Building Community and Coalitions: Takeaways from the TPS Collective

Anne Bahde explained how, from its earliest form as a ‘resource bank’ created by teaching archivists and special collections librarians, the TPS Collective was a response to expressed needs in the community. Though instruction had a limited presence in the major professional organizations, it was clear from conference chatter and other routes that there was a huge, growing presence of teaching across many position types and institutions, but no centralized, agile way for those scattered people to talk to each other. When people did start to talk to each other outside of organizational constraints, new collaborative possibilities and roles arose. 

Perhaps the best example of responsiveness from the TPS Collective is the Community Calls. In the earliest days of the pandemic, when we were all struggling, the community came together organically to support each other, share expertise, and learn together through monthly calls. Directly following each call, organizers stayed to plan the next one and participants were encouraged to stay, give feedback, and volunteer for upcoming opportunities; this rapid turnaround meant we were able to take feedback and input from the community and nimbly fold that into the next call and subsequent products. Because we had no organizational hierarchy or set committees, new volunteers could respond to community needs by finding a role or task to fit their interest level and time budget. We encourage participation through multiple, shared, constantly open channels, including a slack workspace, monthly TPS Collective Facilitation Team meetings, the listserv, and the website.

That agility is also modeled in the building of the website; when it was time for a visual update after a few years, the webteam asked for focus group volunteers from the TPS Community to generate potential navigation structures and tagging vocabularies. The feedback garnered from this exercise directly guided the redesign and was clearly reflected in the final product, and several focus group members stayed on as regular webteam participants. This type of direct engagement allows the community to consistently, iteratively, and responsively build what the community says it needs.

Matt Strandmark first began work on what was then the TPS “Resource Bank” following a call at the Society of American Archivists 2015 meeting; this ultimately resulted in the basic bones of what would become the TPS Collective website. In 2019, Matt became more involved as the group gained energy and members, working alongside Matt Herbison and others to modernize and create a sustainable infrastructure for the (much more active) website.

From the beginning, the TPS Collective, and volunteer work on the website, was possible due to a dedicated and talented group of professionals who have always supported one another. One of the most valuable parts of this work is its ability to flexibly fit into other demands of my schedule and time. There have been times of feverish activity on the website: when gearing up for online events during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, major redesign initiatives, or one-on-one user testing. Matt described other times over the past four years when he has stepped back from this work for months at a time due to professional or personal demands. In a more conventional or traditional professional organization, involvement in a major committee or initiative with this kind of flexibility is not usually possible.

The diffuse and cooperative nature of our work as a collective makes this flexibility a reality. Because of lack of any kind of formal hierarchy or siloed work, taking a step back creates space for other members of the facilitation team or the TPS community to take more active roles. Availability to be more present results in stronger processes and products because of the individuals who have felt empowered to join. 

In such a demanding professional environment, we must seek to create this kind of flexibility in our organizations. In addition to the painful lessons that the pandemic taught us, the success of the TPS Collective shows that TPS practitioners are hungry for ways to contribute, learn, and evolve outside of strictly traditional modes. 

Our key to staying responsive and nimble is our intentional focus on relationships. The TPS Collective seeks to nourish relationships at the network level and we strive to foster *supportive* relationships between individuals in the community as we go about our work. On both of these planes, we hold to the belief that we are stronger when connected together; the spirit of our work is typically one of mutually enriching collaboration and cooperation. We strive for a culture of care. Work sessions often blend in a bit of sociability and in some cases, built in time after the close of business to share current challenges or recent successes. This mix helps develop the trust, vulnerability, authenticity, respect, that are crucial to fostering spaces of productive and supportive feedback and exchange. It’s also a direct investment into community.
At the network-to-network level, we aim to serve as both a partner with and antidote to other, more formal professional organizations. We try to operate with just enough organizational support to keep things moving without being too formal and therefore falling into time sucks frequently associated with formal membership organizations. We’ve intentionally built in liaison relationships with RBMS IOC, SAA RAO-TPS committee  — each join the Facilitation Team, for example, but so too do plenty of people who are affiliated with groups, or who identify with none at all. And there is most definitely room and desire for new relationships to form with additional regional, national, international groups, and with additional cohorts of individuals like museum education professionals, and early career folks; happily a newly formed outreach team is getting underway. It’s a really extensible model, but it is dependent on people seeing themselves in the community, and in this approach.

The TPS Collective has been compelling for many as a space where participation is valued simply because of skills and ideas, and not necessarily because of credentials or expertise in the field.

A lot of us work in spaces where hierarchies are formed by experience and credentials, and these hierarchies can often feel really disempowering to me. While power structures sometimes do still arise in spaces where labor and ideas are prioritised, those structures and relationships often feel different, and feel like comfortable (and exciting!) communities and networks to be in.

John Henry Adams shared about joining the TPS Collective Facilitation Team shortly after finishing library school, and being delegated responsibility for the Teaching Tools Library: essentially, curating relevant resources in a Zotero library. This role also allowed space to watch and listen to the work not just of the Collective as a whole but on the facilitation team—space to lurk. That role became a stepping stone to take on other responsibilities, handing off initial roles to other new volunteers. 

A more conventional organization tends to have term limits for committee membership. That’s perfectly reasonable, but it makes it a little difficult for someone to transition from a lurker to a more active participant. Presence on the TPS facilitation team is “at-will,” which creates space to start out with a more passive role without having to have a specific high-intensity commitment. This also provides an opportunity to slowly learning what other projects others are working on without being nervous about figuring it all out by the time a term is up; volunteers can stick around for as long as they like, and gradually grow into whatever role they feel best suited for.