Activating Communities: A Panel with Teen Activists across the U.S.

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Originally presented as the YALSA's President's Program at the 2024 ALA Annual Conference in San Diego.

Learn how teens have successfully engaged with and activated their communities around the freedom to read. This moderated panel discussion will feature teen advocates and address book banning, censorship, and how they engaged in civic leadership and built coalitions in the face of challenges.

Each teen panelist will answer the following questions:
  • When books were challenged or banned in your community, what was your gut reaction? What did you do next?
  • Can you talk through some of the initial steps you took when you decided to take a stand against book challenges and started trying to activate your community?
  • What strategies have you found most successful? What didn’t work?
  • How can library staff support teen activists in their community? What was the most helpful thing an adult in your life or in your community did to help you?
  • What’s next for you?

This webinar will help library staff working with teens, and maybe even teens themselves, learn from those who activated their communities around challenges and censorship. It will also include strategies, program ideas, and projects that helped the teen panelists build their communities.

Those in attendance will learn:

  1. About the panel of teens and the challenges they faced in their communities.
  2. Strategies the teens used to build up their communities and how they started small and were able to grow.
  3. The different ways that teens acted in response to challenges or censorship and how they were also able to continue the work with projects and programs. These examples could be used by other teens and their library communities

Panelists:




Teen Activist: Nationally Recognized: Da’Taeveyon Daniels





Teen Activist: Midwest: Meghana Nakkanti









Teen Activist Group: California, Golden State Readers: Anais Lee








Teen Activist Group: California, Golden State Readers: Mirabelle Lee








Teen Activist Group: California, Golden State Readers: Elizabeth Goldman





This event will be hosted in Zoom. Automatic captions will be enabled for this event. This event will be recorded, and registrants will receive access to the recording.

If you have questions or requests regarding accessibility, contact us at ce@ala.org or at 312-280-5100.

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