How Libraries* Can Save Democracy
*plus Community Colleges and Children’s Museums
Public Libraries, Community Colleges and Children’s Museums underpin a hidden infrastructure that supports both our economy and our democracy. As Congress weighs infrastructure funding, it should support these institutions.
Do you remember 2008? If so, you might have thought that year would be the most tumultuous of your lifetime. After all, the world financial system came within a whisper of failing, 861,664 families lost their homes and — 143 years after the Civil War ended — the first Black President of the United States was elected. The next three years came to be known as The Great Recession and saw the worst economic conditions since the 1930’s. It felt like a generational moment.
Yet just a dozen years later, the US lost 20 million jobs, faced an enormous racial reckoning, saw more than a half-million people perish during a pandemic and experienced an armed insurrection as the U.S. Capitol was sacked for the first time since 1814. We surpassed the economic turmoil of the Great Recession while tallying up more US deaths than were caused by combat in every war since 1865 and nearly failed to complete an orderly transition of power in the process.
It’s tempting to isolate the economic, social and democratic crises of 2020/21. If we do so, however, we’re likely to chart separate paths of recovery for the economy, the society and the democracy. The impulse is understandable: the pandemic, after all, was not triggered by a wealth gap, racial inequality or the perils of the gig economy for freelancers, adjuncts and other contingent workers. The economy and the pandemic are visibly linked, but the road out of the pandemic shouldn’t rely racial healing or the strengthening of the Democracy. Shutdowns and restrictions are now yielding to testing and vaccinations, which should follow sensible public health guidance. And this process should revive the economy as well, right?
Unfortunately, the events of 2020 bound our triumvirate of challenges together, and the health emergency of COVID-19 is inextricable from the social, economic and democratic crises. 2020 was the year that health precautions like wearing masks, closing restaurants and theaters and curtailing gatherings became political issues. Before the storming of the U.S. Capitol, armed protesters entered the Michigan statehouse, protesting not election results but business shutdowns ordered during the pandemic by Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The economic effects of the pandemic also expressed themselves racially and by social class, with the American Medical Association reporting:
The COVID-19 infection and death rates were nearly three times higher in substantially non-white counties with higher median incomes when compared to substantially white, higher income counties that study authors called “less-poverty counties.
As the US pivots to recovery, we can’t forget the intertwined nature of our challenges. And while we’re fixing the roads, bridges, water, sewage and power infrastructure of the country, we also need to mend the local institutions that connect communities, allow small businesses to survive, workers to find jobs and parents to work.
Three institutions in particular are crucial to the economic and social health of our country: Libraries, Community Colleges and Children’s Museums. If this seems like an odd pairing, it is because these ‘Hero Institutions’ often work below society’s radar. Besides lending books, libraries are keeping children safe and engaged after school, retraining small business owners to compete in a changed world, showing patrons how to find accurate information on the Internet and educating voters. Community Colleges aren’t just a gateway to four-year degrees: they may be the best-equipped institution to help structurally displaced workers transition to new jobs in growing sectors of the economy. And children’s museums are a classic ‘trojan horse’ institution: favored by affluent parents for the rainy-day appeal, children’s museums fill childcare gaps for working families by offering free or subsidized afterschool programs and summer camps.
The bias of this article is both local and long-term and the analysis is based on a mechanistic view of how communities thrive. While the rescue of the American economy is being designed in Washington, much of the funding that flows from the federal government will be structured in U.S. state capitols and then implemented by county and municipal governments. Bad implementation negates good policy, and it will fall to local governments to carry out many of the social and economic policies in this sweeping legislation. Understanding some of the most important hidden pieces of local infrastructure may help our federal and state governments to better support the recovery of American communities.
