ALA Members

The ALA Task Force on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion was created in the spring of 2014 by then ALA President Barbara Stripling.

The Task Force is currently in the information-gathering phase. To aid with information gathering, it has launched a series of short surveys to be conducted at times to coincide with the ALA Midwinter Meetings and Annual Conferences through 2016. These surveys are designed to help understand the culture of the association, the profession and our communities with respect to equity, diversity and inclusion.

The first survey presents the definitions created by the task force — equity, diversity, and inclusion — and asks individuals to consider ALA’s current alignment with those definitions.

The survey can be accessed at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tfedi1web. Responses will be collected through Feb. 16, 2015. ALA members and nonmembers are encouraged to participate.

The final, analyzed results of the survey will be reported by April 2015 via the Task Force's ALA Connect community and distributed through various ALA channels.

Please take a few minutes to answer the survey, which should take no more than seven minutes to complete.

“Embracing and celebrating diversity and creating a more inclusive profession have been long-standing goals of the American Library Association. With your help, we hope to ensure these values are upheld,” said Task Force co-Chairs Trevor A. Dawes and Martin L. Garnar.

The ALA Task Force on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’s charge is to develop a plan and strategic actions to build more equity, diversity and inclusion among our members, the field of librarianship and our communities. The most important Task Force outcome is the public and honest conversation that generated by its plan and recommended actions. The final Task Force report will include recommendations for ensuring that a continuing focus on equity, diversity and inclusion is embedded throughout the ALA organization.

On the survey: Consider changing LGBT to LGBTQ or even LGBTQIAA. There are many who don't identify with LGBT but who also don't identify as not-LGBT.

Also: on the survey or future surveys: Ask ALA members if they attend conferences and if not, why not? And send the survey to non-ALA members who work in libraries and also ask them why they aren't members and how could ALA help them become members. Do they feel excluded?

Suggestion: During ALA conference, have members of this committee or other volunteers wear t-shirts that say "Tell Me about equity, diversity and inclusion" and ask random conference attendees to comment on their personal conference experience around one, two or all of these issues. Either take notes, audio record or even video record the answers. Include questions about accessibility - did you find this conference accessible to you? What worked? What didn't work? Also - do you feel like your interests were represented? Did you feel included? and so on. Use Twitter to do the same and collect the tweets.

Thanks for the work being done on this committee!