Faith, Culture, and Community
LA County Library
Innovation Synopsis
LA County Library welcomes people of all cultures, faiths, and beliefs. We aim to offer programs that reflect this diversity and plan to inform, educate and celebrate all the communities we serve. We hope to give people of all beliefs a chance to see themselves represented in programs and provide opportunities to celebrate their beliefs and explore their own and other cultures and traditions.
Challenge/Opportunity
LA County is one the most ethnically and religiously diverse service areas in the country, with virtually every religion represented in our population. LA County Library's mission of being inclusive and welcoming to all includes recognizing and celebrating our communities of faith. We wanted to explore a model for developing library programming that would explore faith and culture with an inclusive and equitable approach.
Key Elements of Innovation
In March 2023, LA County Library created a Faith, Culture, and Community Working Group to research and develop programming on these topics.
For youth audiences, we created a series of culturally inclusive Program-In-A-Box (PIABs) around faith-based celebrations and traditions that took place throughout the calendar year, and made them available to our community libraries to host programs around. There were 4 PIABs for each season (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer) that celebrated the diversity of faith-based observations for each season.
For adult audiences, we began a series of interfaith dialogues with community faith leaders and academics, moderated by our librarians, which explored the connections between libraries and faith-based organizations.
Achieved Outcomes
28 libraries hosted PIABs around faith-based celebrations and traditions during Winter 2023, Spring 2024, Summer 2024, and will conclude the series in Fall of 2024.
In the Fall of 2023, we hosted 4 Interfaith Dialogues virtually with a series of leaders from a wide range of religions. We hosted the recordings on a newly created library webpage for Faith, Culture, and Community and plan to continue the series in 2024 and beyond.
Based on these experiences, our working group created a faith based library program guidance document to distribute to all librarians to innovate and create their own faith, culture, and community programming for their communities.
