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, everyone, this is April, disembodied voice, welcoming you to Teen Volunteer Programs, Building a Teen Volunteer Program that Works for You with Alyssa Taft from the Cranston Public Library in Cranston, Rhode Island.Thank you so much, Alyssa. Thanks, everyone, for being here. And I'll let you take it away.All right, hello, everyone. Just give me one second while I share my screen and get my presentation up.All righty.Here we go. So, April, let me know if it doesn't look right or you can't hear me. I'm in my slightly echoey teen room, so I hope that all of you can hear me OK.It looks good and I can hear you fine. Thank you.Beautiful. All right. Let's see if I can hide this little. All right. Beautiful. So welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for being here with me today. So this is Building a Teen Volunteer Program that Works for You.So my name is Alice Taft and I am the librarian at Cranston Public Library in Cranston, Rhode Island.So we're going to try and keep it hopefully like a half hour, 40 minutes, so that we have some time at the end for questions, because I'd also love to hear what all of you are doing for teen volunteering. But I'm going to go over the Cranston Public Library team volunteer program, some common problems that I myself have come across or my colleagues have come across and some brainstorm ideas on how to remedy them. Just some general tips and tricks and then volunteering during Covid-19. So up until that switch over to volunteering during Covid-19, I'm going to talk pre-pandemic, and then we'll talk a little bit about what I've been doing recently and moving forward.All right, so why teen volunteer programs? I've been at my job for about a year and a half now. Previously I was a school librarian, so it was a big switch for me. And one of the things that I just maybe I knew would be a big part of my job, but I was anticipating just how big of a part it would be was this teen volunteer program. So when I took over as the teen librarian here at Cranston, it just was, became a huge part of my job. I really enjoyed it. And I definitely made some changes to our program, some tweaks, and I did a lot of research in the process. So it's just sort of like fell into being something that I'm really interested in and really passionate about. And because it is such a big part of my job, I'm just always interested in how do I make it bigger and better and work better for my library. All right, so now let's talk logistics of my program at Cranston Public Library.So Cranston is a branch system, so if you're in Massachusetts, you'd probably be like, wow, your library kind of sounds small depending on where you are. For Rhode Island, it's pretty big. Not all towns have more than one library in Rhode Island, but we have six locations. We have our central branch and then our five branches. I, we have one branch that's in the senior center. So I don't really do a whole lot of teen stuff with our reading room, the senior center, but our other locations are other branches and central. We do do teen services out of. So I coordinate for our entire branch system in terms of our teen volunteer program, which is not necessarily the case. Before I came on, we did have some specific volunteers, we had some branches that didn't do a whole lot with teen volunteering. But now I coordinate for the entire system.We have 80 volunteer applications, so all of our teens have to fill this out. When I came on, if they were paper applications in a big binder and I've worked to switch that over to digital, which for me works so much better. So I am I'm not going to click on them. I'll let you look at them if you like. I have a link to our digital volunteer application, which is just a Google form and a paper option on the paper option is nice. If you have like a parent that just runs in really quick and is like I have a kid that's interested in volunteering, you can hand them the application. It's also really nice that the branches like switching over from completely paper to completely digital. Having that paper option is really nice. However, every paper volunteer application that I get, I just put into our Google form. So it's all in one spot. And then I read the paper application. I really love just being able to search right in my spreadsheet. Our team program is grades six to twelve, so my two volunteer program is grade six to twelve and I'm pretty firm about that. We do not take college students for volunteering. We do not take elementary students volunteering. If our seniors are turn 18, they do need to get A, B, C, which can be kind of a bummer, especially if it's like their last semester volunteering with us. But that's part of the city. Something that I think is really important for my program, logistically, we do not guarantee a minimum number of hours. I will explain that real quick. When I came on, one of the first things that I really noticed was we had more teens looking for community service than we had opportunities for them. And so I had to really figure out how do we increase the amount of teen volunteer opportunities without placing a huge burden on our system. And how do I make sure that this is fair and equitable for everyone? Because I did notice that there are some teens whose parents are really Gung Ho, really enthusiastic.I hesitate to say pushy, but I think you have parents who will come in and really advocate for their kids hours and then there are teens that necessarily don't have that or trying to advocate for themselves. So I try to really think about what is the most equitable way to increase our hours and distribute those hours across a lot of teens. And just a little bit of background about our city.We have four middle schools and two high