By: Mary Beth Almond | Birmingham-Bloomfield Eagle | Published March 8, 2023
BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP — The Bloomfield Township Public Library has adopted a new long-term strategic plan that will serve as a guide for the library through 2025.
The library began its strategic planning process in the summer of 2022, hiring Fast Forward Libraries, LLC, for approximately $27,625, to engage in a three-phase process: Learn, Dream, Do.
Katherine Bryant, the library’s assistant director, said library stakeholders shared input during the strategic planning process via surveys, focus groups and interviews.
“In the later summer and early fall, we did a community survey that was completed by over 500 community members; we had five community focus groups, and 11 one-on-one interviews with community leaders; as well as a survey of our library staff and our board of trustees,” she explained. “That was our information gathering stage, learning what the people want.”
The library leadership team and board of trustees then discussed its dreams for the library based on the community survey, focus groups and interviews.
“Then, we got into the nitty gritty of nailing it all down into three strategic directions,” said Bryant. “It was a month-long process with a lot of discussion, a lot of revision, a lot of thought and expert guidance.”
Library Director Tera Moon said it was important to her to get as much input from the community, the staff and the trustees as possible.
“We had lots of deep conversations, once we had all that input and feedback, and we kind of prioritized things. Now we are in this phase where we are coming up with a framework for implementing all the things we came up with. That is going to help us prioritize, strategize and really focus our resources,” she said.
The new plan defines the library’s vision as “The Place to Discover,” and includes a new mission statement, “We spark curiosity and imagination by connecting the community to resources, technology, and support.”
The five-year strategic action plan also outlines three strategic directions — ‘Enhance Our Core,’ ‘Connect the Community’ and ‘Build Organizational Capacity.’
Bryant said the library will use its strategic plan to allocate resources to set priorities, guide goals of the staff, and organize its thinking around new ideas and what library officials want to focus on.
“There are hundreds of ways to be a library and there are a lot of differing ideas, even within our own community, of what people want from the library, so the strategic plan gives us a lens to look at all these different ideas and figure out what we can prioritize at this time,” she said.
The library’s last strategic plan was completed in 2015 and ran through 2020.
“We all know what happened in 2020, so we did not get a chance to think strategically because we were reacting to the situation in the world with the pandemic,” Bryant said. “We took 2022 to really dig into creating the strategic plan.”
Moon said she’s proud of the work that was done to create a focused plan that aligns library resources with the priorities of the community.
“What we have right now, in terms of our plan, provides us a lot of flexibility, so we can really take it in whatever direction we want within those themes,” she said. “We really have our themes articulated, and then we will be able to direct our work and our resources to those themes.”
All plan information is available at btpl.org, including a one-page summary, as well as the entire Bloomfield Township Public Library 2023-2025 Strategic Plan. The plan can be found in the About tab, by clicking on Policies, Bids and Reports.