know this isn't really a topic you're talking about, with being able to check them out, do you have some sort of disclaimer about you're not responsible for mis-melt functions or things like you talk about high chairs if a child gets injured or something, I assume there's. We do, as libraries often do. I think we borrowed maybe from the Sacramento library, and I'll be happy to share that. I'll give my contact information at the end. The one thing that I really wanted, and one of the board members nixed, was a power drill, because he was concerned about that. But if you look, if someone wants to do that- I agree with library-dependent tools, though. I have heard of that, yeah, I'll be clear. And also library of things in the United Kingdom, these are separate nonprofits, not affiliated with libraries, but they're just all over the place. And I've seen a lot of those stored in, what do you call those, like the semi-trailer box, whatever that's called. Oh, I'm not sure about that, yeah. Yeah, so that could be another storage option. And so if you look on Pinterest, some of them are super, super cute. Up and right, that was a spark, I believe. So Makerspace, all kinds of little grants that you can get through Target, or Best Buy, or various places online to get makey makies and little robots and things for our Makerspace. Lower Right was a grant. We got, again, that was Texas State Library for an outreach vehicle, that's our pedal library. So we can put a hotspot in that, and actually a little generator the size of a car battery. We go out to the park that's outside of the schools, so parents get there to pick up kids. And we're in the park, we give away books and let them use our hotspot. We can issue library cards from there, sometimes just do activities. And we can even deliver around the library to people who are homebound. We can deliver with our pedal library. At bottom there is our, that was early on in our community garden. The city gave us an acre that we have put in a hundred individual beds, and then two charity beds where people come together to grow food. And this has been a way that local banks have been willing to give us money because we'll put their name up on it's now got a fence around it. So again, just an innovative thing to serve our community. We saw the need for that in a slide coming up. I'll tell you about, because I know I've just been talking and not gotten into a lot of the grant information. So the grant, I think pre-planning is the key to success and making your life easier. We wanna think kind of it start with the end. What is it we want to accomplish? People are not interested in the program itself. It's what change is it going to make? We need to be able to find the people who care and then just think through all the, what is really needed with it? How much money is needed and our capacity to make it happen? There are sometimes that are grants that when you get them, it's good news, bad news. Like, oh boy, I got the grant. Now I have to manage it. And I say that because some grants require so much reporting that the end of it, I'll say, gosh, I wish we hadn't gotten that $1,000 or whatever it was. And we won't apply for that one again just because it's such a time commitment on our staff. So we just really need to do this advanced planning to get started. And I've got some templates to show you. One piece of it, when we're talking about relationships is thinking about tying it in with our elevator speech. What will change? And we all should probably have multiple elevator speeches for different functions. And then all our board members need to be practiced on an elevator speech. And so we're not starting talking about us and what we do. We paint a picture of what the problem is. Did you know in Pottsboro, there are so many people who live in low income apartments right around the library and they don't have transportation that they can't reach a grocery store. The only place that they can buy food is at the dollar store because it's within walking distance. As a result of the community garden that we started, people can now grow their own produce, fresh organic produce. And as a result of the cargo bicycles that we got in our library of things, people are now able to reach the grocery store and buy fresh produce. So it's just about painting this picture, not talking about us initially, it's what the problem is. What is the problem before we ever intervened? And going along with this again is building relationships. I had a call two days ago with the United Way director in our area. I hadn't met her before, but she saw on Facebook what we've been doing during this incredible ice storm, power outage and water outage. And she reached out to me and she said, if you ever need anything, let's talk, you're a doer to make things happen in the community, so let me know what you need. And I said, well, as a matter of fact, I need $8,000 for this cabinet to put on a tower to protect the broadcast equipment for the internet. And within 30 minutes, she said, it's yours. So again, some of it's by grants, but it's all, even with grants, it's about building these relationships and things like a lot of people in libraries are shy about talking about what they do and there's so many great things going on. I often think, oh, I've got this brilliant idea. I'm sure I'm the first person to ever think about it. And then later on, I'll find out, like, no, people have been doing this for years, but I just didn't know about it. So I think we can all help each other by sharing this information. So it's the difference between what we hear all the time and this compelling story, especially through the pandemic, I have learned we need to be better storytellers. When I'm talking about internet infrastructure, that is dry and boring and people tune out. But if I can talk about the mom who lives in a modular home in a neighborhood that the only internet access is satellite, she has five children at home. Three of those children have special needs. She earned her GED the mom did three years ago. She doesn't feel qualified to teach those kids. So if it's a year out of school and they have no internet, and by the way, the family has one car, her husband takes that to work Monday through Friday, how are those kids ever gonna be on a level playing field with their peers? And so you tell that story in a nonprofit in California, says, what do you need, how much to put up a tower in that neighborhood? And it was $10,000. And that neighborhood now has internet. So having a powerful story to tell, I think it is kind of the foundation of what we're doing. Sorry about that. So