Volunteering

I've been a volunteer since childhood, delivering meals on wheels for MIFA with my mom and grandmother. I volunteered at my church a lot in middle school, and volunteered at my local library branch in high school. I've volunteered with people with disabilities, and continued to volunteer at the library in different ways.

I was a volunteer coordinator at a learning center for people with disabilities and the library. I know how important volunteering is to so many organizations, especially nonprofits who need more staff than they can reasonably afford.

I also know that volunteering is important for the volunteers themselves. Volunteering might seem like a selfless act, and it's wonderful to give up your time for a cause. But you're volunteering to get something back, and that's fine! It's important to feel proud of what you're doing to help out. And for many teens when I worked at the library, it's important to get service hours for school, or experience in a career field you might want to explore, or to earn a letter of recommendation for college.

Volunteering helps everyone, and I love still being an active volunteer with many organizations. I write book reviews for Teen Bookletters for my library system. I conduct storytimes at preschools, and want to expand that to parks and community centers in spring and summer months. I have experience doing storytime programs for adults with disabilities, and I want to start that again. I also love the idea of one-off volunteer experiences, in case you can't commit to a set schedule.

I am currently writing a volunteer manual for libraries, and I'm so excited to put all of my knowledge on paper. It's a subject I'm passionate about, and I love that I can put it all out there and help other libraries, and honestly - any other organization, form their own quality volunteer program. I'm just getting to the meat of the book so I have a lot of work to do, but Memphis has a wonderful volunteer scene, so I have a list of people to interview to really flesh out this manual.

Have you volunteered before? What did you do? What would you like to do as a volunteer if you could do anything, anywhere?

Career Prep for Teens with Disabilities

Employment for teens with disabilities is notoriously low, with 16.6% of teens with disabilities ages 16-19 having jobs. On the other hand, 29.9% of teens with no disabilities are employed (“Youth Employment Rate”). Libraries can help local teens land jobs—for the summer or beyond—by hosting career preparation workshops. These workshops should be open to, and helpful for, teens with disabilities and without, but some of the advice is exclusively for teens with disabilities.

See the whole "debate" at YALSAblog.

STEM vs. STEAM

I just wrote a curriculum of STEM programs for a rural library to hold for special education high school students. I was initially intimidated by the concept because I am a liberal arts major, a creative writing fellow, a librarian for the love of books. Thankfully I found tons of research and ideas for STEM programs online, especially on the YALSA wiki. The program ideas I came up with on my own, on the other hand, seemed more…artsy. Given my background, that’s not a huge surprise, but I felt defeated when I’d come up with what I thought was a great idea just to realize it’s too artsy.

See the whole "debate" at YALSAblog.