schools, so we have a pretty large pool of teens to draw from. And aside from just all of the other reasons why you need community service, scouting, churches, national honor society, there is a 20-hour community service requirement for high schoolers to graduate. So we just have a lot of teens looking for stuff to do to fulfill those requirements. So that is why I do not guarantee a minimum number of hours. All of our opportunities are assigned via email and their first come, first serve. So what I do is I will take that digital application, that provocation. I send them a welcome email explaining how the program works. And when I have opportunities for the teens, I send them out on the email list. I usually wait until I have like a couple or like a month's worth, send it out and then it's first come, first serve. Whoever emails me back when I talk to teens and their parents about them not guaranteeing a minimum number of hours for some teens, that's a deal-breaker, especially if they are looking for a large amount of hours in a small amount of time, which is totally fine for some teens. That really works. They're like, OK, I'll try and see how many hours I can get here. Maybe I'll explore other options. My program is specifically designed to give you hours over a long period of time. And that is what I explain when people are like, well, what do you mean? You can't guarantee me a number of hours? It's meant to be completed over a long period of time, and if you start early, even though I can't guarantee that you're going to meet your minimum, you definitely will be able to rack up a large amount of hours, if that makes sense.All right. So pre-pandemic ways to earn hours. We have a Team Team, which is our teen advisory board. We meet once a month. We have snacks. We talk about ways to make the library a better place. We plan programs that are kind of like my little focus group. And before the pandemic, I was drawing between 20 and 30 teens per Team Team meeting, which I was very excited about. We actually outgrew the room that we started in and switch to different one. We had a Bring Your Own Book Club. We've done book clubs for the Rhode Island Teen Book Award and the Rhode Island Middle School Book Award. And I've gotten some questions from people like, well, why do you assign hours for book club? Isn't that just a program? And what I would say is these are very specific book clubs that I work hours for, other book clubs that we have other because other librarians are running at different branches. Routines don't necessarily count for community service. These are ones where they are having to prepare something like Bring Your Own Book Club. They're are coming, they're talking, they're recommending and thinking critically about the books that they're bringing to the table as a group, and. Then RITBA and RIMSBA. They're sort of joining this community of readers across the state to read from this list and pick and vote for their favorite. So there is that sort of like democracy in process that I want to kind of give them credit for. It also sort of explore this learn to earn model. The Providence Public Library has an amazing program called Teen Squad. Definitely check them out where the teens actually earn money for learning and they do like really awesome classes, like coding classes. And I saw a presentation that they did about that. And I was like, whoa, that looks amazing. I have zero money. So I started thinking about, like, well, I can offer you service hours. So unfortunately it got canceled because of Covid. But I did have a teen cybersecurity and a teen financial planning in the works and they come, they learn something new and then they get to earn community service hours that have also been really interested in civic engagement. I want to talk a little bit more about that in my next slide. But those are all just sort of like program based ways to earn community service hours. And if I've got to do programming anyway, that also helped solve a little bit of that issue. I was like so many teens looking for hours. What do I do? So this was like stuff that's like not really extra on my plate.But in terms of like what we think of as traditional volunteering, we have a lot of program assistance. We have a ton of children's programs. And I'll just ask the children's librarians, the youth services librarians at the branches, what do you have going on? Could the teen help? And sometimes it's not even necessarily like they need a teen. They just would love another person in the room. The kid, like, dumps an entire cup of juice on themselves. They have someone else in the room to help them and it doesn't derail the program, program cutting stuff out. They do a lot of that. Essentially, feel like toddler craft times, everyone somehow will have them help with discards. Shelving is actually something we sort of moved away from. We are very fortunate, for instance, have paid shelvers.So I'm always very hesitant to give teen volunteers things that are a paid position in the building. So we have had more shelvers in the past. I do have or I did have before Covid, a scene that came in shelf for the teen area specifically that I thought super comfortable with. You're contributing to the teen area, but a lot of times like parents or teens will be like, oh yeah, I want to volunteer, can I show up? And I'm like, no, that's actually like the last thing that you're going to be doing when you volunteer for the library. Definitely different at different places. But that's what our setup is. And they're working on special projects. For example, at one of the branches, the services librarian was doing this big shifting project. She just needed a couple extra hands. That was a really great way to just get some teens in and made her life so much