telehealth, did you know that older adults in Potsboro can't get to the doctor that many of them don't even have phones in their house, not even landlines. What they have are old cell phones without a data package, but they will make emergency calls. So those people plug in those cell phones to call or volunteer fire department to help transfer them from the bed or if they've fallen to get up. And so as a result of this funding, we can get people telephones. So it's always just about how you paint this picture. And rural libraries are so much more powerful and important and transformative than most of us know. So now onto the grant specifics. This is a logic model. And so before you put pen to paper, you start thinking about what the situation is. So maybe the situation is that in our community, a lot of people don't have computers at home, they don't have internet at home. Yet society is moving so that that is an essential service. How will our young people be in a level playing field when they graduate from school? Whether they're going on to college, whether they're going into jobs. The Plotsboro library mission is very technology focused. We want to help people reach their aspirations with a particular emphasis on young people and digital literacy. So what do we need to invest? And so we start looking at, we need a faster internet connection, we need computers, we need to be able to teach somebody how to use a mouse and what the parts of a computer are and all these digital literacy skills. So that takes staff time, that takes classes, that takes a program, that takes curriculum. Who can we reach out to because most grant funders love partners now? Oh, Austin College has an eSports team and one of their missions is community outreach. So they want to get involved with it. There's a nonprofit on eSports that's embedded in schools, but they want to learn how to work with libraries. They can help us. So you start looking at, okay, we can do computer classes, we can have an eSports team, we can help on a daily basis, people who come in to fill out, they need to fill out a benefits form online and they've never touched a computer in their life. And then we go to the outcomes. The short term, what's the median term? What's the long-term impact? And so short term maybe that person can start getting a benefits check that they are sorely in need of right away. And this gives them the ability to then look for jobs and think about things beyond being hungry and what are they gonna be able to eat for dinner tonight? And that can change their lives because they can then get a job that will be transformative for them. So you get organized, you spend time thinking through what the need is, what activity you plan, and what results you believe will occur. And just to tell a story on myself, in the beginning, I promised the world, I thought the more I'm going to change all these lives with this one little program, and it was a little overdone. So be realistic with what your goals are because once you get that funding and then you have to report, you're going to feel awkward if you say, ooh, fewer people came to the program than I anticipated. And it didn't necessarily change their lives. So really think through that. And this is just a visual way to present a plan program and you get at your underlying assumptions and outcomes. And please work on this with some partners. Get some people, board members, whoever, who can help you think through these pieces. So... You have a question about that, the logic model there. Just wanted to know, I know as we've said before or anyone who's coming in hasn't heard, we will have all these slides available for you afterwards along with the recording. But this specific thing that people can use, can you send me a copy of that as an individual page that they could use as a worksheet or something? I can do that. Yeah, so we'll have that available too separately because it'll be in the slides, but I know you're going to want to work with one. Yes, I think I can sit you on a PDF. You can just print out. Yeah, awesome. Okay, grant information. This took me way too long to figure out, but I now have in the cloud, in the Google Drive, I have all sorts of information that is asked for on 80% of the grants. What's the EIN number? What, all of these things that I need over and over rather than going hunting for them each time, I have a central place that I can go to find the information and then it can be shared with the other people who are helping me to write grants. And I don't know if this would apply in your area, but back to Austin College mentioning that nearby college. Every year they have a program that teaches their students how to write grants. So they bring in for two days, a grant writer, the nonprofit organization, may sit in there with a student. They assign to me. We spend two days learning how to write grants. And then the school through a grant pays for eight weeks of that student writing grants for the nonprofit. I've had some fabulous ones. And then some that, it was probably me helping them along more than they were actually writing grants, but they did do some of this organization for me. And one thing that I've seen from both ends is you want to get letters of support from the most prestigious people in an organization you can. Even if you have a closer relationship with somebody within the organization who's at a lower level, the higher in an organization, the letter of support is oftentimes that is meaningful. But when people ask me to write a letter of support, that takes time. So what I like to do going both ways is have a sample letter of support. So I can send it to the person I'm asking to write a letter of support. It's got blanks. I mean, they can use all of it or none of it, but it's got blanks that they can fill in and then some areas that they can personalize. But it gives them an example of what the program is. So what they need to be highlighting in their letter of support. And so some grants ask for all your board information and demographics and just a touch on that. I'm seeing more and more grants that really want to see a diverse board. So I think that's something all of us need to be thinking about when we look at our boards is aren't we bringing in, I call them the usual suspects, it aren't community who are on all the boards and want to do all the things or we really reaching out beyond for French viewpoints. So our library has a 501c3, the friends group, many grants we have to apply through the 501c3 and then other grants like IMLS or Texas State Library, we apply through this city. Okay, so demographics, here's one page that I keep in my Google Drive and it's got all the links, American Community Survey within census.gov gives an incredible amount of detail. How long do people in your community commute to work and just all of these things. So again, if you keep these dry in your drive or however you keep things in the cloud, it's very time saving and efficient to be able to refer back to those things. And just as an aside, today is actually my first day, I'm no longer the library director, I am now the special projects librarian. And so it was very helpful for me to be able to pass on the person who's moving into that position. All of this stuff is in the cloud, so she's ready to go with it. