Library Profile
DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY
DENVER COUNTY, COLORADO
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Library Profile: Denver Public Library
DENVER COUNTY, COLORADO
The Denver Public Library (DPL) is a large,
complex library system that serves the city and
county of Denver. DPL has 26 physical locations
throughout the county, including a large Central
Library, and an annual budget of more than $50
million (2018). DPL serves all of Denver County,
the most populous urban county in Colorado
with a population just more than 660,000. In
2018, the library hosted more than 4 million
in-person visits across all 26 locations and more
than 6.7 million website visits. Annual circulation
included more than 2.5 million children’s
materials and more than 9 million total digital
and physical materials.
DPL’s 2019 strategic plan is guided by an
overarching mission: “Together, we create
welcoming spaces where all are free to explore
and connect.” It specifies that the library will
measure its success in three specific areas that
promote the civic, cultural, and educational
health of Denver: (1) Children enjoy reading
and learning and flourish in school and life; (2)
People connect to resources and acquire the skills
they need to thrive; and (3) We build community
through fun, inspiring, and creative experiences.
By supporting stronger social connectedness,
creating a welcoming environment for all,
and developing innovative programming and
partnerships, DPL promotes the wellbeing of its
patrons and the broader community.
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DENVER COUNTY
1 Data elements included in the Community Health Index, along with measures for Denver County, can be found at the beginning of Appendix II.
Denver County’s 663,303 residents are
predominately White, and more than 30 percent
of residents identify as Hispanic. The median
household income is about $56,000 a year,
roughly equivalent to the national median
household income, and the county’s 12 percent
poverty rate is slightly higher than the national
poverty rate.
Population
% Change in
Population
(2000–2016)
%
White
%
Black
%
Hispanic
%
Asian
%
Other
Median
Household
Income
% Families
in Poverty
United States
318,558,162 13.2 62.0 12.3 17.3 5.2 3.3 $55,322 11.0
Denver County
663,303 19.6 53.4 9.4 30.8 3.4 $56,258 12.2
Compared to other urban counties across the
country, Denver County residents enjoy elevated
levels of overall community health. Denver
County fell in the top quartile of the Community
Health Index.
1
Health Care & Social Assistance;
Professional, Scientific, & Tech Services;
Accommodation & Food Service; and Retail
Trade represent the largest employment sectors
in Denver County, employing 34 percent of all
working adults.
Total Labor
Force
% Health Care
& Social Assistance
% Professional, Scientic,
& Tech Services
% Accommodation
& Food Service
% Retail
Trade
United States* 131,362,978 14.5 6.7 8.9 10.9
Denver County 458,041 12.0 12.0 10.0 7.0
Data Sources: 2012–16 American Community Survey five-year estimates; U.S. Census Longitudinal Employer-Household
Dynamics (LEHD), 2017.
*Continental figures for total labor force include the 48 lower states and Washington, DC.
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SITE VISIT PARTICIPANTS AND DATA COLLECTION
In fall 2019, the study team conducted interviews
with 21 current library sta and representatives
from six dierent partner organizations. Site visit
interviews conducted with DPL sta and partners
focused on understanding DPL programming
and partnerships that support community health
in Denver County as well as DPL’s institutional
approaches to assessment and sustainability.
