Planning the Community Council

The only true directive I have received from Siobhan Reardon, the President of the Free Library, was to form a community council for the North Philadelphia Neighborhood Libraries.  The council is supposed to be comprised of representatives from local non-profits and CDC's, PhillyRising, schools and day care centers, and the library's Friends groups.  There may also be a presence from the Free Library's board.  The Friends groups presented a bit of a problem, because only one of the branches actually has an active Friends group.

An invitation was created which was emailed and/or hand delivered to everyone we could think of to invite.  All of the Library Managers and I did our best to track where the invitations were delivered, and Ed Saeger, Cluster Coordinator, tracked the RSVP's.

I had two areas of concern during this time.

1. Would anyone show up?  Particularly, would the people from some of the key organizations, like PhillyRising respond?
2. Once they did respond, and come to the meeting, I wasn't sure about the type of agenda to have.

Regardless, we plowed on and continued to invite people and hoped for the best.