The Pandemic as Economic Disruption
Just as an earthquake fracturing the ocean floor may trigger a tsunami, the COVID-19 pandemic spawned an economic crisis in the U.S that has hit some of our most vulnerable populations the hardest. The Washington Post has called the COVID recession the “most unequal in modern U.S. history” with the most precipitous drops in employment occurring among Hispanic Americans and the worst recovery from employment drops affecting Black Americans, who have recovered only a third of the employment lost during the recession. By age, young people were hit hardest, with twenty percent of all Americans 20–24 losing employment early in the pandemic. Perhaps an even more telling statistic is the unequal impact that the pandemic has had on women, with mothers losing employment more than fathers, particularly those with school aged children.
This inequality in suffering has tremendous implications for our recovery. In this pandemic, Americans who held the most economic power were the least affected. Our tendency to project our personal experiences onto others means that affluent people may view economic recovery as a foregone conclusion. But as the Pew Research shows (below), the economic consequences of the pandemic have been much more severe at the bottom, and the experience has been wholly different for these families than the complaints about distance learning, social isolation and restlessness that parents in higher income groups see populating their Facebook and Instagram feeds.
Indeed, for the most vulnerable parts of our society, the pandemic has been about lost jobs, food insecurity or outright hunger and the sometimes-failed struggle to keep a house or an apartment. It is not a momentary struggle but an existential crisis.
It is important to remember that a shared belief powers our economy: that different types of work have different inherent value and that the market can accurately price this value at any given moment. Underlying this assumption is a social contract — workers at the low end of the income scale will willingly undertake difficult and sometimes backbreaking work for very low wages because they believe that their children will have a better life. This economic mobility underpins the stability of our republic. Because of the unequal suffering this pandemic has inflicted on groups already near the bottom of the income scale — paired with an economy already experiencing historic wealth gaps — this social contract is in danger. Make no mistake: nobody can survive at the top of our economy if those at the bottom are structurally failing.
The Pandemic as Social Disruption
The death toll of the pandemic in the US has been shocking by modern standards, eclipsing the death toll of the normal flu season by nine to thirty times. But much of this toll has been born by the elderly (between 70% and 95% of COVID deaths are seniors over 65 by state). While each death due to COVID is an early death — and a tragedy for a family — the societal impact has been muted by the reality that around 2 million seniors die annually. There is no justice in this unequal toll, as the hidden nature of many of these deaths may have contributed to the lack of uniform public health policy decisions made around the country. We certainly would have behaved differently as a society had we lost a half-million children over the past year.
The social strain of the pandemic amplified a reckoning over racial justice. The Black Lives Matter movement started after the killing of an unarmed Black 17-year old student named Trayvon Martin in Florida. The movement grew exponentially after video of the killing of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd by police surfaced on May 26, 2020. The movement came to include thousands of largely peaceful demonstrations around the U.S., but was interpreted quite differently by different elements of the U.S. media. While this was largely seen as a social justice movement by the majority of Americans and mainstream media institutions, a significant minority focused on isolated incidents of property damage and between 13 and 25 deaths related to the protests (the majority of which appear to have been the deaths of Black Americans).
The Pandemic and Democracy
The most shocking moment of the first pandemic winter was undoubtedly the storming of the Capitol by insurrectionists on January 6, 2021. The genesis of the event was the aftermath of the national election in 2020, when former President Trump claimed that the election had been stolen and a “Stop the Steal” campaign spread among right-wing news outlets. Eventually a full 65% of Republicans came to believe that the U.S. election was illegitimate, despite a dearth of evidence, 61 lost court cases and the vigorous defense of the integrity of the election by Republican Secretaries of State in Georgia and Arizona. This movement culminated in the Capitol Riot on January 6th where thousands of insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol, killing 5 and nearly stopping the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.
The crisis is not over. A direct result of the misinformation from the ‘Stop the Steal movement is a surge in voting restrictions around the country. A higher percentage of the electorate voted in 2020 than in 120 years, and some of that was due to an improvement in the mechanisms for voting necessitated by the pandemic. While Republicans did well in most local and statewide elections, the failure in the Presidential contest and in the subsequent Georgia Senate runoffs sparked the backlash and the result threatens a generation of improvement in voting access.
