In an interview series led by AEA Consulting Senior Associate, Dr. Kathryn (Kit) Matthew, we explore how organizations are approaching mental wellness, the programs they are implementing, and the noticeable differences they are seeing within their community. In the first edition of this series, Toronto’s The Bentway is Building a Softer City, Dr. Kit Matthew interviewed Ilana Altman, Co-Executive Director of The Bentway, about how reimagining public spaces can combat the loneliness epidemic. In this follow up, she interviews Rob Simmons, the Oak Park Public Library's Director of Social Services and Public Safety, about how the library shares information, services, and opportunities to empower every member of its community.
Building upon the community ecosystem of support
By Dr. Kathryn (Kit) Matthew, Senior Associate, AEA Consulting, in conversation with Rob Simmons, Director of Social Services and Public Safety, Oak Park Public Library.
As a cherished community resource located in Oak Park, Illinois, just west of Chicago, Oak Park Public Library (OPPL)’s mission is to share the information, services, and opportunities that help advance its aspiration to empower every voice in the community. People of all ages and economic groups are represented in this community, including those who are experiencing poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity.
Today, the Library offers a variety of social services. Its direct referral services involve making referrals to community partners and helping patrons to create a service plan;for example, finding housing or employment, and/or applying for government benefits, legal services and tax filing. Through its indirect services, library staff consult and coordinate with case managers and other providers on behalf of patrons, schedule mental health intakes, and refer patrons to Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center. The Library’s referral-based support is grounded in partnerships with more than 30 organizations in the Chicago area that provide various types of comprehensive social services.
In this interview, we hear from Rob Simmons, Director of Social Services and Public Safety, about OPPL’s strategies that help support Library patrons who are experiencing poverty by offering access to mental health treatment, housing and other essential services in order to strengthen community compassion and inclusion.
AEA: How did OPPL identify community opportunities to improve mental health/wellness?
Simmons: Our public library’s key strategic pillars are: equity and anti-racism, engagement, learning, and stewardship. About eight years ago, we researched various possible approaches to move forward on anti-racism and equity, the fourth pillar of the library’s strategic plan.
The community resources approach (a referral-based model where social workers refer clients to other professionals or agencies for support) fits our situation best. We looked to other public libraries, such as Denver Public Library, to understand what lessons had been learnt. For us, this approach evolved into introducing the social services model directly into our library. In practice, this provides clinical mental health services to patrons directly via licensed social work staff at the library. This can’t be successful without community-based partners who offer licensed-based clinical services. Alongside this, we continue to partner with a medical institution, Rush Medical Center, which has really accelerated our equity work. The partnership decision was essential as Rush has malpractice insurance, patient databases with confidential information, and enhanced mental health services. This helped the library to better manage the risks of pushing forward to offer comprehensive mental wellness services.
AEA: Can you tell us more about how OPPL is uniquely positioned to take on this kind of work, and why now?
About ten years ago, in our county west of Chicago, state funding was decreased for residential programs helping those with multiple and severe mental health issues. The amount of treatment beds decreased, and the individuals who had participated in these programs had nowhere to live and no way to easily access necessary treatments, housing and other living resources. Many took refuge in public libraries. So, eight years ago, when I started working at the library, public libraries had already evolved into sanctuaries for those experiencing poverty. They offered clean, safe spaces with technology and educational services. The patrons with mental and public health needs were already here, and yet our community did not yet have comprehensive human services or public health infrastructures to help the library better serve those individuals.
As an organization, we had to commit to building these resources for Oak Park. We understood that there was no existing infrastructure that we could lean on to offer better support for our patrons experiencing poverty. I should stop to clarify that there are many contributors to poverty of which mental illness is just one. Limited or minimal access to health insurance, substance abuse, and limited access to technology are some of the others. The Oak Park community as a whole bought into the library’s role of providing mental health services. Our community has always had the spirit of wanting to help everyone and lead in diversity efforts.
Certainly, a public library’s culture, informal relationships and collaborations fill in somewhat for the lack of community infrastructure and resources, but to really have an impact we had to set a bold vision, strategically partner with the right entities, and equip our staff with the right tools. For example, we outsource supportive housing services to the nonprofit Housing Forward that services the local area, and partner with Rush Medical Center, the largest public health service provider in the west side of Chicago. Even with such partners, there’s still a need in Oak Park for resources and services that are village-led. This is why the library decided to create a nationally-proven model. We created a no-billing, free mental health clinic hub to ensure individuals can receive the help they need when they need it. Our goal is to build human capital in people’s lives through a referral-based model.
AEA: How did you find “unlikely partners” and what are these entities’ roles?
Partnerships are essential to our work and goals. It’s critical that a partner has the same intended vision of positive change and uses similar measurable outcomes as the library. On an ongoing basis, we partner with almost 40 entities, including a major medical center, traditional social services, food banks, transitional housing, community mental health, youth services, and domestic violence organizations. There are many community-based organizations and larger institutions involved in our area of work, such as the Oak Park Homelessness Coalition, and coordination is key.
AEA: Can you tell us more about your work and what you are hoping to learn and/or share?
It’s been a journey of listening, learning, researching and adapting our strategies as part of our anti-racism goals and objectives. To make progress against poverty using our social work model, we’ve focused on breaking down silos and working more collaboratively across the community. When I started working here, the library itself was socially isolated—we were not at the table when decisions about public health or social services infrastructure were made. Now we have a voice in how infrastructure is being built and how new health services are introduced to the community. For example, the library was able to share our social work approaches when I served on a Village Manager’s task force in 2023. The task force’s input contributed to the decision to deploy social workers instead ofpolice officers for nonviolent emergency calls in Oak Park. As I mentioned earlier, at the library we have some of the most vulnerable people with mental health issues in the community, and we had a chance to talk about our work. Collaboration and intentionality are important attributes of our work to help improve mental wellness and decrease poverty.
