HANNAH FITZHARDINGE is the mayor of Fremantle. She recently had a catch-up with staff and clients of the City’s Library Connect program.
LIBRARIES are public spaces for everyone – friendly places that are warm when it’s cold outside, and cool when it’s hot. Kids and adults are both comfortable in a library and it’s relatively private.
That’s why they’re the perfect place to reach people who need support but don’t know how to access it, whether it be for financial hardship, housing stress or family and domestic violence. The pandemic and now the housing crisis have seen this demand continue to grow.
Back in September 2020 we started the first Library Connect program in WA, in partnership with St Pats and with support from the Dorothy and Bill Irwin Trust. This week we received the evaluation report on this program and the results are clear.
• Mayor Hannah Fitzhardinge catches up with the Library Connect crew. Photo supplied
Library Connect has delivered the right support, at the right time, in th right place. 509 people were supported over the first two years of the program, with a large proportion being women and with a high number of Aboriginal people and people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
The amazing social workers who work at Library Connect engage gently with the people who come to see them in the library to uncover the issues that are causing distress (of course, usually there’s more than one factor) and help with immediate practical support, or connect the client with the right services before things get worse for them.
Two thirds of people assisted had not sought social service support ever before. Many of these people were able to be given the assistance they needed on their first contact with Library Connect. This shows the location of the service in the library means it’s reaching people who might otherwise not access services – and that it’s reaching them early enough to prevent further problems emerging. Those who might feel less comfortable going to the door of a homelessness support services (particularly if they have kids with them) say they feel much more able to have a quiet chat with someone in the library.
Library Connect was modelled on North American library social work services and is similar to a model adopted by the City of Melbourne. At this stage it is the only such service operating in Western Australia. Give the cost of homelessness and family and domestic violence to our healthcare, law enforcement and housing systems, this early intervention model seems a very simply and effective way to do something meaningful at a local level. We’d love to see other jurisdictions give it a go!
Meanwhile, here in Fremantle, we’re proud that Library Connect sends a strong and visible message that our community (and the Council) is committed to providing practical, tangible support to those who need it most.