BUDDIES – Connected Libraries & Communities

About the project

The BUDDIES project brings together 4 partners from 4 countries with expertise in library innovation, community engagement, advocacy and cultural programming: the European Cultural Foundation (Netherlands, coordinator), Public Libraries 2030 (Belgium), Aarhus Public Libraries (Denmark), and Comicdom Press (Greece). BUDDIES is part of the wider #TheEuropeChallenge initiative.

Europe has more than 65,000 public libraries. They are trusted places where people of all ages and backgrounds find knowledge, support and a sense of belonging. BUDDIES helps the people who make this happen: through mentoring, peer learning and hands-on tools, it gives library and community workers the skills and confidence to run community-led activities. The project also gathers real stories and evidence from libraries across Europe, and uses them to show decision-makers how libraries work as hyper-local learning hubs, and why they deserve support.

BUDDIES focuses on three main objectives:

• Give library and community workers the training, tools and support to run inclusive, community-led activities
• Connect practitioners across Europe in a network where they learn from and mentor one another
• Show the value of libraries as local learning hubs and turn this into concrete policy recommendations

Over the course of the project, we will:

• Run a Europe-wide skills audit of library staff to understand the skills they need today
• Collect 40 case studies of community-led library initiatives and map them online
• Build a digital competency framework for library and community workers
• Deliver mentoring and training through a Train-the-Trainer programme and Buddy Coaching for community teams
• Create a KnowHow Lab and an open library of toolkits, connecting frontline workers across Europe
• Bring the findings and policy recommendations to EU institutions at a high-level event in Brussels

For more information, visit: https://theeuropechallenge.eu/buddies/