easier, I hope. But kind of going back to that civic engagement piece, I had some really cool stuff in the works for the election year. But again, I think the name of the game, I'm sure all of you are going through this. Covid derailed all my plans, but I did get in one Pizza and Politicians, which I can't take credit for. I read about a similar program in the Library Journal or Boyah, and I was like, oh, my gosh, I love this. I love any opportunity where teens who do not have a voice in our democracy because they cannot vote yet or the majority of them cannot vote yet, but are definitely going to be impacted by the choices that adults are making for them. And so I invited our city council president, Mike Farina, to come. That's all of us in our little sea lab.We had pizza and we chatted and it was wonderful. He was really, really open to hearing what the teens were passionate about and I think that it was just a total slam dunk that we actually had invited our senator, one of our senators to come, Senator Reid, and it was all booked. And then I think the day we shut down was the day he was supposed to come. So that was that was a bummer. All right, and then summer, summer is when we have our biggest surge in volunteers again this summer, not so much, but last summer we had a ton of teen volunteers across our entire branch system. I do a teen volunteer orientation where the teens come. We make sure that if they have an application on file that it's current and that they don't have an application on file. We need to get that done. Excuse me. We talk about just sort of expectations, you know, how like what do we expect you to do, how we expect you to act, what to do if you have a problem, if you need to call out all those things and then we actually build our schedule. So this took a lot of prep and planning ahead of time. All of our children's librarians kind of had to have their program set schedule set, but they just that we called them up by grade and the teens actually like signed up for all their stuff and they were able to build their summer schedule right then and there. We did accept volunteers after that and I kind of put them on that email list. So if we ended up needing more volunteers, someone called out. I just sent it out on that email list. First come, first serve. Whoever emailed me back at those hours.Already, so that was just like a quick overview of my program, and if you have questions, feel free to put them in the question box. But now we're going to go over some common problems because you might be sitting there saying, like, OK, that sounds cool, but your library is so different from mine, none of this would work.All right. mon problem number one, I want teen volunteers, but I can't find enough, so if you live in an area where maybe you don't have as large of a teen pool to draw from, maybe your students don't need community service hours or maybe like the school does a really good job of providing opportunities for them or they don't have to travel to your library, whatever the reason, if you don't have enough teen volunteers but you want more. Here are some options. Really make sure that you are marketing. Do. Have a flyer that you can just send as a PDF to the school librarians to print and post. Do have a brochure just so that you can hand it to a teen if you're like teen in the library, if you ever need to volunteer opportunities, here's a brochure. You are posting on social media, even places where teens aren't necessarily Facebook doesn't have a whole lot of teens on it, but their parents are. Are you doing enough outreach? So, again, even if your schools aren't necessarily requiring it, national honor society pretty much across the board needs teen volunteers. RTB requires service hours. Do you know who runs your local national honor society? Which teacher? Churches were a huge one for us scouting. You know, having just sent an email to your school's guidance counselors, pretty much all of these emails are available typically on the school website. You might not get an answer back, but you might get someone who's like, totally.I love being able to guide my students towards new opportunities to build their resume. A SAT prep class is like anywhere where students are going to be that are maybe looking for something to do, looking for things to add to their resume, looking for places where they can build their skills. In this model, you might want to guarantee ours. I think that's definitely appropriate. I needed to not do that for my program. But you might want to flip the switch for me. I have an opportunity. I send it out, someone claims it. Maybe you want to have someone come every Tuesday for three hours and you'll save things for them to do. That would probably work better for you. This also is an opportunity for you to do a more targeted internship program. This is not something I can do. I would love to have like an intern that comes and we like maybe it's the school library to me that, like, we work on different skills and we really build their resume in our toolbox and they work on projects over a long period of time. They have an application process that is just not something that I can do with the amount of teams that I have and the amount of time that it takes to coordinate my current volunteer program. Maybe you're like, OK, I can't get five teen volunteers, but maybe I can find one intern and really build a very meaningful program for that one teen.I think that is also super valuable.Another problem: I have more volunteers than I have testified than that was my problem, so really encouraging that prolonged involvement in your program is not going to be perfect for every single teen and family. So I am really upfront about that. It is a, it is a program that is built for prolonged involvement. So