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FCPL's Social and Racial Equity Task Team

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FCPL's Social and Racial Equity Task Team

Fairfax County Public Library, Va.

Anti-Racism, Digital Equity and Inclusion | 2019

Innovation Synopsis

Fairfax County Government and Fairfax County Public Schools jointly issued the "One Fairfax" policy on social and racial equity in late 2017. Beginning in 2018 and working through early 2019, FCPL initiated it's own One Fairfax task team, focusing on updating policies, procedures and programs of the library using an equity lens.

Challenge/Opportunity

FCPL operates across 23 locations with more than 600 staff; it has countless procedures and documented (or undocumented) policies, as well as the litany of programs and services offered every day. Where do you even begin? For FCPL, it began with the task team members and their areas of passion. Each team member had to come to the table with a project or idea that they wanted to see implemented or updated. The group discussed and debated, but each idea had a built-in cheerleader.


Key Elements of Innovation

The focus of the Social and Racial Equity Task Team was on bringing their individual passions to the fore, and seeing ideas executed. The team comprised of circulation staff and info staff, managers and front line staff, branch staff and admin. Projects ran the scale from new multilingual marketing in predominantly immigrant communities, removing "nuisance" charges, adding systemwide youth services programming staff and creating a virtual library card for public school students that accrued no fines.


Achieved Outcomes

The anticipated outcomes of this task team were: to create a set of advocates across the library system to share FCPL's efforts around equity, to bring to life projects which focus on social and racial equity and to make FCPL a frontrunner in the greater county's efforts in this area. In all ways, this team has succeeded in their goals. They remain engaged around equity and future projects, even though the official task team has completed their work. FCPL is now known as a local leader around equity.