
Developing Inclusive Children’s Library Programs
Children’s library programs are among the most vibrant and beloved library services. They connect kids and families; support literacy, academic achievement, and career exploration; and help close opportunity gaps—plus, they’re fun! To make sure all children can benefit from library programs, librarians need and want to make our youth programs highly inclusive. What steps can librarians take to help all kids and families feel welcome and included? Center Youth Voice One of the most impactful ways to make programming for youth as inclusive as possible is to engage the young people themselves in making decisions. This helps ensure programs are responsive to the cultures, identities, abilities, and experiences of youth in your community. To maximize inclusion, seek out ways to center youth voice that are appropriate and helpful for children’s age and the context. What does it mean to center youth voice? A seminal model for understanding how youth can meaningfully participate in programming decisions is Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship (1992). It has since been reimagined by other scholars, including a hub-and-spoke model created by Phil Treseder in his 1997 book Empowering Children & Young People (see figure). At the level of “assigned but informed,”