In progress – please check back soon!

Penn Yan Public Library is committed to helping make strides toward greater social equity, in our community and in our society. We are working on a variety of initiatives to fulfill this commitment. In the meantime, the links below offer information on our goals, processes, and current status.

Click here to read the antiracism statement we adopted in the summer of 2020.

Click here to read the addition to our strategic plan on antiracism and diversity.

Click here to see the current month’s calendar of programs for kids, families, and adults, several of which are themed around justice, civics, and diverse voices.

From 2020 to 2023, PYPL hosted a program called Diverse Voices Matter. In it, facilitator and adult services librarian Alex shared a variety of pieces of creative expression – though largely poetry, made freely available from poets.org – featuring, in the own voices as often as possible, the perspectives, views, values, stories, histories, concerns, joys, and agonies of many dozens of creators from an amazingly diverse range of backgrounds and identities. Alex has collected a majority of the poems shared during those three years in a document that features key lines from each one formatted as links that will take you to each full piece. By formatting it this way, free from the context of titles and names, Alex hopes you will be struck by the power of the selected words themselves – and that when you follow each link, you will be delighted, surprised, or satisfied by the full context of the work. You can find that document here.