The Young Adult Services Forum (YASF) of the Illinois Library Association affirms the Illinois Library Association Statement of Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
YASF is committed to welcoming, uplifting, and empowering young adults, library staff, and others of every combination of identities as noted in the Statement. We affirm the importance of the needs and voices of members of groups facing historic and ongoing marginalization in a society that often prioritizes white, male, Christian, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class, American-born, able-bodied experiences.
We recognize personal and systemic injustices and the harm they do to teens, both within and outside of the library community. YASF seeks to provide professionals from underrepresented populations with the tools to thrive in the field of library teen services. We aim to provide all library staff serving teens with the skills to think critically about identity, power, privilege, inclusion, representation, and oppression, and to recognize this work as an intentional, ongoing, and indispensable exercise. In this way, we may begin to approach justice in library services to teens.
We will take continuous, tangible action to provide Illinois libraries and library staff serving teens with support and resources needed to actively confront injustice in their organizations and their communities, to examine their biases, to navigate the reality that progress can be uncomfortable, and to develop plans for the continual examination and re-evaluation of services to ensure justice in an ever-changing world.
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