Fromage Your Community: Storytelling Roundtable at MLA ‘26
Submitted by: Molly Maloney
The Community Building and Belonging Committee, along with the Accessibility and Disability, African American Medical Librarians Alliance, LGBTQIA+, and Social Justice and Health Disparities Caucuses, invite you to join us in sharing our stories of resilience, change, and confusion due to recent changes in our country and professional community at MLA ‘26 in Milwaukee.
Session Goals: We are Not Alone
Our hope is not only to have space for catharsis, but to ask questions and share strategies for problem solving, working around, working through, and resisting. An additional aim is to widen, strengthen, or establish a network of support for members facing issues related to identity, community building, belonging, social justice, and/or accessibility. With supporting the wider MLA Community in mind, we hope to capture useful strategies and resources discussed by members. Padlet will be used to record resources and discussion highlights, allowing for both named and anonymous participation.
Format of the Session
Roundtables will have moderators to help guide conversation and help ensure the space is safe for genuine engagement. Authentic conversation requires those sharing to be vulnerable and may involve deep emotion. To this end, this event will be a safe space: what is said during the session, stays in the session. However, what is learned here will hopefully leave the session to be put into practice! To support these difficult conversations, tissues and small stress-relief activities will be available at each table as needed.
Table Topics
There will be eight tables developed by the representatives of each caucus and committee:
- Community support
- Growing up with disabilities
- Invisible disabilities
- Later-in-life changes
- Later-in-life disabilities
- LGBTQIA+
- Place-based barriers to inclusive work
- Open conversation at the Charcuterie Board, a space for topics other than those above
Join Us!
You can find us at the Storytelling Roundtable on Thursday, May 21, from 10:30 to 11:45 a.m., central time, in room N105.