Ray Pagenkopf from the Menomonie Public Library was able to attend the 2025 virtual Power Up:  A Leadership Conference for Youth Services Managers and Staff Conference in February thanks to a scholarship from IFLS, with funding support from the WI Division for Library Services through an LSTA grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Tell us a couple of things about one stand-out session:

I thought about this a lot, but the session I most enjoyed was actually the keynote. It was very grounding to hear from Kyle Lukoff, the author of When Aiden Became a Brother. He gave a very frank talk about book banning, censorship, and what that means for marginalized kids who need to see their worlds represented. It was also very sad because things are only getting harder. When he was a librarian he had the philosophy that a kid could read whatever they wanted, and if they were ready for it, they would read it and if they weren’t, they wouldn’t understand it. Which made a lot of sense to me and my experience.

 What is one idea you got at the conference that you are hoping to implement into your work or the library’s work?

I was very interested in changing play areas to be more reflective of the kids’ actual lives. The presenter talked about bringing in real items, like menus from local restaurants for the play kitchen, and sticks and leaves to play with. The menus are a great way to play with something that they probably already see and engage with, and get to role play the other side of that interaction, plus it’s a great way to get some diversity through the restaurant choices. For my area I would love to get menus from the local Hmong restaurants. I have reached out to the local area to see who has menus that I could take (less common than it once was) and to the theater to get any old playbills. That still hasn’t happened but in the meantime my storytime kids are growing plants and watching them work with the seeds and dirt and even water them made me see how much more real items meant to them. They slowed down, focused really hard and were very curious about the process. Holding the seeds was a lightbulb moment for them.

If you had to use 6 words to sum up this conference, how would you do it?

 Post-election temperature check for inclusive kids programs.

 Anything else you want to share with others about your Power Up Conference experience?

I had a really great time and I am so glad I got to go. I liked hearing from people who worked at much larger and smaller libraries and seeing the ways they worked and how things were around the country. It was a bit stressful to also hear about how everyone’s jobs are getting hard at the moment, but it is heartening to see the resilience.