I tell teens when I do school visits that you start when you are a freshman, you're going to be done with your 20 hours if you are involved on a regular basis, you come to me your senior year and you're like, I need 20 hours. I'm only available on Saturdays. That's probably not going to be something that works for you and works for me. So, again, they're not guaranteeing hours if you haven't started as an advisory board. I love that as sort of my gateway into teen volunteering. I really encourage them to come to that program is just a way to really immerse themselves in the library and then designing programs that have a community service hours. So not all of my programs do. And there are some people that have done that. Not all of my programs do I think really critically about which ones that I feel I could really justify being like they are participating in our library community, are learning community. They're making themselves better. They're making their community better. And then I designed programs specifically around that.All right, another problem: Coordinating volunteers takes up too much of my time or I'm not really getting the results that I want.There's a lot there people would like you know, teen volunteer sounds great, but it's it just takes too much time to train them or to have them do something or I have to redo what they're doing. I hear that a lot. Totally understand. So my suggestions would be, have him try automating everything you can. Anything, you can drag him into a Google forum, anything that you can have automatically create a spreadsheet for you. So my I take care of taking all the hours from the branches and having like one central location where teens can come to me and be like, how many hours have I earned? Can you sign my paper? Can you write me a letter? So that's all done through a Google form. They keep track on a sign in sheet and then once a month put it in the Google form. It gets sent to me very, very quick and easy. Stay goal-oriented, really thinking about what is the end goal of your volunteer program? My goal, to be perfectly frank, is to make sure that as many students as possible can have a positive interaction with volunteering at the library and get as many hours as is feasible for them and for us. So your goal might be I want to bring a small number of interns through a guided internship program where they are going to learn a skill set.I have some teens that I see three times and volunteering you never again, and I still count that as when they got what they needed from the library. They got those hours. That's awesome. So your goal may be different than mine. So I think just really like making sure that's clear in your mind when you're thinking about, like, why is my program not working for me?Remember that it's for the service to the teens, like, I definitely think that when I think about what is it that I provide for teens. Community service opportunities is a big one, but it's also something that should benefit you and your library. So I never make up anything for teens to do. I don't invent a project for them to do. I really am, like, I only put out opportunities for things that are really, truly going to be beneficial for the library. Get comfortable with saying no and providing feedback. And I know that can be a little bit uncomfortable, you know, having volunteers that are doing things quite like you want them to, are showing up, maybe you're goofing around. So really just being comfortable being like this is why I need you to do. And if you're not going to do it, these are the consequences. Maybe we won't ask you back to volunteer and then also like that getting and say no. I say no to a lot of parents. It's unfortunate. A lot of a lot of times have parents come in that are like, you know, my kid needs X amount of hours in this amount of time.Had a parent come in who was like my kids thought they had all of their hours done. They're missing two, can my teen volunteer right now? And I said no. And it was a bummer because I know that that family did not get for me what they needed. But if I have that happen to me multiple times a week, that is severely going to derail my workflow and my workday. And I think also, you know, it sort of derails the program like I want, I want there to be some integrity in the program that I am running and only do what you are capable of doing. So if you have a small entrepreneur and you might be like, whoa, this is way too much, start small. If you inherit and the volunteer program is not working for you, scale back. If you're finding that you want to ramp up and really invest your time, really, to be honest with yourself, like what are you capable of doing with the parameters of your job and your community. Took some the time like.Already, some general tips and tricks. I like to keep records for each teen, you know, in a perfect world, every teen, we keep private records of their own volunteer hours.This is not going to happen. So I have a bouncer's reg. This is just sort of like the example where I keep their first name, their last name, the job performed. And I just add to that. So if they're on teen teen, if they come up with a program all of the months and then this allows me to keep very easy track of how many hours per month am I able to award and then how many hours total each individual teen have completed. So if I have a teen that emails me is like, hey, can you prepare me a letter? With the hours that I've done this year, I can very quickly pull my spreadsheet up, do control up to find their name. I just look really quickly and I can say, all righty. Lois Lane completed nine volunteer hours at the Cranston Public Library. She earned these hours by participating in our Bring Your Own Book Club. Super easy. It's all in one place.I