This is a great article in the Journal of Children and Poverty, by Vikki C. Terrile who works at the Queens Library, Jamaica, New York, USA. She writes about how libraries can support families experiencing homelessness, and how they can work with other service providers to provide this support. She makes the excellent point that the inclusion of social workers in libraries makes the assumption that the work a library can do for this community is based on correction of their homelessness – that “the presence of social workers [in libraries] … assumes that the most pressing library-related needs of people who are homeless are corrective”. She goes on to suggest that perhaps it isn’t the library’s job to make people experiencing homelessness correct their housing situation. Maybe by adding in social work services to a library’s offerings, that library is perpetuating the impression that a person experiencing homelessness has in some way failed and needs correcting. She writes: “Libraries [are] developing programs and services to make people who are experiencing homelessness more like everyone else”.

This is an interesting perspective to think about. Should libraries provide services and programs specifically for people experiencing homelessness to help them with their housing situation? Or should they leave that work to the specialist housing services that are set up to do just that? Should libraries instead focus on making ALL their services, spaces, and programs welcoming and accessible to people experiencing homelessness along with everyone else so libraries’ relationships with this community isn’t about housing at all, but is instead about community, connection, belonging, recognition of abilites rather than deficits? Maybe libraries should be taking both approaches?

I am looking forward to talking to people who are experiencing homelessness or insecure housing about what they want from their libraries so we can learn from their ideas and perspective.

Here is the citation for Terrile’s article if you would like to read it:
Vikki C. Terrile (2016) Public library support of families experiencing homelessness, Journal of Children and Poverty, 22:2, 133-146, DOI: 10.1080/10796126.2016.1209166