Starting in 2017, Hester Street partnered with Brooklyn Public Library to lead community engagement around the renovation of several neighborhood branch libraries, including Sunset Park, New Lots, DUMBO, and the Central library.
In Sunset Park, the process included interviews with over 350 residents, local service providers, organizations, librarians, and elected officials to incorporate their ideas on its design and programming. The HST team also conducted a patron survey, two large public workshops, and four focus groups with populations not well represented at the larger workshops, and shared a final community report with Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) to ensure that the community’s priorities for programs, services, and space allocation within the new library were captured.
In New Lots, HST collaborated with former NYC Council Member Inez Barron and Arts East New York to lead an engagement process to inform the renovation of the branch library to better support the needs of the surrounding community and showcase its unique history as the site of a former burial ground for enslaved people and a space that celebrates African American heritage in East New York. Starting in 2019, HST held community events to gather feedback and ideas on the programming and features of the renovated space until the COVID-19 pandemic paused the process. Resuming in 2022, HST engaged residents and specific patron groups, such as the New Lots Adult Learning Center participants and youth, through targeted activities to collect their input for the new library.
To support the community engagement process in Sunset Park and New Lots, HST designed the following engagement activities and facilitation guides for public workshops, as well as an online survey to support our work on the New Lots renovation project:
Sunset Park:
- Public workshop #1 facilitation guide + activities
- Public workshop #2 facilitation guide + activities
New Lots:
- New Lots Pre-Engagement Presentation to provide context for community members’ engagement
- Precedents activity + facilitation guide used in workshop #1 to support community members’ understanding of other examples and possibilities for public memorials and community spaces
- Workshop #2 layout, facilitation guide + activities
Brooklyn Public Library survey for library users of local branches under renovation.