suggest starting a separate teen email. I have a teen email. I love having it separate from my regular email and it just helps compartmentalize things for me. So I have my very specific, these are teens that I'm emailing from the team email and then I have my work for colleagues and such like.And like I said before, automate everything you can, Google Sheets and Google forms are like my absolute favorite things on the planet. I know there are some libraries who have who use, like, really cool software to schedule them and stuff. I just do a lot of Google sheets and Google forms.Maybe at some point, you know, I'll get around to testing some other stuff, but that definitely works for me and I really appreciate those things.Already talk up your program, more tips and tricks, the number of hours that your teens earn in community service is a valuable metric for your administration, your trustees, your community. You know, make sure that that gets counted like that was put in our annual report. It is a very valuable service and make sure it's getting counted by, by everyone. Like I talked about before, getting comfortable saying no. I think it's really important that you remember that your program cannot be exactly what every single teen and parent is looking for. And I think that you really need to define your goal, set your boundaries and stick to them. Definitely times where I've made an exception. But in general, I am very clear about what our program can and cannot do for teens right upfront.Define what success looks like for you in your library, so it might be building a team of 50 teen volunteers each year, or it might mean one meaningful internship for one teen. And I think both are super valuable. So if you're like, oh, I can get enough teens, don't necessarily think about quantity, then you really have to be like, what is success look like for my library? What is my goal? And that one meaningful internship could change his life. That, that's so important and so awesome.And then finally, excuse me, think EDI. So how am I serving and recruiting teens from diverse backgrounds? Can I partner with local community organizations or schools to reach more teens? So I am always thinking about the demographics of my city.We are a central library is located in a very commercial area. It's not walkable from any neighborhood, you really need to get driven there. So a lot of the teens that show up for my in-person program at my library are teen that are able to be driven by a parent. And that is a bit like that is a very specific demographic in my community. So I did a really quick audit of who was represented in my teen volunteers, because that is one of the questions on our application, is what school do you go to? So I realized last year that I had zero kids on my teen team, which is kind of like my little cross-section. I use them for a lot of focus groups and litmus tests, a zero kids from being middle school in my teens teens, and that is probably one of our more socioeconomically challenged areas. And so I was like, OK, so these kids aren't coming, how do I fix this? And again, Covid ruined all my plans, but I really wanted to sort of dig into, like, why are these kids not coming? Can I have more opportunities that they don't have to be inside my specific library for? Am I could I come to the school and maybe provide opportunities for them so that they don't have to go anywhere else? But. you know, I would not have realized that I was missing this demographic if I hadn't collected that data and been thinking about, like, OK, who is missing right now?Who are we not serving with our volunteer program and our teen teen?All right, Covid-19. So we have completely halted in-person volunteering, as I'm sure many of you have as well. So we have switched everything over to all our buildings are open, but we're not doing in-person programming.We're not doing in-person volunteering. So I have taken teen team in virtual we had our first one in September. We have our next one on Monday, definitely drawing a smaller crowd, but it was just so good to see them. We take a break in the summer anyway. That's something we typically do. So it's been since February since I've seen them. And just getting that opportunity to talk to them, check in with them was awesome. We did a Zoom call and then I also had a Google form survey for them to fill out for them. So if I had students that didn't feel comfortable speaking up or wanted to share something just with me, share their ideas, that was a way for them to contribute as well. As a virtual Bring Your Own Book Club for high schoolers. I got zero. My first one. It was to be fair, it was a gorgeous Saturday. So it's kind of like I would prefer them be outside having fun and be at my book club anyway. So we'll see how October's meeting goes. And then we're also doing a virtual rallied middle school book award lounge where they don't necessarily have to read any of the books if they've read some great. If not, they can just listen to some book talks and we just talk about the list. We talk about reading in general. If they are like I'm looking for a funny, but we can recommend based on the list. And then our hope is that some of those kids will want to vote in March for the winner.Something that had been on my radar and something that I really wanted to do, before Covid was start a teen blog, I feel like a lot of places have like a teen review site or some sort of like way for teens to review media and books and get credit for it. And Covid-19 made me kind of like prioritize how am I doing this, so teens can earn can be service hours for writing a media review or a blog post. And these are all live links and won't click on them.But it is going to be in the presentation of the Liveline is in the virtual tote