Asset Framing
In the above image, Wellspring an artwork by artist Charles Luna, a woman holds a small child in patch of grass in the desert. The viewers' eyes might dance between the cityscape in the background, the artist's model in the foreground, and the desert all around. And yet, our eyes always come back to the centre, to the oasis the pair make. Instead of lamenting the desert and all that they do not have, the woman and child are focused on each other and all they DO have when they are together.
Exercises such as engaging with this artwork emphasize "asset framing" over "defect framing". As articulated by Trabian Shorters, asset framing is about shifting narratives, so that instead of defining individuals or communities by what they lack, we instead "define a people by their aspirations and contributions" (Shorters 2018). In other words, instead of lamenting the mother/child pair's surrounding environment, we instead would define them based on what they have, their hopes, and their contributions to the world around them.
Planning and engaging in work for libraries through the lens of asset framing similarly shifts our perspective. When we think about librarians in this context the first thing that comes to mind is how they often work in organizations where resources are "never enough". Similarly, maintainers in all fields of work can be envious of budgets for peers' innovative projects which always seems to trump maintenance when resources are divvied up.
As we compete against each other for resources, constantly seeking new ways to prove our worth or justify our work, an important analogy to consider is the lack of leaderboards in Doctorow's Walkaway. In a society that has walked away from capitalism, seeking to build a communal future, the most successful communes are those that don't force their citizens to compete. The leader of a failed commune, in reflecting on his aggressive and hyper-competitive mindset that led him to critique the groups without leaderboards, observes that we are not the problems-- it's the systems:
“It twists my head that I only started disbelieving in useful and useless people when I proved to be useless. Then I had this revelation that the scale I’d judged people on--the scale that I was failing on-- was irrelevant.” (Doctorow 2017, 208)
Similarly, As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Left Hand of Darkness, "To oppose something is to maintain it... you must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road" (Le Guin 1969, 163). So, instead of using the scale--the scale that we all fail on in different ways--let's walk down a different road and work towards a new goal.
Staging honest conversations about the need for support does improve projects and outcomes. Being able to say and be heard when you speak that: "If I’m going to do this new project x successfully, I’m going to need to give up y, and get help from z."
Or practicing saying "No" in your personal and professional life--it's a great way to stop burning yourself out, and letting yourself and others down.
Jessica Meyerson at Educopia has a great way of putting this conundrum about what to do "first". When talking with her about how how the personal is a precursor to community work she counsels that identifying "the hardest lies we have to stop telling ourselves is the hardest work we need to do" (need citation). Also if we want to keep this paragraph, more needs to be added to this paragraph.
