Every day, the team at Mesa County Library meet people who are new to Colorado, says library director Michelle Boisvenue-Fox.

“And after they get their state ID [license], they come to the library to get their library card—that’s how important it is to them,” she explains. “They ask about programs, especially things like book clubs, so they can meet new people. They want to learn about the community and they want to make connections. The library is important to them. Our story time gives parents opportunities to meet one another. It’s actually not unusual for me to hear stories from adults that these friendships last long after the children are grown and go away to college. That’s the importance of connection.”

In her 2020 TEDx talk, Boisvenue-Fox highlighted the many ways that the library system she leads works to meet the diverse needs of the community. In 2023, I had the opportunity to get an in-depth look at the current initiatives, which I feature in my recent book, “Meet Me at the Library: A Place to Foster Social Connection and Promote Democracy.”

The Mesa County Library system in Grand Junction, Colorado, serves an increasingly diverse population. Under Boisvenue-Fox’s leadership, the system has launched a number of innovative programs and offerings such as a public multimedia production studio and artist-in-residence space. An adult learning center offers ESL (English as a Second Language), GED prep, adult literacy, and citizenship classes.

Like many libraries across the country working to meet resident needs, the team at Mesa County has also found ways to leverage culture to connect the community. The Mesa County Library’s signature event is their annual CultureFest. Started in 2010 by a group of immigrants and refugees who were using the library’s adult learning center, the event celebrates all of the cultures in the Grand Valley. The event serves as a platform for individuals to showcase elements of their cultural identity from fourteen different countries, ranging from Norway and China to Mexico, Russia and Ukraine. The library staff and organizers continue to hear stories from community members who attend this event and are always surprised by how many cultures are represented in the community.

But other needs emerged during their strategic road-mapping process in 2023.

The feedback that they received from the community focused on the need for kindness and community — which was surprising to Boisvenue-Fox. In response to this, “community and belonging” became an essential pillar in the library’s plan and was central to the events and activities they hosted.

They built an interactive “Discovery Garden” at the branch on 5th Street and Chipeta Avenue to provide community members with education (such as compost demonstrations), food and respite. The area features a children’s garden, pollinator beds, food plots, shade structures and a shed that uses solar panels to power irrigation.

Volunteers and partner organizations maintain the gardens and host a variety of learning opportunities throughout the year. The garden harvest provides some food to local food kitchens and serves as a form of mutual aid among the volunteers and the community at large. At harvest time, residents are invited to bring a reusable bag or basket, roll up their sleeve and pick whatever they like — being mindful to only take a fair share so that others can enjoy the produce as well.

The garden is primarily volunteer-operated and grant-funded, with support from a variety of foundations, businesses, and individuals, as well as the Mesa County Libraries Foundation and Friends of the Mesa County Libraries. Soon, the library system will begin looking for a gardener-in-residence (GIR) who will be based in the Discovery Garden and will be responsible for creating even more programming.

Boisvenue-Fox says that, through their road-mapping process, they learned exactly how much the people in their community wanted a place to have conversations safely. “I had one person very vulnerably share that they didn’t know how to be nice to their neighbors who had Trump signs out in their yard, and they did not vote for Trump,” she says. “So, just really interesting viewpoints and needs.”

The staff at the Mesa County Libraries has seen the power of using books, exhibitions, events and programs to spark community conversations. For the staff, this is sometimes as simple as displays that highlight books about a particular topic, taking a “windows and mirrors” approach.

As Boisvenue-Fox explains: “Mirrors in that you have the right to see yourself in books and literature, and windows in that it gives people who have a desire to learn about others that are different from them an opportunity to do. And reading is one of those ways that is a nice entry point into doing some work yourself, especially if you don’t have close relationships with someone you can ask questions or learn from.”

Another subtle way of encouraging conversation is through displaying open-question boards. Mostly posted at the entrance of the library, these conversation and question boards have become a simple way for people to share their thoughts on a particular topic or in response to a prompt: How do you want to be a neighbor? What matters to you? What makes you happy?

Thoughts, which are sometimes anonymous, are shared on sticky notes which library staff monitor and also use to guide library programs and other ideas for the library.

Mesa County and a growing number of other libraries are also hosting “living room conversations” to facilitate conversations aimed at healing society by building relationships rooted in trust and respect. Participants can engage important and sometimes sensitive or difficult topics such as race and ethnicity, political polarization, or gender and sexuality. A six-part guide on grief explores the various stages that people go through — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and finding meaning. A conversation called “The Future of Work” grapples with the emergence of artificial intelligence and robots in the workplace.

Regardless of the topic, each event in the Mesa County series includes “getting to know you” questions such as: “What are your hopes and concerns for your community and/or the country?” “What would your best friend say about who you are and what inspires you?” and “What sense of purpose/mission/duty guides you in your life?” Deeper, more topic-related questions follow and include prompts such as “What assumptions have you made about others based on their politics or social media posts?” and “What assumptions could others make about you?” The living room conversation format makes it easy for anyone to host or participate in a conversation, and this relatively simple concept has been found to transform relationships between family members and communities.

For staff at the Mesa County Libraries, the opportunity to reduce othering doesn’t just happen across political ideologies—it also extends across socioeconomic status. Boisvenue-Fox says, “Since coming to Mesa County, I’ve seen that we have a large houseless population in our area, especially in our downtown area near our central library branch. While Grand Junction is very rural in the state overall, we have very urban problems here. And so one of the things that I noted in the Central Library was language centered on them — othering people that are different from you.”

The library is engaging in active conversations with the community around the unhoused community. Staff members have participated in poverty simulations put on by the United Way and worked to help each other to better understand the complexity of the issues and how to be supportive.

“When I get the question of ‘Michelle, what’s the one thing I can do to fix it?’ I’m like, there’s not one thing you can do to fix it, because there’s like five different avenues the problem can fall under and there’s not one easy fix for all of them,” Boisvenue-Fox says.

Libraries like this one are uniquely positioned to provide the opportunity for new shared connections and social interactions with groups from different socioeconomic backgrounds. While books are an important component, they are just one part of the equation. A welcoming and knowledgeable staff, creative programming and intentional community outreach work together to create spaces where entering the library itself is an act of participating in democracy.

Adapted from Meet Me at the Library, by Shamichael Hallman. Copyright © 2024 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

This post was originally published on Next City.