The Racial Equity Task Force (RETF) was formed to acknowledge the historical injustice and unfair treatment of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities and to assess what current impacts may exist in the Library. The RETF consists of library staff, members of the Board of Trustees and the Library Foundation Board, volunteers and community members to share experiences and bring a variety of perspectives to understanding and addressing racial equity throughout the library organization.

This process included determining a baseline and context for the RETF’s work as a short-term working group to understand and center racial equity throughout the Library’s culture and operations. The specific actions in this process included analyzing internal documents, leading listening sessions with staff, conducting group discovery sessions, facilitating discussions, probing research findings, reviewing current and future conditions among libraries and exploring areas of focus for sustainable practices.

The recommendations that were gathered from the RETF process, research and surveys, along with external interviews and focus groups, have been organized into a Racial Equity Framework that provides a strategic stance from which applications can be developed through the library’s continued engagement over five- and ten-year periods. In the final analysis, the implementation plan speaks to the breakdown steps of each objective, which will need to be developed further through well-defined and ambitious yet achievable goals.