In addition, DPL sta provided the following data
to create the network map included in this profile:
• 2018 DPL Annual Report
• 2018 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms
for the DPL Friends Foundation
• Interview notes and related materials collected
by the case study team
This site profile includes the following:
• A summary of select DPL programming and
partnerships that support the community
health of library customers and the overall
health of the broader Denver community
• DPL institutional approaches to measuring
and assessing the contributions its eorts
have in the local community
• A descriptive network map that illustrates
the scope and variety of connections DPL
maintains with local partners throughout the
county and beyond
KEY PROGRAMS AND PARTNERSHIPS PROMOTE COMMUNITY
HEALTH IN DENVER
DPL sta who participated in the study
repeatedly pointed to the library’s focus on
building community and making the library
welcoming for all as qualities that enhance
the broader community’s overall health and
wellbeing. DPL oers programs that address both
physical health (e.g., movement, yoga, nutrition)
and social and emotional health and community
wellness (e.g., Death Café; Memory Café), classes
and workshops on wide-ranging topics (e.g.,
navigating the Department of Human Services
or talking with children about race), and art
and music programs. Across dierent types of
programs, DPL addresses personal and public
health needs by providing information and
resources, helping participants increase their
knowledge and skills, reducing social isolation,
and creating an inclusive atmosphere so that all
Denver residents feel welcome to access library
services. Below, we highlight two examples of
DPL’s public and personal health eorts.
DPL’s Community Resource Team
Promotes the Wellbeing of Patrons and
Sta
DPL’s Community Resource Team (CRT)
illustrates DPL’s strong commitment to
supporting public health. The CRT began in
2015 with one social worker and the goal of
working with library customers experiencing
homelessness. Since then, the team has
grown to include four social workers and six
peer navigators. Peer navigators have lived
experience with some of the challenges the
library’s customers face as well as knowledge
of relevant resources in Denver. They help
customers navigate challenges through outreach,
compassion, coaching, and connecting them to
resources. While some positions were originally
grant funded, all are now permanent library
positions funded by the city. The CRT creates a
welcoming atmosphere and weaves supports for
public health into all its eorts.
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The CRT helps customers address a wide variety
of needs, including income assistance, food
access, shelter, legal aid, behavioral health, and
immigration services. They connect customers
to services inside and outside the library and
have developed multiple partnerships to support
this eort. Peer navigators and social workers
work across all 26 branches, connecting to
customers through drop-in hours and outreach.
They also work closely with security and library
sta to identify customers in need of assistance
and to de-escalate situations when needed.
In addition, the team provides consultation,
support, and training for library sta, and the
team participates in city-, state-, and national-
level conversations to develop institutional
policies that challenge social injustice and
respect the needs and dignity of all customers.
Two CRT members described their roles:
“We want people to know that the library is
a part of the solution to all of these issues . . .
helping people engage with support systems
they didn’t know existed or didn’t know how
to access.” (Social Worker)
“This service opens our eyes and opens doors
to the libraries for many people; they come
here for refuge. It helps people start anew.”
(Peer Navigator)
The CRT has influenced the library system and
its support of and resources for addressing
health and social needs in a number of ways.
Social workers and peer navigators have
provided training for sta on topics such as
trauma, mental health, and homelessness.
Close collaboration with the security team has
benefitted both teams and helped shift the
security team’s role to a focus on keeping people
in the library, rather than ejecting customers. A
security sta person said, “We were not trauma-
informed [then] to the extent we are now. [After
training from CRT], we serve the community
much better today, because we are better
prepared, better educated, [and] our ocers have
new tools to understand our customers.”
DPL’s adoption of peer navigators has also helped
other organizations in Denver see the value of
the peer navigator role. The city created a request
for proposal (RFP) to bring peer navigators to
other homeless-serving groups, and the Denver
Department of Public Health and Environment
created two peer navigator positions to do
outreach.
The CRT enhances the library’s eorts to provide
a welcoming, safe, and accessible space for all
customers. The team provides concrete supports
for customers’ behavioral and physical health
needs. In addition, the team supports sta in
using trauma-informed practices to advance
core library values of building community and
connecting people to resources, including
by engaging them in a variety of formal and
informal education opportunities.
Multiple DPL Programs Support Older
Adult Health and Wellbeing
DPL’s Older Adult Services (OAS) provides a
variety of programming that aims to enhance
health and wellbeing by helping older adults
access needed services, get information
about health needs, build community, reduce
isolation, and increase social connectedness.
