American library’s evolving role: social work center

Forty miles from downtown Chicago, in the birthplace of Ray Bradbury, sits one of the nation’s most striking examples of the American library’s evolving role from book repository to community shelter.

It’s a well-accepted fact that law enforcement is the de facto front line of mental health services for the poor. So too, in struggling cities — like Waukegan, which decades ago was a white, middle-class enclave — the library is the social worker of first and last resort.

Stroll onto the Waukegan Public Library’s airy main floor and you’ll see gaggles of people entranced at banks of computers or getting counseled for the Affordable Care Act enrollment process. Kids are upstairs on overstuffed chairs look- ing through graphic novels or playing make-believe in the children’s resource room. And homeless people are warming their bones on a day when the mercury might not get above 2 degrees.

A state-of-the-art classroom anchors the bulk of the first floor. In its warm, glass-walled embrace, people gather to learn rudimentary English, study for the GED high school equivalency test, apply for temporary driver’s licenses, learn Microsoft Word, fill out applications for U.S. citizenship, prep for the ACT, eat healthier, or get information on how to call the suicide hotline.

The books are, effectively, beside the point at an institution where the mission isn’t merely to promote literacy, but to improve the lives of its community members.

“Demographics are shifting, and the perception of the library is shifting — if we don’t shift along with it, we’re at risk of no longer being relevant,” said Carmen Patlan, the Waukegan library’s community engagement and outreach manager. “As books and readers go online, people wonder if libraries will still exist. What will they be for? Libraries are beginning to feel this need to shift toward addressing the underlying needs of a community, because if the people are in crisis, these 250,000 books mean nothing.”

Patlan is a veteran of the tumult Waukegan has experienced as a hotspot of immigration anxieties. Hispanics have come to comprise over half the population, and in June 2007 the Waukegan City Council voted to apply for federal funds, through the now-defunct 287(g) program, to certify two police officers to initiate deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants who committed crimes. The decision caused an uproar in a town already anxious about the influx of Spanish-speaking immi- grants fleeing Chicago and oftentimes arriving straight from Mexico.

But long before outreach programs began cultivating Hispanic patrons by teaching them what a library is for — many immigrants, with little background knowledge about libraries, believe them to be either bookstores or specialized academic organizations that are not open to the public — much of the older, white patron base had either moved away or their children had grown up and made family trips to the library a broken habit.

Today, with 19 percent of Waukegan residents living in poverty, the library operates with a specific customer in mind: a lowincome, white, Hispanic or black single mom with three children and no high school diploma. In order for her and her children to reach their true potential, they’ll need help with reading skills, with understanding the basics of stay- ing physically healthy, and resources to help them address issues like food insufficiency, mental illness, domestic violence and access to college and scholarships.

“Our children are in survival mode because their parents are in survival mode,” said Patlan. “But if we can make our community successful, we will be successful. Not only in circulating books, but in making sure parents are reading more, children are reading more and they have access to the tools they need to lead self-actualized lives.”

If self-actualization seems like too huge a responsibility for a humble library, just ask yourself: If the library doesn’t designate itself a community’s social worker, who will? Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @ estherjcepeda.