Hidden Infrastructure: Economic, Social and Democratic
And that brings us back to infrastructure. It’s fair to think of infrastructure as the backbone of the economy, because without robust infrastructure — roads, rails, bridges, tunnels, clean water, sewage, telephone, cable and fiber optic lines and power generation and delivery — basic economic activities cannot take place. Today we’re seeing a crisis in global shipping ricochet through the economy because the infrastructure for shipping goods around the world has not met the demands of the pandemic, from dockworkers and truck drivers to ships, trucks, and warehouses (this description is paraphrased from the Times article linked above).
This weakness in our ability to move goods, along with other memorable infrastructure failures in the past several years, like the power grid in Texas and water systems in Michigan and Mississippi have led to a renewed push to rebuild the country’s infrastructure — something that has been much discussed to little effect in recent years. This may change under the Biden administration with the newly announced infrastructure plan.
Rebuilding our physical infrastructure is wise. It’s needed, it has been long-delayed, and it will stimulate the economy. It will be difficult to compete in the future without a better power grid and more efficient transportation. But there’s a huge risk that an investment in physical infrastructure without a corresponding investment in our social and economic infrastructure will miss the mark. All three are in equal disrepair, and the hidden infrastructure may have an even greater effect on the success of our democracy.
If we examine the pathology of a recession, it is often the same story: one or more crises lead to a loss of confidence in the economy, which tumbles both businesses and consumers into a recession. In 1990, concerns over sovereign debt, a credit crunch and a spike in oil prices after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait jumpstarted the recession. In 2008, the Great Recession was triggered by the collapse of derivatives backed by complex pools of high-risk mortgages, spreading fear and cascading to other financial institutions.
The COVID-19 pandemic reversed this typical order of events. In 2020, the economic damage preceded the fear. In the space of just a couple of weeks, entire sectors of the economy shut down. Consumer and business confidence were high in the early days, as a major relief package passed Congress and expectations for a short contraction were high. But the virus persisted as did business closures, creating a crisis of unemployment. As the first CARES rescue package lapsed, the economic consequences of the pandemic became real for a much broader swath of the population, leading to more business closures and a meaningful drop in consumer confidence.
As mentioned before, this pandemic was also particularly uneven in the toll it took on different sectors of the economy. Some industries (retail, hospitality, travel) have been devastated, while others are only mildly affected. Unexpected consequences (no toilet paper but lots of Zoom calls) were everywhere. The recovery will be even more complex.
Equating increasing employment statistics to full economic recovery is understandable, and it’s what we tend to see business reporters do on cable news. Unfortunately, it misses the mark while we are recovering from a recession that has created structural unemployment. Entire categories of jobs may not come back after this recession, and displaced workers will need more than unemployment checks if we are to avoid replicating the lifelong struggles of workers displaced from the steel industry in the 1980s. In other sectors, however, hiring will outpace the availability of trained workers.
These spiral fractures in the economy have taxed two types of infrastructure that are just as important to the fitness of our society as roads and bridges. This hidden infrastructure has two components: economic and social. And there are three Hero Institutions in particular that may shape how well we emerge economically from this crisis and whether we can stabilize the democracy.
Economic Infrastructure and Employment
The visible parts of our economic infrastructure are the most familiar. Startups need investors, whether they are friends and parents, angels or venture capitalists. Small businesses need banks for liquidity. Farmers need futures markets to manage risks. Most businesses rely on insurance to protect against catastrophic events. Beyond this visible layer of economic infrastructure, though, there are less visible needs.
For our economy to function, workers need jobs and businesses need workers. These seem like perfectly complementary needs, but they’re not. The kind of factory that fueled the industrial revolution that could take any healthy adult (or child) and turn them into productive employees doesn’t really exist anymore. Jobs are specialized, even the jobs we think of as generic. As it turns out, even fruit picking is a specialized job that requires workers with specific skills. Even if an unemployed worker has the right skills for a particular job, that person might live in the wrong area. Or the skills might be comparable, but not close enough to make it profitable for a new company to retrain the worker.
