Street-Level Supporter

The Yeadon Public Library opens at 10 a.m., but director Richard Ashby always arrives two hours earlier. “I begin with walking the floor—praying and getting emotionally ready for the day—to ensure the library’s presentation is up to par,” he says.

Ashby has walked the floor of a library since 1989, when he was a security guard at Wyandanch Public Library (WPL), NY. Then, too, he wanted to make the space welcoming to all. His “career-defining moment” came one day when a young African American girl complained to the librarian, who was white and not from the local community, that another patron was calling her names. The librarian “did not know how to handle the situation,” Ashby recalls, and as a support staff member, he wasn’t allowed to intervene.

“This was…when I decided that I needed to pursue my library degree,” he says.

Over the next several years, he worked his way up as a page at WPL, starting first at the circulation desk and then moving to the children’s room, reference desk, and finally becoming page supervisor. Meanwhile, he was in school.

“My career trajectory can be considered nontraditional…to some,” he says. “However, for most librarians of color, starting as a page and working your way through the ranks is more common.”

In 2005 he became supervisor of WPL’s library operations, a position he held for five years, and in 2012 he set up a “sidewalk library” in the Mantua neighborhood of West Philadelphia on a corner plagued with drugs and violence. The first initiative of LiteracyNation, the nonprofit he established, the sidewalk library distributes gently used books to young people. Ashby also helps their parents with job applications, fixes bicycle tires—and simply listens.

In 2014—the same year he was named Librarian of the Year by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA)—Ashby became director at Yeadon, a small urban library near Philadelphia with big community reach. Among the programs he’s developed are a homework club with free meals for participants and an annual back-to-school event at which kids with library cards get free haircuts from local barbers. He also brokered a partnership with a neighborhood organization to train and employ three retirees, who each work 20 hours a week. “The partnership allowed the library to save 3,120 additional staffing hours [annually],” says Ashby, who is currently running for vice president of BCALA.

“Our programming is diverse [enough] to meet all of the changes public libraries are undergoing,” he says. “And I am here for the long haul.”