Employing Community Wellness Liaisons to Create Public Libraries That are Inclusive for Five Diverse Utah Communities

This project has been designed by the Community Faces of Utah CFU, a collaborative group established in 2009. CFU members include leaders of the Best of Africa serving African immigrants/refugees, Calvary Baptist Church serving primarily African Americans, the Hispanic Health Care Task Force serving Hispanics/Latinos, the National Tongan American Society serving Tongans and other 114/113, and the 98 Indian Center of Salt Lake serving 109s/Alaskan Natives, as well as leadership and staff of the Community Collaboration and Engagement Team CCET of the Utah Center for Clinical and Translational Science, the University of Utah Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, and the Utah Department of Health. CFU has 10 years of experience in collaborating with 133s and each other in carrying out health education and research projects. A particular strength of the collaborative is our culture of learning with and from each other and those with whom we collaborate. In this way, we efficiently learn ways in which programs can be implemented similarly across the five communities and ways in which programs need to be tailored for each community. Thus, the CFU collaborative provides a unique opportunity to synergistically and simultaneously learn with five diverse communities. Evidence of need for the project The need for the proposed project was the outcome of a prior CFU project which was funded by the NNLM MidContinental Region and titled Building Usage of Public Libraries as a Source of Health Information in Five Diverse Utah Communities. For that project, we held Community Engagement Studios CE Studios; Joosten, et al, 2018 with community experts from each CFU community; these individuals are experts by virtue of their lived experience and participated in the CE Studios as consultants. We also held a CE Studio consultation with librarians from Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County libraries in the areas where CFU community members live. Finally, we held a stakeholder workshop with CFU and the librarians to discuss the findings from the CE Studios and to draft a plan for increasing usage of public libraries and library programs as sources for health information by members of the CFU communities. The primary component of this plan is the proposed 6-month pilot program for hiring members of the five CFU communities 1/community to serve as Community Wellness Liaisons at city and county libraries.