This means labor is not fungible and mobility is not guaranteed. Unemployment doesn’t automatically respond to a growth in available jobs. In mild recessions, we don’t notice this effect. When manufacturing plants close in rural towns, those areas might not recover, but they don’t often make national news. It’s easy to not notice that a bunch of people who lose jobs might never work again as long as the economy starts chugging forward.
This pandemic could be different. It may once again create structural unemployment by dramatically changing retail, travel, hospitality or a host of other industries. The jobless will find that the careers they had expected to fill their lives no longer have room for them. They’ll need the economic tools to find and prepare for new careers.
Employers will face an inverse set of challenges. For every AMC Theatres (Reddit investors notwithstanding) that confronts a changed landscape after the pandemic, there will be companies that support telework, contactless payments, tech support, automation and clean energy that need highly skilled workers and cannot find them. Startups and small businesses (which represent nearly half of jobs in the US) are particularly vulnerable to any inability to hire qualified workers. They don’t have the capital to make big, long-term bets on training new workers.
Healthcare is part of this problem. Small businesses may have a hard time competing with large corporations for workers if they can’t afford to offer the kind of rich benefits that require broader capitalization, even if they’re flourishing in more viable parts of the economy.
Job training is a fundamental issue, too. Few businesses have the wherewithal to scour the landscape for structurally displaced workers, evaluate them, create months-long retraining programs and support these workers while they retrain and then hire them. This is difficult at best for Fortune 100 companies and impossible for small employers.
The pandemic has exposed this glaring hole in our economic infrastructure. Creating a systematic way to address structural unemployment may be a key to a sustained recovery.
Social Infrastructure and Childcare
In his book “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline of Civic Life” (Penguin Random House, 2018), sociologist Eric Klinenberg explains how he came to understand the need for social infrastructure by studying a heatwave in Chicago in 1995.
During the week between July 14 and July 20, 1995, 739 people in excess of norm died in Chicago, roughly seven times the toll from Superstorm Sandy. But the loss of life was scattered unequally. When Klinenberg began to investigate, he found dramatically different death rates in ‘matched pairs’ of communities — those with the same racial makeup with similar rates of poverty, unemployment and violent crime. His conclusion:
“the key difference … turned out to be what I call social infrastructure: the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact. Social infrastructure … fosters contact, mutual support and collaboration among friends and neighbors.”
Social infrastructure creates ties between individuals in neighborhoods and forms a fabric of mutual aid in lower-income communities. There are visible and hidden parts of this infrastructure. Schools, daycare centers, parks and playgrounds tend to be highly visible. Food pantries, community centers, senior centers and libraries are often less visible. One of the most important benefits of social infrastructure for low-income families is that it allows the adults in a family to work full-time.
The visible pieces of social infrastructure that enable work are schools and daycare centers. These institutions care for and educate our children and allow parents to work. The rise of two-income families in the 20th century was a mixed blessing. While increasing family incomes, it also had the effect of making families more vulnerable to economic stresses. Single parent families are under even more duress. In 2019, over 1/3 of children under 18 lived in single parent households. In some areas, these numbers are even higher. In Cleveland, for example, 71% of children live in single income households according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count data book. Single parent households and two-income families at lower income levels are heavily dependent on childcare, but less likely to be able to afford traditional childcare than more affluent families.
The Urban Institute finds that while 73 percent of children under age 5 with working mothers are regularly in childcare, only 36% of low-income children are in daycare center-based care. The rest? They’re dependent on relatives (particularly grandparents) as well as friend networks and home-based daycare. Thus, each death of a senior in a low-income neighborhood during the pandemic has had a potentially crippling effect on a family support structure.
The other visible part of the childcare social infrastructure is our schools. Part of the reason for the urgency to get children back into school full-time centers around the inability for parents to return to work in jobs that cannot be performed remotely. And here again, there’s a wealth gap.
This chart, prepared by Stuart Andreason for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta from BLS data at the beginning of the pandemic shows — as expected — that the ability to work from home skews dramatically by education level.
