In 2021 the Indianapolis Public Library hired its first social worker to bridge the gap between librarians and patrons who need additional services.
Yanna McGraw, an Indianapolis-based social worker, has been active in Marion Country since 2008 in various areas, including geriatric, home-based therapy, law facilities and individual mental health cases. She took the job with the library as a way to provide resources and care to those who needed it but didn’t know where else to turn.
“What I feel this role is, is to build those partnerships and look at how we can address those things that we see as rules that are broken,” McGraw said. “There’s always a solution to things, we just might not like the solution but there’s always a solution and kind of give people back their dignity.”
McGraw is at the library Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 10 a.m. to noon and Tuesdays from 3-5 p.m. She said most of that time is spent researching and helping people build their resumes, fill out job applications and get bus passes in addition to referring out to different community organizations to help them acquire basic needs such as food, clothing, housing and mental health resources.
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Hundreds of patrons come and go from public libraries each day, many of which are homeless, elderly or in need of additional assistance, McGraw said. Although librarians are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about helping people, McGraw said they aren’t trained to help those with additional mental health needs or those in crisis as it reaches beyond the capabilities of the library.
“I think Liberians want to just fix it and social workers are like ‘we have to, like, peel down the layers, look at the whole picture and then come up with a plan,’” she said. “Sometimes that takes planning, talking through and then making those connections with resources.”
McGraw isn’t by far the first social worker to be in a library, but she is the first for the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library System. This means she’s had to build the framework for her position from the ground up using the 27 bullet points in her job descriptions, examples set by libraries on the West Coast who have already implemented the service and connecting with other library social workers through Whole Person Librarianship.
Dr. Andrea Copeland, chair of the department of Library and Information Science at IUPUI, met McGraw through a social work doctoral student who was writing her dissertation on public libraries. Though she doesn’t work directly with IndyPL, she’s been someone McGraw can talk to outside of the system.
“You need someone like Yanna, with her expertise and training to be there to help fill in that knowledge gap that librarians simply don’t have,” Copeland said.
Copeland said McGraw has done a wonderful job at raising awareness in terms of resources and making her own knowledge accessible to librarians and patrons alike, sort of like a “pathfinder.”
“I think she’s sort of amplified the role that librarians have had in terms of connecting people to resources,” Copeland said. “I know she’s advocated for less involvement of security and the police when dealing with patrons in crisis.”
However, the library still has a lot of work to do, which McGraw mentioned in her presentation for the Board of Trustees March 27 by special request of Dr. Khaula Murtadha. Copeland said this is an innovative new service to the library and there will be some initial confusion as it becomes fully integrated.
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McGraw said the things they’re experiencing in the IndyPL system are happening in every library across the country, and until there is a system-wide plan and buy-in from those at the top, it will be difficult for her to make a significant difference.
“If you have a little bit of understanding of it, it could make a difference,” she said. “It can make a shift in how you see and view and where you put your dollars at when you decide to donate or contribute to an organization.”
In an email response to the Recorder, Murtadha cited an article from Public Libraries Online, which states libraries should “consider their unique needs and what they want this position to accomplish. Library social work programs vary based on the needs of a community.”
“Generally, the roles of a library social worker are a blend of the following: staff consultations and trainings, direct patron work, and building community partnerships,” the article continues. “Based on the identified needs of both the community and the library, social worker roles can be crafted accordingly.”
McGraw and Copeland both echoed this sentiment and agreed that Community Needs Assessments are essential in determining how social workers can best serve their communities with the resources available to them. Copeland added that fully integrating those services into the library system on the front end — like they would with any other policy or procedure — would affect the back end and vice versa.
“When you when you implement a new service, you’ve got to ask how it affects all the other services and all the other resources, right?” Copeland said. “Until you do that, you will have an experience where you know the social services provided by the social worker are not integrated into the whole.”
The work that McGraw has accomplished through the library system in the past year is nothing to shy away from, however, she said she alone cannot do it all. For her work to be sustainable, the community and the library itself must do its part to come together and lift up those in need.
“It’s our responsibility as a community to figure out a solution that is not ‘person one here, person one here,’” McGraw said. “We need to figure out a centralized way to get the resources to the people that need help the most.”
Contact staff writer Chloe McGowan at 317-762-7848 or chloegm@indyrecorder.com. Follow her on Twitter @chloe_mcgowanxx.