bag. So if you're interested in this, you can look through them. I have all the criteria you can look at. I created a rubric again, school, library and background to create a rubric for each of them. And so you can take a look at that. And I also it's I literally just hit publish on it.There's only one review on it, but there is a link to our library blog. Hopefully one day I'll be like a WordPress master. I feel like I'm stumbling through this, but it's an opportunity for me to learn something new, something really exciting. And then I'm also offering something called to Build Your Own Community Service Project. So the idea behind this is that if there is a teen who's interested in doing a community service project outside of the library, we will act as a library mentor.And the way that I've explained it to other people and teens is that if you're a teen and you want to organize you and a couple of your friends to have a socially distant beach cleanup and a lot of beaches around, that's awesome. That's fantastic. You don't have an adult to sign your paper saying that you did that. Right.So if they're interested in something like that, where they have this idea and they need help executing it, they need support from an adult and they need someone who can provide that documentation that, that actually got done.The library, aka, me, will be that sort of library mentor for them. So there is like a process where they have to submit their idea. We brainstorm, we come up with an action plan. It's kind of almost like a mini senior project or capstone project. If your town does that, no one's taken me up on it yet. I've had a couple of kids and it, again, just launched this last month. So we'll see. It is an option for them, you know, especially if I have teens that are really struggling to get their hours done. Maybe they work during some of the programs that we have. This is an opportunity for them to really choose their own adventure, pick a passion project, build it in a way that is safe for the world we're living in right now. And I will sign their paperwork and I'll help them.Alrighty, I made it with 10 minutes for questions, so this is my email. Feel free to email me about anything if I put like a broken link in my website, in my presentation and you want to look at it. Email me if you have any questions, suggestions on suggestions, please feel free to email me. I love, love, love talking about civic engagement, team volunteering. I just think that young people have so much to offer and the library is just a really great way to tap into that. So I will stop trying.Thank you so much. That was awesome. There is lots of great chat going on and you do have some questions. Do you want me to read those off for you or do you want to tackle them on your own?I'm trying to figure out how to stop sharing. Hand over your picture of yourself. And then there's that like a screen with an arrow and you can click.I know. I'm like I hit it. And now I wish I hadn't hidden it. Let me try. I close the video.There we go. Did I do it?I see you. I hear you. OK. Good. All right.Yes. And can go ahead and look there.And I did want to point out that someone did ask about the slides and I did put the slides in the tote bag, which is the green button for the picture. So those are there. And of course, this will be recorded, too. But yes, some of the claps for Alyssa. So thank so much. That's the one thing. You don't get me that at the end.All right. So I see some questions. So do you require emails for volunteers then? Is there any worry about school kids who don't have computers? That's a great question. So I do, I do require that they have an email. And I definitely can see that excluding a small number of students, if they I do allow them to put a parent email on there. I really encourage the teens to be the ones that are receiving the emails just to level the playing field. But I do allow them to use a parent. I feel like most parents, if they don't have access to a computer, at least have a smartphone. Again, not everyone, but in general. And part of it is that I just I have hundreds of applications a year. I cannot call every individual student. So email is the only, only way to make sure that everyone has the same chance. Our high schoolers have a school email that I can email. Unfortunately, our middle schoolers do not have their, they have a close email system, but yeah. So the high schoolers should have at least access to an email and a computer through school. Middle schoolers, if they do not have that access, you know, I would definitely work with a family, but I've never had ever had a family be like I filled this out and I don't have an email.There's some details on the learn to. Yes, so that was an idea that I came out of, the Providence Public Library has something called Teen Squad and it's amazing. And they just read that they're building absolutely incredible and they actually pay their teens to take classes. It's a very specific program. They have a whole website, definitely check them out. But I love this idea of like learning and sort of like getting something out of it. We are competing with teens like in terms of the Internet, their friends, sports, other types of things they could be doing.So I feel like if they're going to come to the library and learn about something, that's awesome. And I think they should get credit for that. So I have no money to give them. So the only thing I can give them is service hours. So like I said, I started this project and I can't finish this project, but it's definitely something to think about. Maybe you could have a virtual coding class and give them community service hours for it. I think that be really cool. I think that's valuable.Recently checked in with the homework helper program and what has been