Going into the pandemic, we already knew that the social infrastructure for childcare was weak for lower income parents. When the pandemic showed upper-income parents the difficulties of working from home without effective childcare, they experienced a milder version of the paralysis and insecurity lower-income families have been living with for generations.
But the ability to work also depends on hidden infrastructure. While public schools provide both learning and nutrition for children and free daycare for working parents, they leave important gaps. The hours between school’s end and the end of the workday create a donut hole in the wallets of working families. Why does school end earlier than work? And why does it end altogether in the summer? The answer is simple: to allow children to help families with farm work in the afternoons — in the 19th century. Affluent families may have little trouble employing a nanny to mind young children afterschool but working families struggle. And while summers before 2020 might have looked like a smorgasbord to high earners, they present a potential crisis every year for working parents.
Even the aftercare problem and summer care gap are not the only problems that hidden infrastructure must address for low income families. There’s still the problem of mildly ill children being turned away from schools and daycare and the extra two weeks or so of random holidays that schools celebrate and workers do not. The obvious solution to some of these childcare problems is to conform school schedules to the work schedules of more Americans. Until that happens, though, other institutions must step into this void.
The Infrastructure of Democracy: Information, Education and Empathy
“In order that there be society, and all the more, that this society prosper, it is necessary that all the minds of the citizens always be brought together and held together by some principle ideas”
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
While our democratic crisis has economic roots, at least three causes must be addressed at a local level. One is the question of information. Academic researchers have shown that even students who are ‘digital-savvy’ and use the Internet for research daily are not inherently good at evaluating information. The COVID pandemic has increased both the level of confusion and the need for credible information. While education may not deal with the very real issue of qualified news organizations spreading false or misleading information, it is an important step to combat misinformation.
Voter education is a second need. According to a survey by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in 2018, just 36% of Americans can pass a multiple choice quiz with questions drawn directly from the U.S. Citizenship test. Voters are misinformed about basic facts about the founding of the United States, the structure of our government and the relationships of the branches of the government. Because control of school curriculums has long been politicized, even the understanding of fundamental events in United States history like the Civil War is different in every state. Closing this knowledge gap will be an important part of our recovery.
The third need is less obvious but more important. One of the bigger issues with Democracy in the 21st century is the increasing polarization of the electorate. One root cause for polarization is a lack of universal empathy. Much of this is caused by the fact that we’re now physically separated from people who are unlike us — by race and economic status. Most white Americans live in mostly white neighborhoods. This is also true of income. According to The Brookings Institute:
By enormously expanding the footprint of the American metropolitan settlement, suburbanization created a patchwork of communities built by design to be spatially sorted by income
Part of the answer to this problem lies in municipal planning. New urbanism, in particular, seeks to recreate the village experience where walking builds community and different types of people at different stages of life can form bonds. But these are generational answers to a lack of empathy that might affect our children more than us. In the short term, the best solution is to bolster institutions that are already popular in communities around the United States, that already enjoy tremendous community support and that already bring diverse groups of people together from different walks of life. These are our Hero Institutions.
Hero Institutions
Small businesses need support and guidance, structural joblessness requires a comprehensive solution, single parent households and working families need to solve childcare gaps and citizens need to see and connect with each other more to buy into democratic values. How can we address these problems without creating immense new bureaucracies and scores of unintended consequences? By bolstering institutions that already exist in our communities, funding them, upstaffing them, giving them new facilities where needed and extending them into the communities that lack them on the blueprint of the most successful models. Rather than embarking on a new experiment, we’d be using a proven formula of best practices within our society.
Three institutions in particular stand out as candidates to help us recover from the crises of the pandemic: Public Libraries, Community Colleges and Children’s Museums. Part of the rationale has to do with what these institutions already do. But where successful solutions are not endemic to the institution, we can also find best practices: examples of success scattered around the country that can be funded and rolled out to peers. The odds of succes are higher because of the trust these institutions enjoy, their position and placement within communities, and their flexibility in pivoting to meet the needs of their patrons.
