Happy Spring:
The trees in the city are flowering and in the pauses between sleet and steady rain, the sunshine makes us feel hopeful. About a year ago, Street Books hired our stellar Library Operations Coordinator, Josh, and this spring marks more growth: new librarian staff and a fresh roster of incredible board members, (stay tuned to meet them in a future post), who join our amazing veteran board members. We are feeling lucky to be growing the team and expanding the reach of our work.
A sturdy team means having the bandwidth to operate the street library while also doing deep internal and external work, as we articulate our commitment to equity and what it means to us in our day-to-day work. In May we will have an all-team Equity training and in the meantime, we continue to work on distilling our philosophy into words, exploring and deepening what they mean to us in our work and vision for how our community can and should be.
Since we believe in the transformative capacity of a good book, it's no surprise that the Street Books crew has an ongoing book group intended to help us study systemic change, and to ask ourselves how we can learn from the organizers that have come before us. Here are a few examples:
We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
2 articles on reparations by Nikole Hannah Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates).
We'll post more from our book list in the future -- let us know what you're reading that you love and that inspires you to work toward a more just future.
Don't miss our 13th annual ribbon-cutting and summer season launch:
Monday June 5th, 11-1
(1219 SW Park Ave, outside the Portland Art Museum).
Community, cake & drinks provided.
More details to come!