the biggest challenge?A movie in-person programs to first of all. I think everyone is really feeling the, like, virtual program burnout out. It's a lot. It's definitely different. I think my biggest challenge was just making sure that it was safe, you know, making sure that it was engaging and making sure that there are multiple ways for teens to participate. So I said I have my virtual teen team, but I also include a link to a Google survey, Google form for them to fill out so that if they feel uncomfortable in that virtual Zoom environment in a way that maybe they didn't feel uncomfortable in person, there are multiple ways for them to interact. So that, I think has been my biggest challenge is thinking of ways that everyone feels like they're ready to interact with virtual programs. What do you suggest for the teens that are bored of the task that you have for them and get bored? That is an awesome question. I say boredom is important. A lot of times you may be asked in life to do super boring stuff. The point of a teen on my teen volunteer program is not to entertain them. They are doing community service hours and they are helping the library. So if they come to a program and their job is to sit in the room while a story is being told, and then maybe the last 10 minutes of the program, they help out with the craft and they're just another person in the room in case a kid needs to use the restroom and they need to direct them and make sure they don't get lost like that is what they're there for.So I think it's OK if they're bored. Yeah. And if a teen complains, I will flat out tell them, like, you know, you're getting three service hours and sometimes life is just boring. Sometimes you have to do boring tasks. And that's like, yeah, oh, I love that volunteering is work. Like, you know, you're here in exchange for something. So if you're bored, bummer. Do you ask teens what they're interested in purchasing and volunteer doctors? I don't because I asked if they have any special skills. If you look at my volunteer application, I asked them if they have any special skills or knowledge or interest they'd like to share at the library. However, because I is a first come, first serve, I just sort of allow them to pick what's interesting to them. So if someone's not really interested in coming to teen team and working as a group, they can opt to try and sign up for individual test program prep.I really just sort of leave it up to them to try and choose their own adventure. Can we get some more information on the book club program with a specific study to do for it to qualify? For Bring Your Own Book Club, they have to bring a book that they've read recently and share it with the group and. Like, we have a big discussion, we book talk and we talk about just sort of like reading in general, it's really fun to watch them like one of them book talks it. And then the next month they're like, I read that book that you suggested. That's pretty cool. And I try really hard to make that as teen leaned as possible. And then RIMSBA and RITBA are the teen book awards. So what we do is each month prior to covid, before we had to move everything online, we had them read at least one of four sewing groups. The list I like theme and each month had the option to read at least one of four on that month's list. And then we discussed and then at the end of the reading season, we voted. Do you? Only have two minutes Oh, I only have two questions left. Do you do community based volunteer programs? So I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I'm thinking maybe like.Like programs where we go out into the community and do stuff we haven't in the past, I was totally open to that. I really want to I really want to see a beach clean up. I don't know what is on my mind, but.Yeah, so I would totally be open to it, but we haven't really done anything like that. How do you deal with the ability differences between older and younger teens? Are certain programs skewed towards one or the other?For me, I, I do have some, because typically it's our children staff that are requesting teen volunteers from me. Sometimes I personally need teen volunteers, but typically they're requesting from me. And so I will have some librarians that will say I would prefer an older teen and I will just write that like great grades 10 and up, like on the opportunity. And when the person who asks for it or tries to clean it, I'll just double-check because I have a spreadsheet that they are the corresponding grade. That doesn't happen a ton. I actually feel like some of my middle schoolers are more enthusiastic and engaged than some of my older teens, so it can be so variable. So sometimes I do request for that pretty rarely. And yeah, I think sometimes like what middle schoolers might lack of maturity they make up for in enthusiasm and most of what you are having them do.I personally feel like a middle school or high school or could do. And then if one of my librarians disagrees with my colleagues, disagrees, they will tell me I need, you know, a 10th 11th grader here.Alyssa, awesome.You're like a timing queen. This is pretty amazing. So thank you.Thank you again so much. Just as a reminder of all this information is, is in the tote. So this is our lunch break here on the East Coast. It's noon when you're ready to come back if you want to come back for the next session. Those are going to start at 1:00 Eastern. So right before one, you can come back, you can go right to your breakout. So you'll go right up to that schedule. If you end up logging out, you can log back in. We're just going to be kind of hanging out here. So, yeah. Thanks, everyone, for coming. Enjoy your break and we'll see you back soon. Thank you.Thank you.

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