Hero #1 — Public Libraries
Of the three Hero Institutions, public libraries are the most versatile and the most central to daily life in American communities, particularly for our most vulnerable residents. Though they may be the reason that people still read for pleasure, they are also community hubs, tax preparation centers, ESL and tutoring destinations, 3-D printing gurus, and freelancer hangouts. But apart from these uses, there are four specific areas where public libraries — if properly funded, staffed and supported — can help save the economy, our society and the democracy.
Supporting Small Business
The pandemic has hit small businesses, and especially minority-owned businesses, particularly hard. The Paycheck Protection Program, which was designed to help companies survive the pandemic spent much of the first funding on much larger businesses, which tended to have stronger relationships with lending banks. Though the program was adjusted, smaller businesses have had larger challenges during the pandemic, and many have failed.
Some public libraries have stepped into this void. One of the most pioneering and comprehensive programs was announced in January by the Boston Public Library, the “Repairing America Initiative” The plan is a good blueprint for the type of assistance that a well-funded public library can offer to small businesses and includes:
- A partnership with General Assembly to subsidize training courses for entrepreneurs and small businesses.
- Helping business owners engage with the free resources on Grow with Google to help their small businesses transition to online sales.
- Babson Financial Literacy Project classes free of charge
- Goodwin Neighborhood Initiative — small business legal services free of charge.
Educating Voters
Perhaps no bigger challenge emerged from the 2020 election than the crisis of misinformation and the need to educate voters. Libraries occupy a unique position in American cultural life because they are at once highly trusted and acknowledge data specialists. In fact, the most common degree for library careerists is the M.L.I.S. which is often heavily focused on the acquisition, organization and management of information. So libraries are the logical place to combat disinformation and train students, parents and seniors how to spot false information online.
The second part of voter education is functional political literacy. Libraries can educate voters about registration, provide access to registration forms, explain the voting process, organize registration events, teach voters how to research candidates and platforms, host election forums and candidate debates and create education programs for K-12 and college students.
Building Empathy
Tony Marx, President of the New York Public Library called the NYPL, “the most democratic institution in the City” and pointed out that even in a diverse metropolis like New York, public libraries are the place where patrons meet people unlike them in a human context every single day. In smaller cities and towns that may be divided by class and race, it is the library that sees the most crossover. During the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, the public library was neutral ground that brought the community together to help neighborhood children cope and thrive.
Beyond the passive effects of creating a safe space where different groups of people continuously intermingle, libraries use programming strategically to build dialogue and start conversations between different groups within a community.
Afterschool Care
Public libraries are heavily invested in supporting children afterschool. According to the Afterschool Alliance, nearly 75% of afterschool programs work closely with local public libraries.
The Chicago Public Library runs ‘Teacher in the Library,’ the nation’s largest afterschool homework program. The Library engaged the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall to study the effectiveness of the program and found that they were reaching students who needed the help most — as over 90% of program participants also received free or reduced-price lunches in the public school system.
In a New York Times article, Sam Bilal, a high school student in New York, explained how central the public library was to her life growing up in homeless shelters:
The 96th street library on the East Side was my second happy place, after home. I would go there after school, get my work done, then go home. The security guard knows me, some staff know me. It was like a family to me over there…. Libraries were the place you could rely on and have peace. I’ve been through shelters since I was 8 years old.
An earlier study from Chapin Hall looked at teens in the library and found that public libraries found that youth programs in public libraries could benefit both kids and the libraries but cautioned,
Many library staff expressed the view that their libraries are understaffed and underfinanced, and, moreover, that teens are only one of many constituencies they serve.
Where libraries have adequate staff, appropriate space and community support, programs designed to fill the void in childcare can succeed. But, as the Chapin Hall study cautioned, many libraries do not have these resources. If a major investment in libraries is made in a way that provides the right benefits and incentives — libraries can fill the after-school childcare gap in a systematic way.
I should note that in many cases, academic and school libraries perform many of the same functions as public libraries and may help solve some of the same problems. The Hudson County Community College Libraries, for instance serve a student body that includes low-income parents with small children and they welcome [pre- and post-pandemic] local residents in their diverse communities to use the facilities of the library. These libraries solve many of the same community problems as public libraries and are deserving of the same support.
Policy Prescriptions: Helping Libraries Build Communities
The mechanisms for library funding and supervision are diverse and complex. Some are administered and funded by municipalities, some are independent and have their own tax districts. Legislators must be careful about how any infrastructure funding for libraries is allocated because the potential for diversion to state budgets or allocation by criteria other than need and potential community impact are high. Three things to consider:
1. Use the IMLS to Administer Grants — To support childcare programs, small business initiatives and community building, consider using the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to award grants rather than creating block grants for states to administer. The IMLS is a federal agency which already administers over $223 million in grants and research to libraries and museums and will be able to design appropriate criteria for grants to libraries. In Fiscal Year 2019, the IMLS had 593 applications for Library Service programs but was able to fund only 312 awards.
2. Create an Evergreen Construction Fund — The physical infrastructure of libraries around the country is decaying unevenly. Rather than allocating funds to states by population, different criteria should apply. Library construction investment by age and condition of the infrastructure and by the library square footage per capita for the service population may be more important criteria. Low income Americans should have a library within easy access, and adding libraries in ‘educational deserts’ is critical. Rather than dispersing an immense amount of funds in a single injection — which will likely inflate library construction costs and cause a logjam for contractors — establish an evergreen fund which provides for new construction, supports regular renovation of older structures and aims to get libraries to a uniform standard within the next 10–15 years would be preferable.
3. Create a Scholarship Fund for Librarians — one of the challenges of library administration is a paucity of librarians of color and the difficulty of pursuing a career in library sciences (which ulitmately requires a master’s degree) from a low-income background. Library Directors should resemble their communities, and federal support for students pursuing library sciences and for library staff seeking advanced degrees would help. Library degree programs need to diversify to teach management, space planning, fundraising, community outreach and other leadership skills as well.
Hero #2 — Community Colleges
The Biden infrastructure bill reportedly includes $12 billion for community college infrastructure. Importantly this will not only modernize the physical facilities at community colleges nationally, it will allow for construction of community college in ‘education deserts’ — low income areas with few or no higher learning institutions.
While this investment is vital, it is not sufficient. Community colleges are the best positioned community institution to address the issue of structural unemployment in the United States. Based on the uneven economic effects of the pandemic, we know that when jobs return to our economy, some of the sectors that contracted the most (travel, hospitality, retail) may not return at the same level of employment. At the same time, there will be jobs available in other industries that require specific skills and aptitudes.
Asking an unemployed person to recognize that she may never find employment in her past industry is already unrealistic. On top of that, laissez-faire economics assume that she will research growing industries in her area, identify the skills needed for these jobs, find a place that offers this type of training, pay for the cost of this training while still unemployed and after completing this training locate a potential employer and secure an interview to get a new job. Believing that mobility of labor functions effectively when structural unemployment is pervasive requires magical thinking.
Community Colleges can provide the bridge to retraining workers with structural support and increased funding. To understand how this might work, let’s consider the question of air traffic controllers.
Every year in the United States, 400–500 new Air Traffic Controller jobs become available. These jobs pay well (median salary above $100K), but they require a specialized degree, a medical exam, a security investigation and a pre-employment test. Entrance to the FAA Academy requires two years of specialized training. It’s a considerable barrier. A set of community colleges now offer associates degrees in air traffic control specifically aimed at granting access to the FAA Academy. But students still have to know that these jobs exist, find the programs and then pay for two years of highly specialized education before they even apply to the FAA Academy, let alone get a paying job as an air traffic controller.
Free Community College tuition solves part of this problem: combined with extended unemployment benefits to support living costs, free education would relieve the economic stress on workers training for new industries. But there are other problems. Air traffic control requires a specific personality and temperament. There’s the medical exam, and the background check.
By reversing the funnel, Community Colleges could help turn the job search for structurally displace workers into a more rational process:
1. Job Identification — Bring Community Colleges together with local employers and other state and federal grant initiatives for new businesses, so a pool of jobs requiring training can be identified.