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. I am so excited. I get to do the stuff that energizes me. I'm not worried about replacing the heating filter or something. The website you gave for the census data, can you repeat that again? It was at the... Yes, go to data.census.gov and then you can get into the American Community Survey through that. Yeah, the Census Bureau has all the data you're gonna need for demographics, definitely. So yeah, data.census.gov is the website and you can look up your community, your county, your city and find everything you need there, yeah. Yes, and down to census tracks. And sometimes that will help you in your grant writing because I may look at a certain population and it's not lower income, but if I go by a census track, it is. So free and reduced lunch, all those kinds of things, you can really pinpoint, target what you need for your grant. And just as an aside, one of the warnings in grant writing is not to chase the money because you'll see all these grants pop up and it's like, oh, that looks good. And in fact, I guess we did have to chase the money. We had so many needs when a grant would pop up early on. It's like we can leverage that, make it work in a way that works for one of our needs, but you do have to be careful that you're staying mission focused that strategic plan. Are these grants you writing, are they part of a bigger picture? Not just a one-off that becomes extra work for you. So this is an example. This weekend I will be finalizing a telehealth grant I'm writing to the Texas State Library. And I know IMLS provides this and Texas State Library provides this and other grants. Not always, but sometimes. So this is the scoring rubric. So when you're on the other end of the equation and you are a grant reviewer, you are given a grant proposal to read and you are given the scoring rubric and you put these points in for each category and it goes on to needs assessment budget, personnel, sustainability, all outcomes, all these have these categories. And I can read a grant that is the most exciting idea I've ever heard in my life and man, this thing's gonna explode. It's wonderful. But if I look at these black and white sentences on this scoring rubric, if they don't hit those things as a reviewer, I cannot assign them top points. And so if the Notice of Funding Opportunity, the NOFO has a scoring rubric, you've got to read and reread and make sure that every one of those points is clearly addressed so that there is no room for the reviewer to say, oh, they really weren't clear on that. Then when you get big time and you've got all kinds of grants on all kinds of schedules rolling in and you've got reporting due and are you gonna apply again? A solicitation calendar is another thing that I use and I share with our city secretary when I get a grant in because she needs to have access to all the information and other people. And then this is just a way for you to keep straight deadlines and what you got before, what you asked for. That's kind of embarrassing. There have been grants I've gotten because the timeline sometimes is such almost, I've had grants nine months later after I submit the proposal that I'll be notified that I got it and I don't even remember what I asked for. So keep great records so you don't have to say, oh, and by the way, what was it that I asked for? Don't be like me. Grant tracking this I share with the city secretary all sorts of details. This will help you in the long run save so much time that you're not having to dig through files and that everything is right there. Sometimes like the T-slack grants, Texas State Library, they do random audits and when they do a random audit, they will say within 24 hours, we need these documents. And I've actually, the one time I'm thinking of, I was in another city in a cab when they said we need these documents within 24 hours. So I was able to get into the cloud and send them what they needed, not ruin my trip. So that was a good thing. What grants to apply for since we're small and rural libraries, I wanted to talk about this one, the due date is coming up soon, March 4th, but it is doable. They will give out $3,000 as libraries transforming communities focus on small and rural libraries. We got it in the first round of funding to hold some health discussions. Whatever your community needs to be talking about, this is the time to get some training in how to facilitate conversations. They've got free training on their website. Whether you get this grant or not, I would recommend everybody take it. But this is really how we find out what the needs are in the community. And for instance, in Texas, you may have heard of we had quite a breakdown last week of essential services and people in the community are angry and they are rightfully angry. And so one of our roles as a library is civic engagement. How do we get people together to talk about things that matter to them? So we are now planning a series of conversations not to place blame, we've got to get beyond that, but what can we learn? I think they call it like in the military is an after-action review. These people right now are saying they really want to get involved and they want to change things. So the library is the perfect convener for bringing people together to get serious about making those changes they want to see. So I would highly recommend looking at that grant. You can do it by March 4th, it's doable. So this is my contact information and special projects librarian. And Krista, I'll be happy to answer questions if we've got time. Sure, absolutely, we can do a few. Yeah, someone did want to see a previous slide. I think it was the one, oh, let's see, go back a few slides. I think that that's in before that one. Is that the right one? The solicitation calendar. I think someone's looking for that information just to look at it again. But yeah, we can ask some questions. There are