Califa Group

Califa Group, in partnership with Regallium Consulting, LLC, and Nation of Makers, will develop and launch a new national collective of library members to share resources and learnings about how library makerspaces have and will continue to shift their services and programming post-pandemic. The project builds on Makers in the Library: A Toolkit for Building a Community-Driven Makerspace. The idea of a collective was born to support libraries recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, building on lessons learned from the initial project, promoting diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion practices for their staff and the communities they serve, and building library professionals’ capacity and skill sets. Project activities include researching models for the collective, forming a charter group of libraries to co-create the collective’s structure and serve as leaders, expanding the collective, developing professional development opportunities, and creating an addendum for the existing toolkit that incorporates learnings from collective members and new approaches to in-person and digital programming. Project outcomes will include best practices for developing, assessing, and sustaining maker activities in libraries following the COVID-19 pandemic and the collective as a model for organizations to work collaboratively to share and advance knowledge for themselves and the field at large.