2. Curriculum Development — Fund the co-development of training programs directly with prospective employers to ensure the skill fit.
3. Pre-Screening — Allow employers to test, screen and interview applicants before training in return for guaranteeing job placement upon training completion. Medical exams and background checks can also be completed at this time. This is exactly the way that our military academies work. Rigorous prescreening guarantees a job (as an Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force or Coast Guard officer) upon successful graduation. Local police departments in some municipalities also interview candidates and make conditional job offers before sponsoring them to complete police academies.
4. Hiring — when pre-screening and interviewing precedes training, hiring is formulaic. Trainees have the guarantee of a job if they complete the training with satisfactory grades. This provide peace of mind to the unemployed worker and to the employer.
All of these practices already exist at community colleges and most community colleges have extensive connections with area employers and cooperative programs for job training in place today. By molding these disparate programs into a single unified national job retraining process that can be marketed to unemployed workers, we can transform these individual efforts into the kind of economic force that would help us rebuild the workforce.
Hero #3 — Children’s Museums
A children’s museum is broadly appealing to a wide variety of parents because its most visible purpose is as an attraction and rainy-day activity for smaller children. But Children’s Museums can also be platforms for addressing the gaps in childcare for low income families — particularly after-school and summers.
2020 has been a particularly difficult year for Children’s Museums and they will need support merely to survive. The Association of Children’s Museum reports that:
the pandemic has had a major effect on children’s museum operations, resulting in lost revenue and reductions in staffing. In summer 2020, 75 percent of children’s museums reported only 28% of the attendance they received during the same period in 2019. A survey from the American Alliance of Museums found that individual museums lost on average $850,000 as a result of the pandemic.
The Brooklyn Children’s Museum offers a tuition-free after school program Monday through Friday from 2:30pm to 5:45pm for the entire school year — including supplemental nutrition. They co-locate this program with a public school to help solve the transportation dilemma for working parents, but suburban museums may also have buses or other transportation options available.
In Houston, a partnership between the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation and the Children’s Museum of Houston provides free summer camps at two local elementary schools.
Filling these childcare gaps can be one of the most immediately valuable functions that children’s museums can provide. But their value as long-term social infrastructure for communities is also compelling. They offer the kind of STEM and nutrition programs for low income communities that can help children succeed and improve their long-term educational success. They also provide the kind of meeting ground for parents in low-income communities that Eric Klinenberg describes and can create groups of affinity and support for immigrant communities and neighborhoods.
It’s not just children’s museums: other museums can provide similar functions and deserve similar support. Science and Technology museums, for example. are often oriented towards children and may be ideal venues for afterschool and summer programming. For this reason, the Institute of Library and Museum Sciences would also make a strong partner to develop national standards for afterschool and summer programs and award grants. As with community colleges, however, there are deserts. Any comprehensive program to support museums as community outreach institutions must identify the gaps and provide funding to build new museums where they are missing or expand them where they are too small.
Communities Under the Magnifying Glass
Libraries, community colleges and children’s museums are hero institutions because they are woven into the fabric of the communities around the United States that have suffered most during the recession. But they are also heroes because they have a willingness to experiment and a relentless focus on detail execution. An after-school program that starts thirty minutes after school ends and is further than walking distance from the school may be popular — but it may not support single parents without social networks who will lose wages if they leave work early.
Many public servants have the same practical mindset, particularly those at the local level. There is no doubt that our first attempts to recover from the economic, social and political crises of the past year will fail at first. But if we structure our response in a way that gives us the ability to learn and adjust, and if we rely upon institutions with the most practical experience in helping the communities that most need it, we can prevail together.
David Vinjamuri is adjunct Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University. He is author of Library Space Planning: A PLA Guide (ALA, 2019).
David is also an elected local official, serving his second term as Trustee for the Village of Pleasantville, NY. He is a candidate for County Legislator, District 3 for Westchester County, NY in 2021.
Contact: david@brandtrainers.com