At the senior leadership level, we all aim to equip our staff and help them grow to better serve our community. It’s important to recognize that when you have shifted the organizational outcomes you want to see, you need to hire staff already experienced and well-versed in this work. They may not come from a traditional library or nonprofit background, but their ability to respond positively to distressed patrons is essential. Around the library, we live in the heart of an 30+ year-old opioid epidemic, and you have 1 in 5 people experiencing acute mental health issues in our area. The library had to step up to create a system which identified this and other mental health issues as a priority. And then we needed to create strategies and infrastructure to address that priority.
AEA: What role does staff hiring and training play in the success of mental health and wellness programming?
Our library-wide focus on de-escalation, engagement and outreach moved us away from the more traditional public safety model of monitoring behavior and removing troublesome patrons. We look at our public safety staff as an extension of our outreach department. We aim to provide a continuum of service to our patrons no matter what their needs or interests. This means that someone experiencing homelessness who receives connections to Housing Forward also may be connected with me for possible mental wellness assistance. “Outreach” is a continuum from inside the library to outside in the community.
How does this play out in acute situations? Imagine a patron suddenly experiencing erratic symptoms of substance use disorder at the library. This presents a safety issue for them and others due to this person’s erratic behavior. Our Public Safety staff have the skill sets to diffuse and de-escalate this situation. At the same time, Public Safety staff also recognize symptoms that point to someone needing additional resources to help alleviate their overall stress and anxiety. This is a trauma-informed care model—staff react by not asking “what is wrong with you?” but instead “what is going on with you?”
These options include one-on-one and group engagement, trauma-informed methodology, and an integrated referral process. If individual case management is needed, we conduct short-term case management. We ensure that individuals can safely reach the next step on their pathway to a more stable housing situation or mental health resources.
We intentionally blend restorative practices into our outreach to help strengthen relationships between individuals and the communities they belong to. We must create spaces where the stories and experiences of marginalized and excluded community members can be shared and received. Library staff have undergone training in peace-circle keeping, a key restorative practice. Peace Circles are rooted in Indigenous practices of having discussions in the community whereby everyone has a chance to speak and share on a particular topic under shared guidelines and values.
We offer workshops for staff such as “Introduction to Restorative Practices”. Restorative practices are proactive methods used to promote community and build trusting relationships that ultimately lessen the likelihood of causing harm to others. In our efforts to be a library for everyone, restorative practices are an engagement strategy to support that mandate.
AEA: What is the internal governance and visibility of your mental wellness focus within your organisation?
The library’s public Equity and Anti-racism Statement states,“Choosing to be anti-racist touches everything the library does. The priorities of equity and anti-racism drive all of the library’s work, including its mission and vision and the allocation of its resources. On an ongoing basis, the library must identify and address how its policies, systems, budgets, programs, and services may be inequitable and serve to marginalize or oppress people. Then it must work to change them.” The social service and outreach work is seen as a core service and is always visible to senior leadership. Our work is front and center to our library fabric of who we are and it's funded directly by our operating budget.
AEA: How are you tracking impact?
The data we gather is guided by our library-wide logic model which summarizes the library’s work and what success looks like for each objective in our strategic plan. It provides a snapshot of our thinking and planning. First, we identify what is the community problem or need? What specific intervention(s) address that? And, what are the intended outcomes?
As with most community and cultural organizations, it’s hard to separate outputs and outcomes. We see outcomes unfold through time when patrons participate in our programs; measures range across short-term changes in their knowledge or skills, mid-term changes in their actions or behaviors or actions, and long-term changes in their mental health status or condition.
Here are a few examples of what we track and share our work including both programmatic and social work outcomes.
Deeper engagement with the library through our outreach programs. We have program participants returning that want to help give programs, particularly the restorative work. We saw this with our “Living History” youth development program with a restorative program embedded in it. Mental health outcomes include social work staff articulating more pro-social skills in patrons they’ve worked with and patrons increasing their connections to mental health resources 90 days after the social work team helped them. Once we refer someone, we average 77% in our follow-up with them and try to continue that periodic follow-up for at least 90 days.
AEA: What advice would you have for other cultural organisations engaging in this work?
Being successful in this work absolutely requires the right partners to alleviate all the contributors to poverty, including improved mental wellness.
We have become a “Library for Everyone” and this weaves throughout everything we do. You see and hear this in small but important ways,such as having more inclusive policy statements around the building and using language that creates a culture of empathy and equity. Our social services and outreach approach is to work within the community ecosystem of support and not try to do it alone or ignore the issues. We blend prevention techniques, crisis intervention, restorative justice, therapeutic involvement, case management, and coordination of wrap-around services. We stick to the model we have found works well for our patrons, partners and the library itself.
To undertake this type of work, you need to be open to making structural changes in your organization. In 2016, we combined our social services and public safety functions into one new department. This team ensures safety in the library and refers people to resources for housing, employment, health care, immigration, domestic violence, and more. The focus is strengthening relationships with those community members who are most in need of services but are often socially isolated or overlooked. We’ve been implementing outreach programs as a way to reach and support our vulnerable patrons, especially at-risk youth and patrons experiencing homelessness.
Internally, this outreach model has been the catalyst for moving the library away from the security patrol model. The goal is not to remove a patron but to offer options to those experiencing anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues.