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Poverty and Changing Library Models
Katie Sleyko
LIS 771
Spring 2010
April 29, 2010

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Poverty, while depressingly prevalent in the best of times, has worsened and deepened
because of our country’s recession. We as librarians can serve these populations better, and it
is in our own interest to do so. Though traditional models have helped in bringing some of the
poor to the library, the model for librarianship assumes a patron of the middle-class, in
location choices, creation of fines and the imposing of residency restrictions on library card
usage. In serving poor and homeless patrons, perhaps the best solution is to change the way
the library itself is run, rather than expect conformity to a model not designed for them.
Eleven percent of all households in the United States don’t have food security; that is,
they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. 1 One out of five children is poor,
which the United States defines as not having enough money for either clothing, food, or
shelter.2 Most of the poor are white and non-Hispanic, though the rates of poverty for the
black and latino/a populations are disproportionate—23% of latinos/as and 27% of blacks are
poor.3 Poverty also correlates highly with low literacy, as well as riches correlating to high
literacy.4 Those with lower literacy, when they have jobs, tend to get menial jobs.5
Those in poor neighborhoods do not tend to vote. There are two major reasons for this:
the high population of felons who are poor, and who have had their voting rights stripped
from them; and the absence of political engagement within poor communities. 6 This absence
of a political voice in these communities leads to their needs being ignored and their needs for
funding unanswered, which in turn deepens poverty and the ability to get one’s voice heard.
1
(Household Food Security in the United States, 2007 2008)
2
(Frequently Asked Questions Related to the Poverty Guidelines and Poverty 2010)
3
(Poverty: 2008 Highlights 2009)
4
(National Center for Educational Statistics 2002)
5
(National Center for Educational Statistics 2002)
6
(Gimpel 2004)

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Even with all these statistics, there may be questions as to why librarians should
bother to help the poor in their neighborhoods, let alone start changing library models. First,
the population is one that needs serving, and which continues to be underserved. The ALA
requires that librarians serve all library users to the best of their ability. In serving the poor,
librarians as a whole also help one-quarter of the black and latin@ population, fulfilling the
commitment to diversity that the ALA requires.7 In helping the poor by improving literacy for
the impoverished, earning power and information access increase for an entire community.
Encouraging voting or upping chances to get involved politically can add huge numbers of
votes and backing to several projects, including voting for increased library funding.
Even with all these needs to serve the poor as outlined by the ALA, actual service to
the poor has been a sticking point, enough so that it has its own site—The Hunger,
Homelessness, and Poverty Task Force, or www.hhptf.org. The website itself is not
particularly forthcoming on any issue in particular, but the links speak volumes. These links
seem not to have been updated since 2006; there are many dead links within the website, and
no link to a document leads to a document written later than 2006.
The Hunger, Homelessness, and Poverty Task Force website links to criticisms about
the ALA itself and the hypocritical stance of many libraries dealing with the poor and the
homeless. Some libraries have “smell rules:” policies where patrons must not smell strongly
in order to use the library.8, 9 These are intended to keep out unwashed patrons, but must be
applied, if applied fairly, to people who use too much perfume or cologne, or mountain bikers
coming into the library for a drink. There is also documentation of libraries’ hesitation to help
7
(ALA Council 2010)
8
(Berman, Classism in the Stacks: Libraries and Poor People 2006)
9
(Stir Raised by Dallas Body-Odor Rule 2006)

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the poor as libraries. The poor and the homeless are cited in other literature as feeling that the
library is actively hostile to them.10 There has been some progress has been made in this area,
including the creation of the Hunger, Homelessness, and Poverty Task Force, and a
coinciding Poor People’s Policy, meant to be put on posters and hung in prominent places in
libraries with poor populations. But the little attention paid to the site, including the dead
links, and the little attention it gets from the library establishment, as evinced both from the
separate URL that separates it from the main ALA site and the ALA website burying its link
in a larger roundtable collection, says very clearly that the conventional approach to poverty
and helping the poor is in need of a workout.
The way to work out how to serve poor library patrons better is to find out what it is
that keeps people out of the library. It is easy to see, for example, how late fees would be
reviled and avoided by poor and homeless patrons, especially if their transportation is limited.
If one works many hours a week, and the bus route to get to the library stops just after one
leaves work unless it’s a weekend route, returning a book late to the library may be the only
option. The ways that libraries are placed in a neighborhood reveals assumptions of everyone
using the library driving their own car, especially in a suburban setting. If a library is neither
on nor close to a bus route, many people who cannot afford a car may never see the inside of
the library. The need to establish residence in the area to get a library card means that
homeless or transient populations, like migrant workers, may never check out books. These
assumptions tend to be self-fulfilling, so it is little surprise when libraries, designed to bring in
middle-class patrons and thus full of them, find that the poor and the homeless find them
hostile.
10
(Robertson 2010)

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To bring in more poor and homeless patrons, we must change the way we operate.
This is not to say that we must abandon the idea of the library as the center for information.
But we must also realize that when a patron is poor, there are huge environmental and
physical challenges that can affect the ways that patrons get to and access that information.11
Easing the burden of getting to and processing that information—for example, lobbying bus
companies to change routes to be closer to the library, or finding and providing healthful food
if a library is located in a food desert—improves the function, use, and esteem of the library in
light of poor patrons.
One way to improve library use and esteem is to make the library unavoidable. There
is an interesting experiment going on in Florida with the use of a “front-porch library,” a
library located in the home of a librarian.12 The creator of this concept, Adrian Fogelin, lived
in an economically depressed area and knew that getting to an “official” library would be
nigh-impossible for poor children. The original front porch library is run with donated books,
so if a book goes missing, there is no financial loss to recoup, plus the patron now has a book
of their own. This encourages many checkouts from the poor children, which may never
happen with a poor person in a traditional public library. Fogelin also points out how she
trains children in how to use the library; she demonstrates to children how she records down
their name and the books she checks out to them and keeps them in a file. She also gets
children to volunteer for the library, who then learn about collection organization and
enforcing library rules.
11
(Evans 2009)
12
(Fogelin 2009)

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Though this particular library is aimed at children and is located within a home, this
easily could be made into an adult library located in a home bought expressly for this purpose.
Adult versions of the front porch library could be easily made with books weeded from the
collection in main branches of public libraries, especially with the multiple copies of each
season’s bestsellers that are inevitably ordered and weeded by large libraries, as well as
donations. Additionally, using foreclosed or abandoned properties in neighborhoods as front
porch libraries can help “beautify” or give the appearance of safety and normality in the
much-maligned and avoided poor neighborhoods of a city, and perhaps give a needed public
space in areas where public parks may be unthinkable.
Another example of a new way of delivering library service is in the creation of library
gardens. In the GreenLeaves project in New York state, the garden serves as a way for non-
violent criminal offenders to do community service.13 These convicts go into libraries which
have never had gardens and create them in the empty lot space that the library doesn’t use.
This results in urban libraries becoming oases in the communities they are located in, which
are overwhelmingly poor and without green spaces. More people want to use the library,
those that don’t view it as a benefit to the community, and the convicts have become mentors
to the community’s children. These applications certainly are valuable, but the article doesn’t
mention how library gardens, if used for food plants, could help alleviate food deserts, places
where there are no grocery stores or otherwise out of reach, such as healthful food being
priced far beyond its value. The library’s man purpose in the community, being the place to
locate information, doesn’t have to be usurped by this event; the library could distribute the
food to volunteers or on a first-come first-served basis.
13
(Kuzyk 2007)

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There are other services coming to the fore which fight food deserts. A program in
Baltimore is starting where library patrons order groceries the same way they check out books
remotely—through the online library website.14 This program helps relieve the food desert
around the library and may eventually convince grocery stores that they would be patronized
well. Since the library is already a part of the community, food stores risk nothing by shipping
groceries there, as they would if they built a location that was rarely patronized or vandalized.
The library, in turn, becomes a food source as well as a public place, and the community
becomes invested emotionally in its success. This program is being funded by federal
stimulus money, but grants could be pursued for the long term.
In order to truly serve patrons, librarians must also address the selective politicization
at work within the public library. Many librarians feel that refusing to cooperate with the
PATRIOT Act is not a particularly political move, nor is petitioning local governments for
more funds for the public library. The PATRIOT Act does nothing to hinder libraries’
function; it only specifies the desire to see patron records on demand. Though there was some
furor over the refusal to cooperate, the refusal to share patron information is seen as so
apolitical, so basic to the function of the library, that even the ALA opposes it.15 Yet it is not
routine, nor seen as apolitical, to stand up to city councils for grocery stores, equitable
housing and adequate shelters for the homeless, though these have as much to do with patron
quality of life as the protection of patron records, and these policies would benefit the library
much more directly. Standing up for patrons in one area—the protection of their records—and
not in others that would help them use and eventually fund the library—making them
14
(Owens 2010)
15
(ALA Council 2003)

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homeowners, payers of local sales tax and clean job-seekers—does a disservice to poor
patrons and makes clear our biases as librarians.
Lobbying for patrons, instead of urging patrons to lobby for us, can work in getting the
community invested in the project of the library. There is also the direct approach: giving
users a forum to form and debate political views. Called civic librarianship, the trend of
making the library a hub for local, regional and national politics can have a deep effect on the
political involvement and representation of a community.16 Under programs as prescribed in
civic librarianship, such as bringing in local politicians to discuss policies and decisions,
lecture series on hot-button issues, and reaching out to other public programs in the area, such
as public radio stations and museums, can bring a community together and empower them as
voters and citizens in making choices that will serve them best. Politically represented poor
people are politically powerful poor people, who can create stronger communities, receive
appropriate funding, and also vote library budgets into law. It is in libraries’ own best interests
to see that their poor populations are politically involved, as it can create a loyal voter base for
years to come.
Though libraries can help build strong communities for the poor and the homeless
surrounding them, sometimes these communities can come into being on their own. Dignity
village is a community of homeless that has private housing, communal restrooms and
kitchens, and its own website. This place in Portland, Oregon started as a tent city and has
since grown into a permanent residence for about 60 homeless people. Even with this
community, they find that public libraries don’t want them, incorporating the libraries’
16
(Kranich 2005)

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rejection of them into their mission statement.17 Yet this community is a great example of
creating appropriate places for the homeless through public action. If the libraries in the area
became allies of the village, the potential for civic engagement on the part of the villagers,
and the signal boost for the library from the patronage of the villagers, could be beneficial to
the whole area. More campgrounds such as these could be built, less transient or victimized
homeless people, more poor library patrons who feel that the library is no longer hostile, and
more residents of the area who want to see their library thrive. Instead, we see wasted
potential; a group that has come to have local political power who discount the library as
somewhere they are not welcome.
Library models, as they stand now, do give great service to those who have a middle-
class life: access to outside transportation, extra money to pay late fees, a permanent residence
for access to library cards and close familial relationship and parental permission for minors
to take out books. But the model can be changed to serve the poor better without upending the
century-long mission of the public library of providing information access to all residents. We
can make the library unavoidable, placing front porch libraries in underserved neighborhoods.
We can provide food to places without it. We can get people involved in the project of the
library by making them informed, engrossed citizens.
17
(Why a need for a "tent city" n.d.)

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This bibliography has been put together using MS Word Auto-Citations.
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40%20Core%20Values%20and%20Ethics (accessed April 29, 2010).
—. "Resolution on the USA Patriot Act and Related Measures That Infringe on the Rights of Library
Users." ALA.org. 2003.
http://www.ala.org/template.cfm?section=ifresolutions&template=/contentmanagement/contentdi
splay.cfm&contentid=11891 (accessed April 29, 2010).
Berman, Sanford. "A Long Struggle to Force Libraries to Serve the Poor." Street Spirit, January 2001:
12-13.
—. "Classism in the Stacks: Libraries and Poor People." Street Spirit, February 2006.
Evans, Gary W. and Michelle A. Schamberg. "Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working
memory." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 13 (March 2009).
Fogelin, Adrian, Katherine Bowers, and Kary S.Kublin. "The Front Porch Library: Bringing the Library
to the Neighborhood." Florida Libraries 52, no. 2 (2009): 20-22.
"Frequently Asked Questions Related to the Poverty Guidelines and Poverty ." U.S. Department of
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29, 2010).
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across Neighborhoods." Political Behavior 26, no. 4 (December 2004): 343-375.
"Household Food Security in the United States, 2007." Economic Research Service. November 17,
2008. http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err66/ (accessed April 29, 2010).
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Kuzyk, Raya. "Learning Gardens: New York's GreenBranches Program Links the Library to the Street."
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National Center for Educational Statistics. Adult Literacy in America. Study Report, Washington D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 2002.

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Owens, Donna Marie. "Check It Out: Get Your Groceries At The Library." NPR.org. April 26, 2010.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126282239 (accessed April 29, 2010).
"Poverty: 2008 Highlights." US Census Bureau. September 29, 2009.
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Robertson, Guy. "What Goes Down: Library Experiences of the Urban Poor." Feliciter (Canadian
Library Association) 56, no. 1 (2010): 4.
"Stir Raised by Dallas Body-Odor Rule." American Libraries 37, no. 2 (February 2006): 1/3.
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