a lot, yep, that's the one that you want to just see and they'll get it. Now, we'll let you know that all of the slides will be available after the conference with the recordings that we're going to do all of the sessions. The whole day is being recorded. I'll be editing it down to individual sessions. You will not have to sit through an eight hour recording. We'll have an hour long recording of this and we'll have a link to the slides as well. In addition, Diane's going to include the separate document that's the agreement form or what people asked a lot about that library of things. We're not going to ask much questions about that right now but she can give you that form there. And this would also ask, you had that fill in the blank letter of recommendation, the sample letter of support. If you talked about that, can you provide us with a copy of that for people to use as well? I can, yes. All right, so I am going to, let's see what we got here for. So at the very beginning, you talked about being on a grant review committee and this is something different than getting grants but how do you get on a committee? How did you manage to do that? How would somebody go about being involved in actually giving out these grants? The best job ever. IMLS and TSLAC, Texas State Library, so I assume other state libraries do. In fact, TSLAC just sent out a thing yesterday, I believe email saying they are looking for reviewers. So you just send them your information and they need reviewers. They reach out to grants that are available that are out there that you might want to be helping out with and just offer, yeah, or see if they're asking for it, awesome. Sorry, I was really, okay. Someone is actually working on that ALA grant. Yeah, let's go back to that page there. That ALA grant come out for rural and small libraries is great, yes. They did a first round of that earlier last year and now they're doing a whole nother round. I don't know if there'll be more, we'll see. But someone wants to know what is the most important part of a support letter? I'm a board member writing one for a grant for our library for the ALA grant. So what would you think be the most important part? I think to show kind of your capacity, your interest in capacity to do it. And then for this one, I think the issue that you want to, that's being addressed to just show that you have a real need for the community to gather together for that discussion. And I've heard all kinds of things from voting to story walks to telehealth, that kind of thing. So I would just say, what is the need in the community and why the library wants to be part of that? Connected to, like what you were saying earlier about, what is the issue in your community connected to that? Yeah. All right, what do we got here still? Just thank you, that was very helpful. Yes, awesome. What do you have any tips for gathering community input? Reaching out to community for input on doing this. Yes, I absolutely would take the training that's online. I've taken the Harwood Institute training, which is all about community conversations. It's about gathering a cross-section of the community. So you really have to reach out to all demographics, not just the usual people who show up at the library. And in fact, part of what we did is our town has an annual festival. And so we just had clipboard and talk to people there. We went to the grocery store and then we arranged in-person meetings of about eight people at a time to talk at the library. And the things that emerged in our first series of conversations really surprised me. The main thread that emerged, again, from a very diverse group of participants was that people wanted to get to know other people in the community outside of their usual silos. And so they wanted to cross the boundaries and get to know other people by working on community activities. And a community garden was perfect for that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that one is always a fun one, I think. Lots of other libraries doing that, yeah. Okay. I don't know what that is.  And this may depend on your area too. Grants, they're specifically for construction of new buildings. I know IMLS grants are no longer from the government, they, capital improvements like that are not something that can be done. That may be something to look into in your own state, in your area, here in Nebraska, we have certain grants that are Nebraska-centric that would be for that. I know Diane, do you know anything that's- USDA? Oh, yeah. USDA? Oh, yes, USDA, yes. I wanna get the exact name of that, I have that here. USDA Community Facilities Grants. If you just Google that, USDA, US Department of Agriculture, Community Facilities, they're direct loans and grants. So you can do loan or a grant either way for that one. So that is one that is a national that you could definitely look into. All right, I think we'll wrap it up for this. Thank you so much, Diane. This is a lot of great resources, a lot of awesome info, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on one of you, we might end up asking you to come into another session about the Library of Things. There was a ton of questions about that. For those of you that are not aware here in Nebraska, I also do a weekly webinar show called End Compass Live, where Diane has been on previously, as you mentioned, talking about the esports that she did. And we might end up having to have you do something about that now, we'll look for that. All right, great. I am happy to share librarians are great about that. Yeah. All right, I'm gonna pull presenter control back to me. And I'll just show you this, what I was just talking about the USDA. Now, this is specifically the one for Nebraska, but the USDA Department of Agriculture just look for, as you can see here, check your state. And this is definitely for public libraries, have a section here to get grants from the federal government USDA specifically for funding.


You know, you're helping others win these battles that they might not be able to fight for themselves. But it's all about helping thy neighbor, okay? And the more we stand in our faith, and the more that we believe in God and pray for ourselves, for others, for people we may not even know, our prayers are being answered. You know, every time I come across a homeless person, I have these little homeless bags in my car that I make up with, you know, waters and snacks and notes. And even if I don't get a chance to talk to them, I pray for them that they find their way. And that God helps provide them a home and food and shelter and water and all the things that they need.