Planning and Setup

Categories: Funding and Potential Resources  |  Establish Your Team  |  Prepare For Paperwork  |  Build Your Calendar

 Funding and Potential Resources

Before you begin . . .

Consider potential sources of funding. The viability of different funding sources will vary depending on the institutional context. Some possibilities may include the following:

General funding

Need-specific funding – e.g., an internal budget for student assistants could provide paid internships

Examples of funding needs may include the following:

  • Salary for a grant coordinator
  • Salaries for research assistants
  • Stipends for student participants who complete the mentorship cycle
  • Honoraria for mentors and advisory board members
  • Refreshments for larger meetings such as mentor/mentee training, mentorship kickoff, and closing meeting
  • Fee for mentor/mentee trainer
  • Transportation and meals for site visits
  • Honoraria for site visit hosts
  • Speaker fees for special guests
  • Salaries or stipends for students in internships
  • Stipends for internship hosts
  • Transportation, meals, and lodging for students for professional development opportunities (e.g. professional conferences)
  • Office supplies (e.g. signage, sign-in sheets, and name tags for meetings)
  • Printing (e.g. certificates of completion for student participants)

Ideas for activities that may require little or no funding:

  • Job shadowing: Many libraries may be open to providing short job shadowing experiences for undergraduates.
  • Local site visits: Some institutions may provide free tours to small groups. Keeping it local avoids transportation costs.
  • Ask-A-Librarian: Drop-in or meetings over web-conferencing platforms.

When planning low or no-cost events related to BIPOC librarianship, be mindful that BIPOC professionals are often asked to donate their time in service to diversifying the profession and promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives. For this reason, we advocate for paying honoraria whenever possible to those who work to support the project and are not being otherwise compensated for their time.

NOTES FROM THE PILOT: We additionally budgeted for stipends for focus group participants for our research phase. We anticipated spending more money on food than we did given that most of our meetings were remote or hybrid, and when given the choice most of our students chose to participate remotely. We did not end up taking the students to any professional conferences, but this arose as a suggestion from one of our mentors that we thought would have been a great use of our funds. We were able to pay a stipend to students who completed the program thanks to a donation from an anonymous donor. We were able to use grant funds to offer students paid internships, and to pay honoraria to mentors and advisory board members, speaker and training fees, and transportation for site visits.

 Establish Your Team

Recommended Timeline: 12 months before mentorship launch

BIPOC Become Librarians has many moving parts, with various levels of bureaucracy to navigate, and many human beings to provide care for and support to. Establishing a team with clearly defined roles and a plan for regular communication is key to ensuring the project is sustainable for everyone involved.

Project Leadership: Meet on a regular basis to ensure the project is moving forward and all participants are receiving necessary communication and resources. Ideally the project leadership represents a diversity of institutions with access to different resources to support the program. Each member of leadership can take on a particular role, e.g. mentor coordinator, mentee coordinator, internship coordinator, etc. Consider whether you will want to publish the results of this project. If so, build in consideration of Institutional Review Board (IRB) requirements at your institutions and include team members who will manage the IRB proposal. Additionally, if you will be using grant funds, ensure someone on the team will be responsible for handling the inevitable paperwork and bureaucracy that will come along with it, including acting as liaison with the office/campus unit that receives the money from the grantor and processes all paperwork between your institution and the grantor. The liaison should also work with the office/campus unit that handles private donations if your program receives such gifts.

Advisory Board: Ideally Advisory Board members share affinity with the goals of the program, represent a diversity of institutions, have experience with mentorship or internship programs in some capacity, and can participate in identifying potential internship sites for undergraduate student participants. Members meet with Project Leadership at inflection points to provide feedback on the plan of action. They remain available between meetings to asynchronously provide feedback as questions arise. They may review recruitment plans, the mentorship guide, and other resources as they are developed.

NOTES FROM THE PILOT: Our project leadership included four SJSU faculty librarians, one of whom was the library chair, one faculty member from the SJSU School of Information, and one librarian from San José Public Library. Our Advisory Board members included five individuals from five different institutions throughout the country with expertise in public library administration, special collections, academic libraries, and career counseling. The project leadership team first began working together in September 2020 to develop the grant proposal for IMLS. We began identifying and reaching out to potential Advisory Board members. We also developed a loose timeline, though in retrospect we wish we had determined key dates more concretely in this early phase so as to provide more advance notice of these events to participants. We received the good news that the grant had been awarded in July 2022 and began the grant period that August.

The project team had a weekly virtual one-hour standing meeting. We did not find it necessary to meet for the full hour every week, but found it useful to have a reminder to check in. Once we established mentorships, we also invited mentors to pop-in as needed during the first 30 minutes of our meeting if they had something they preferred to discuss live. We learned a great deal from our mentors during these “office hours.”

Related Resources:

 Prepare for Paperwork

Recommended Timeline: 12 months before mentorship launch

Plan ahead for navigating the particular bureaucratic limitations of your institution. Request monthly meetings with whoever can support you in navigating the bureaucratic landscape early in the planning process. The nature of your project may call for working with colleagues from your institution and state or from other institutions in other states. There may be limits on how much you can pay to whom, and for what type of work. These limitations may change depending on the home state of the institution and the home state of the people you want to pay, as well as how much you want to pay them. If you intend on paying students for internships, or providing a stipend for completing the program, investigate the protocols for hiring and paying students at your institution. Paperwork issues can also arise around internship sites. The more you can know in advance, the better.

NOTES FROM THE PILOT: We learned a lot on the go about limitations on paying others from our grant funds. In addition to the IMLS grant, we received a gift from a private donor. Each pot of money was administered by a different office on campus, with their own timelines and protocols of processing payments and reimbursements. For example, when we wanted to pay students “awards” for fulfilling their commitments to the program, we learned that “awards” on our campus would be processed through the Financial Aid Office, which would deduct from the award if the student owed money, or reduce their financial aid and use the award towards tuition. In order to meet our intention of putting cash in the students’ pockets, the students had to complete hiring paperwork and the students had to be paid as employees. When we wanted to pay a speaker fee for a keynote at our closing meeting, we ended up having to ask the keynote speaker to fill out hiring paperwork. We also learned that there were limitations on paying honoraria to mentors in certain states. One in particular was required to complete a lengthy online training before they could be paid. These are only a few examples of the many paperwork hurdles we had to navigate that we wish we had known about in advance.

 Build Your Calendar

Recommended Timeline: 12 months before mentorship launch

Having dates for key events in the project identified in advance will assist with ensuring all intended participants can hold time on their calendars for the events and will also help in planning for any associated paperwork or funding. Major dates can include mentor and mentee training and meetings, Advisory Board meetings, regular team meetings, library site visits; due dates for mentor-mentee meetings, submission dates for stipend paperwork, and a closing meeting/final event. Consider the flow and demands of the academic year and how this will impact the participation of both student and faculty participants, as well as those outside of academia whose busy times at work may follow a different pattern.

NOTES FROM THE PILOT: What follows are the dates of events during the pilot. These do not necessarily follow the recommended timeline, especially because the pilot was a two-year project that began with focus groups, and the recommended timeline for implementing the program is one year.

  • September 28, 2022 – First Advisory Board Meeting
  • February 6, 13, and 21, 2023 – Mentor/Mentee Trainings
  • April 10, 2023 – Mentor Meeting with Leadership Team
  • April 21, 2023 – Second Advisory Board Meeting
  • August 3, 2023 – Mentorship Launch
  • March 8, 2024 – Library Site Visit
  • April 19, 2024 – Mentor Meeting with Leadership Team
  • May 7, 2024 – Closing Meeting