The library's Social Services Days bring county agencies and nonprofits together with the people who need their help

Homeless individuals are often seen as a problem for libraries. The Sebastopol Library views them as just another constituency and has developed a program to help them.

Sebastopol Librarian Courtney Klein with one of the books that inspired her to create Social Services Day at the Library. (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

For the last year and a half, I’ve received monthly missives from the Sebastopol Library about something called “Social Services Day.”  Every third Tuesday of the month, from 1:30 to 3 pm, representatives from a collection of different government agencies and nonprofits appear at the library to help, well, anyone who needs help.

Sebastopol Librarian Courtney Klein created the program with the homeless and economically marginal in mind.

Klein was a psychology major as an undergrad and always imagine that she’d become either a therapist or a social worker. “But life moves in different directions, and I chose public librarianship,” she said.

“A public library serves the public—so it's everyone, regardless of socio-economic status,” she said. “We have tons of programs for kids. We have programs for seniors, programs for teenagers, programs for adults. Then there's this one patron demographic that always visits libraries—and that is people who are vulnerable and unsheltered or precariously housed. With my social work and psychology background, I have an interest in connecting people to resources, especially when they're in a dire situation. And that's what we do with Social Services Day.

She did a lot of research and outreach to figure out what kind of services would be most helpful to this group of people.

“It’s very much been a collaborative effort,” she said.

At Social Services Day in November, there were representatives from housing groups like Share Sonoma County and West County Community Services; folks from the Registrar of Voters and the County Clerk’s Office; as well as a representative from Sonoma County Legal Aid’s Small Business division.

This month, on Tuesday, December 19, there will be people from West County Community Services to help with housing; representatives from Redwood Empire Food Bank to help people sign up for CalFresh and EBT; and someone from the County Clerk's Office to help issue birth certificates (a requirement to be accepted into some social programs). There will also be representatives from the Registrar of Voters, Legal Aid of Sonoma County (for their domestic violence, eviction, elder abuse programs), as well as Buckelew Programs and Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County, both of which work to help low income people achieve economic and social stability.

Though the program was designed for the homeless, Klein said it’s evolved in interesting ways.

“That's the beautiful thing about something like this—if you're serving the most vulnerable, you also end up serving other people too…The people who visit are not only the original intended audience, but also people who want to or who are working in some kind of social service or nonprofit area and want to network. We've also had people come in wanting to talk to some of these organizations so that they can volunteer. We've had that happen multiple times.”

She sees Social Services Day as a natural extension of the library’s mission.

“We're an information hub,” she said. “And so this is just another way of providing information is how I see it.”