Phyllis Goodeill sidles around the desk in her office at the back of the Del Norte County Public Library, stepping between cardboard boxes as she does. Her desk is a mess. Piled high with binders, papers and books, it looks exactly how you’d expect the desk of a busy library director to look: Like there are other things more important than an orderly workspace. 

“At this point,” Goodeill says, “I don’t have any answers. We’re all just waiting to see what the fallout will be.”

Goodeill, like many others in the world of non-profit, quasi-government agencies, is waiting for the funding waters to clear. Back in Washington, D.C., programs are being cut with abandon, entire agencies shuttered at a moment’s notice, and it’s up to people like Goodeill to translate all the budget slashing into realities on the ground in the often poor, rural communities where the funding cuts will be felt the most. 

“It’s concerning,” Goodeill says, taking her seat behind the desk. “Of all the things they could monitor or investigate, why the libraries? Why the museums?”

Last week, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an independent federal agency that disburses funds to state and local libraries across the nation, announced abruptly that the funding the agency oversees was being frozen and its staff of about 70 people put on administrative leave. Historically, the IMLS has funded or helped fund programs as varied as a mental health pilot program at a local Iowa library, internships at a science library in Florida, workforce training in several states, and basic library services to Native American tribes, to name a few. 

Currently, the only service that will most likely lose funding at the Del Norte County Library is the Zip Books program, a grant-funded program that allows patrons to order books from Amazon through their local library and have those books delivered to their home to read. After the patron is finished with the book, it goes into their local library’s permanent collection. In this way, libraries serve patrons with an incredibly convenient and popular service while guaranteeing their collections stay up-to-date. The books were purchased through a grant from the IMLS. The current year’s Zip Books allocation at the Del Norte County Library is just over $16,000. 

Goodeill says she had hoped to get funding through the Libraries Transforming Communities grant from the IMLS to purchase a soundproof booth that would have allowed patrons to privately access telehealth appointments. Now, that seems to be on hold, too.

According to the California State Library website, IMLS grants have paid for support services for literacy programs, materials in braille for the blind and print-impaired, a statewide ebook library, summer reading programs, and training for library staff. 

Up until recently, a complete list of grants the IMLS awarded each fiscal year was available on the agency’s website. As of this writing, all that data had been purged from the IMLS’s funding “Dashboard.”

IMLS grants to California for the current fiscal year total $15.7 million. These grants were all canceled April 1. With about 20 percent still unpaid to California, that means an immediate loss of a little more than $3 million to California libraries.   

For Goodeill, though, the story isn’t about numbers, it’s about children. She’s currently engaged in a letter writing campaign to educate lawmakers about the impact of these funding cuts. 

“I was very specific,” she says, describing the scope of her missives. “I said, these are the programs that will be affected and these are the families and children that will be affected by these budget cuts.” 

And given the advent of the Orwellian info purge on the IMLS’s website, documenting her concerns has become paramount. “I say record yourself. I know that’s not everyone’s favorite thing, but I say let’s all record ourselves talking about our programs. It’s more personal if we talk about the children being affected by this.” 

To that end, Goodeill says she’s been interviewing the librarian at ‘O Me-nok Learning Center in Klamath, whose library used IMLS funds to replace old, worn out books. Those funds were part of the agency’s Reading Nation Waterfall initiative that funds greater access to libraries and books specifically for Native children. 

“I’m interviewing her and I’m asking her and I’m recording it so that I can share it with Reading Nation Waterfall and take it higher if I have to, so that the people know that the Native American children are being affected by the decisions at the IMLS.”

It was funding from the IMLS’s Reading Nation Waterfall program that allowed Goodeill, along with Yurok Tribal officials and accompanying academics, to travel upriver to the remote community of Kep’el with a hundred free books for children. 

“The drive is a two hour drive and it’s a one way dirt road,” Goodeill said. “So, they took us upriver with four boxes of books.” She, along with Dr. Anthony Chow, Chair of San Jose State University’s School of Information, helped hand out the books at the Kep’el Headstart. “I got to witness little children, Native American children, choosing books that are Native American books, taken from the Native Ways of Knowing booklist,” Goodeil said. “To see a little boy, whose hair has never been cut, choosing a book called My Powerful Hair…yeah, that’s why I do what I do.”

Goodeill, who jokes her car is like “like a bookmobile!”, is always prepared to hand out books, especially to young people. “I was a library kid,” she says. “I grew up in the library. I went to the library regularly.” Goodeill didn’t work in a library, though, until 2021, when she started volunteering locally. 

“My rise to the directorship is one for the books!” she explains. “I started out as a relief worker, two days later I became the bookkeeper. Six months after that, the director vacated the position and I was the acting director.” 

In early 2022, Goodeill became full director of the library. With no previous experience, she concedes she’s had to learn her job on the job. “I have learned everything I know sitting here, doing it.” 

Part of Goodeill’s job is finding funding to supplement the library’s operating expenses paid for by local property taxes. To keep the books flowing to local youth, Goodeill and the library rely heavily on grants and donations. This year, the library has raised $90,000 in supplemental funding. The lion’s share of that was a one time donation from a Debra Chasteen, a patron who passed away and left $50,000 to the library specifically to purchase new books. 

“We get stuff, too,” Goodeill laughs, pointing at boxes of wifi hotspot tech in her office. There are also a pair of telescopes, which have prompted Goodeill to join an astronomy club so she can learn how to use them. 

Goodeill has also applied for a summer grant from Klamath Promise Neighborhood to augment the summer reading program with activities. “It’s not sitting and reading out of a workbook, it’s a dance or it’s something, and they read about it and write about it.”

She’d also like to find a way to fund an actual bookmobile, something that occurred to her at the recent KPN-hosted community dinner. “They [Klamath Promise Neighborhood] asked for projects [to fund]. I have one…let’s get a bookmobile and staff it with school librarians,” many of whom recently received pink slips from the school district. 

“I’m scrambling,” Goodeill says, “trying to figure out how can I help the children have access to these books?” 

For Goodeill, it’s all about access, something she’s not certain the budget-slashers back in Washington D.C. with their dogged opposition to DEI policies understand.  

“Libraries, everything that we do is based on DEI,” Goodeill says. “Can the person that’s handicapped, can the person in a wheelchair, can the blind person, can the deaf person, can they all come through the library door and have the same access to the same information. That is the lens, that DEI, that we use to insure that everybody has access to information. It’s not about hiring, it’s not about any of that stuff that the administration has objection to. For us, it’s about making sure everybody can access the same information. That’s how we use diversity, equity and inclusion in our work.” 

This failure to understand how diversity, equity and inclusion policies work could be easy to fix, Goodeill suggests. “If you object to DEI, how about we rename it Information Access for All? Because that’s basically all it is.”