REALM Project

Crisis management planning and responses: Pottsboro Area Library

Pottsboro is a small, rural town in northern Texas, about an hour outside of Dallas, with a population of around 2,600. The next biggest city is Sherman, about a half-hour away. Both are in Grayson County, which has a population of over 135,000 people. The communities in Pottsboro consist of multi-generational families, many of whom have lived in the area for a hundred years or more and work in the service industry, the school district (the largest employer in the area), as ranchers, and more. Recent additions to the community include professionals who commute to Dallas and weekend homeowners who buy property along Lake Texoma (a lake that borders Oklahoma and Texas). With few businesses within city limits, Pottsboro has a small tax base, which means the city council frequently faces funding concerns. People try to pitch in where they can, including the city manager, who can be found in the community contributing to public works projects, such as fixing the water main or digging ball fields.

Pottsboro Area Library, a small, rural public library, sits within the Pottsboro city limits and serves Grayson County. At one point, the library was in danger of closing due to a lack of funding and innovation to help people reimagine the role of the library in their community. Dianne Connery, now the development director for the library, stepped in to become the director in 2010 and served until 2024, leading the library out of this crisis and into an era of new projects and areas of focus on digital equity and public health. She has been able to enact these changes through her curiosity—always being open to learning new ways of doing her work, and tenacity—exploring all kinds of ways to make difficult situations better for the community.

Amidst stereotypical understandings of what a library is, Dianne and her staff have worked hard to strategically plan programs that attract media attention and provoke community members to say, “Oh my gosh, I had no idea libraries would do that.” The library recently implemented a drone training certification program over the summer for 15 teens that can lead to a commercial drone pilot’s license, thereby opening up a new area of employment for these youth. Dianne’s commitment to bringing health equity to her community has yielded opportunities for telehealth at the library, computers that enable individuals to more easily complete health forms, and the help of the grant-funded digital navigator to help people to log into their health portal and access their explanations of benefits, among other initiatives.

Dianne has leveraged her curious spirit to identify a variety of funders, opportunities, and partnerships that have provided the library with funds for these digital equity efforts, such as the digital navigator, broadband access, Wi-Fi hot spots to provide access in strategically identified areas of need, and more. Advocacy work at the federal level with the state congressman’s office has enabled Dianne to share the impact of what her library is doing to support and contribute to thriving communities.

Crisis management

Northern Texas has been the recipient of severe weather events that have greatly impacted the towns in terms of survival, access to resources, and city government capacity. In 2021, a winter storm blew through Grayson County and caused water and power to go down for several days. This posed all kinds of emergencies for the town of Pottsboro as people tried to find ways to stay safe and healthy amidst scarce resources. Dianne expressed her concern that, during this time, the city government did not seem to be in sufficient contact with the community at the time to provide much needed assistance. Instead, Dianne turned to social media (using a solar charging station at the library) to learn about her community’s needs (such as a family that needed water to make bottles for a new baby, and residents in multi-unit dwellings who had no water for flushing or drinking) and to identify how the library could step in to provide support. She reached out to her contacts and connections via social media, particularly ranchers who could bring large tanks of well water to the library to provide people with this precious resource. The ranchers were ready to step in and help. Dianne drove around the community, picking up volunteers along the way, and brought people water to flush their toilets, let them know where they could go to get potable water, and had an outdoor toilet delivered to the library so people could walk over and access it. As she put it, “Service on a very personal level!”

Another way that the library was able to connect the community to resources was through a partnership with a nearby restaurant that requested potable water so that they could cook food for the town. Dianne and others drove the meals to people who were homebound and set up a drive-through at the library to enable people to access the food as needed.

Dianne shared that people in the Pottsboro community voiced a fair amount of frustration on social media during this time, asking why it was the library’s job to step into these roles and wondering where the city government was in this crisis. Dianne describes this as a delicate situation, in which the library staff tried to walk the line and meet community needs while not putting themselves into a difficult position regarding ongoing city funding. Debrief meetings with the city government following this crisis were conducted with the goal of understanding how the city could do better going forward rather than an intent to place blame. These meetings led to the implementation of Civilian Emergency Response Training (CERT) for the town, since first responders may not be able to prioritize Pottsboro when the nearby, larger town of Sherman also had critical needs. This training could empower Pottsboro to handle crises more effectively until help could arrive. Furthermore, the library staff’s knowledge of the community members and their difficulties—such as those who had recently been in the hospital and needed some extra care—enables the library to examine how they can take care of the community and what would be needed to continue to do that work.

Weather-related crises continue to cause issues in the Pottsboro area, with strong winds and ice storms causing power lines to go down for extensive periods of time. Despite overall good weather, those who are homebound and in need of power for their medical equipment are greatly affected by such outages. Pottsboro Area Library received a grant to fund a digital navigator who has found several ways to support the community through various crises, such as helping townspeople with installing and updating critical apps on their phones that support their medical equipment. This has resulted in awareness across the town that you can call the library to help with all kinds of needs, even checking out large equipment or getting help with using iMovie to record a child’s graduation when relatives can’t attend because of various crises.

Dianne credits her curiosity and willingness to take risks as key traits for ensuring these successes in her community. As she puts it, “The library had no taxpayer funding when I got involved; it was all donation, all volunteer, and it was going to close. So I had this freedom to innovate and create because it was going to close anyway.” In her new role as development director, Dianne continues to look for ways to add new layers of opportunity onto existing services, with new layers of opportunity. For instance, an existing digital navigator program has since become intergenerational, pairing teens and senior citizens. The program now has a layer of empathy added in through a simulation lab that portrays for teens what it’s like to live with macular degeneration; in this way, the teens are better equipped for teaching older folks to use digital devices. The library has also brought in Workforce Solutions Texoma to teach the teens how to interview for a similar position based on the experiences they’ve already gained.

As far as policies and procedures are concerned, Dianne underscored that, when she was director, the library was even smaller and needed to be nimble and responsive. Therefore, many of those procedures were not written down. However, the new director, Renee Nichols, has worked to develop, implement, and codify various policies and procedures for the benefit of new hires who can use them to learn how the library works. This is important, especially when it comes to implementing an ethos of empathy and humanity with patrons, based on that “personal level of service” Dianne helped to develop. Going forward, the library will be more intentional in adhering to and refining these processes and procedures to respond to dynamic community needs and priorities. Dianne sees the library as “the front door of the community,” a place that understands community needs and works to meet those needs through innovation and tenacity.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Explore how you can be curious about your community’s needs, how you can meet even a few of those needs through an innovative approach to community connections, and how you can build on and leverage this work during crises.
2. Look for ways to build empathy at your library and in your community so that when staff are working with individuals who need help, or when you are pairing different groups of people together, you can create an environment of kindness and understanding.
3. Talk to your peers in other institutions, not just libraries, to learn from them about grant funders, funding opportunities, and application tips and strategies. Funding and support can come from unusual 

Other examples

Read other examples of how libraries, archives, and museums are approaching crisis management and planning for disasters.

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