Andrea Hansen-Miller, a licensed clinical social worker who helps homeless people, runs her office out of the Minneapolis Central Library, offering visitors snacks, warm clothes, assistance finding housing, and mental-health support. “The police regularly clear the city’s streets of encampments, but officers don’t run unhoused people out of Central,” Paige Williams explains in this in-depth, on-the-ground report from Minnesota. “As long as they follow the rules, any patron—and everyone at the library is called a patron—can stay all day, every day.” Such policies make the library a natural place for social workers to meet individuals where they are likely to be—but not everyone who works there has the training or skills necessary to assist unhoused people, many of whom are in crisis. “A lot of people come into the public library, or go into librarianship, and are shocked by the fact that it’s not their childhood library,” one librarian at Central explains. “It can be exhausting to see so many people who need so much, or who have so little.” In these ways, as Williams explores, the library is a mirror, reflecting our shared social distress, while also offering insights into how we must adapt to better support those in need.

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