Like fragments shored against our ruins – I celebrate the commitment of public resources to universal access via the Chicago Public Library.

This winter we convened to champion the 81 Club – an initiative the Chicago Public Library Foundation hired us to support in 2023. The 81 Club puts a Chicago Public Library card into the hands of every Chicago Public Schools student on their first day of school – because it is built right into their student ID card. CPL had already done the hard work of building their agreement. Our role was to deepen the partnership by designing mutually reinforcing strategies to increase library resource uptake among students. For example, libraries now display the texts on CPS independent reading lists so students have easy access to books customized to their learning level, curated by CPS literacy experts. Or – librarians flooded the city’s back to school event schedule so families could engage with the resources available for students and for them.

Once upon a time in this city, 200,000 students were barred from borrowing books because of fines on their cards. Chicago was the first major urban center whose libraries went fine-free – and now we are pioneering public resource leverage through the 81 Club. Our libraries are ‘third spaces’ – neither home nor school – but places students see as theirs – places where they automatically belong. In 81 locations across the City of Chicago, kids can always find a librarian whose answer to every question starts with ‘yes.’

Only government can make a resource or a service truly universal. It is the only entity big enough, far reaching enough, and expansive enough to offer services, supports, resources, interventions at scale. Change can begin anywhere. But taking it everywhere often requires a role for government.

We love working across major public systems, like the libraries and the schools, to design and launch initiatives that become more than the sum of their parts. CPS and CPL were two systems in the process of greater integration – ready to take on an expanded initiative, together.

Right now, truth is mercurial… fiction is broadly accepted as fact. I choose to celebrate these monuments to truth-telling, sites of creativity and promise, and portals into a bottomless well of knowledge. Fragments shored against our ruin. In every neighborhood. For every student. Where we all belong.

I have always said that librarians are the most creative people I have ever known, and the statement holds up every single time.

(credit to the late great T.S. Eliot and The Wasteland, ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins’)