The department also seeks to promote an age-
positive philosophy within the library and across
Denver. OAS’s programming contributes to
an ongoing cultural shift at DPL that includes
a positive vision of older adults—a vision that
translates into a broader variety of trainings and
programs for older adults and for library sta. For
example, trainings on how the older brain learns
is helping better prepare librarians to create
eective health and educational programming
for older adults.
DPL runs a number of ongoing programs
to support older adult health and wellbeing
in which partners play a supporting role.
For example, Medicare Mondays, oered in
partnership with Benefits in Action, a state-
authorized assistance program for older
adults, provides one-on-one assistance in
understanding and applying for Medicare and
other public benefits. Memory Café, an ongoing
program at multiple branches, oers support;
resources; and fun, enriching activities to people
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living with memory loss and their caregivers.
About half of the participants find out about the
Café through the Alzheimer’s Association, which
helps with marketing. Memory Café has spread
to multiple branches within DPL, and librarians
from other parts of Colorado have visited to
observe it for possible replication. DPL has also
spearheaded mindfulness programming for older
adults, including meditation classes, Qigong
classes, and gratefulness gatherings. These
are grounded in research about the benefits of
mindfulness for older adults, and they are among
the most well-attended programs that DPL oers.
Key Partnerships Support Programming
for Older Adult Health and Wellness
The Denver Art Museum and DPL are located
on the same plaza, and they partner in multiple
arenas, including early learning and older
adult areas. In their work with older adults, the
Denver Art Museum and DPL collaborate on
programming, use each other’s space, provide
training for each other’s sta, and participate
together in a Creative Aging Forum. Training
exchanges have included DPL sta participating
in an Art of Access Training (on how to increase
access for people living with disabilities) at the
art museum and art museum sta participating
in a DPL training on “How the Adult Brain
Learns.”
One recent collaboration involved a Photography
and Memory program, where DPL played a lead
role. The program engaged students from a
University of Denver photography course and
older adults as partners over multiple sessions.
The student-partner pairs exchanged stories
focused on a treasured photograph, and the
students created photo portraits of their partners.
The process culminated in an exhibit hosted by
the art museum in its Community Gallery.
In other examples, DPL helped the museum to
bring art into the community by inviting the
museum to share pieces from its collection at
Memory Café sessions and to set up temporary
exhibits at branch libraries. The Denver Art
Museum initially convened and continues to play
a lead role in the Creative Aging Forum, where
arts and cultural institutions share ideas and
expertise related to working with older adults;
DPL is an active participant and has also hosted
meetings.
Changing the Narrative, a Colorado-based
communications and awareness campaign, seeks
to reframe aging to counter ageist attitudes and
stereotypes. Changing the Narrative’s goals are to
better support the health and wellbeing of older
adults and to encourage stronger communities
by valuing and learning from older adults’
knowledge and experience. The partnership
between DPL and Changing the Narrative
includes the following:
• Sta training: Supporting culture change at
the library through oering training to sta
• Community education: Community trainings
and workshops
• Hosting events: Partnering on multiple events,
such as a 2019 lecture by an anti-ageism
activist, and sharing costs such as presenters’
fees and catering, providing publicity, and
creating invitations (with the library providing
the space)
The partnership has influenced Changing the
Narrative’s work beyond Denver. When it initially
enters a new community, its practice is to create
a commission. Though libraries were not on
their original “target list,” Changing the Narrative
now requests that local libraries be at the table
because of its partnership with DPL. Changing
the Narrative finds that libraries are helpful
partners because they are trusted institutions
frequently visited by older adults, and libraries
do not carry the stigma that “senior centers” may
have for younger seniors.
The NextFifty Initiative is a Denver-based
foundation focused on the older adult
population. NextFifty provided funding for the
creation of DPL’s OAS administrator position as
well as much of the department’s programming
and training. NextFifty also funds some of the
department’s partners. Knowledge of the history
of the CRT positively influenced NextFifty’s
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decision to fund DPL, and NextFifty hopes that
the OAS Department will follow the CRT model.
This trajectory would mean DPL incorporates
OAS funding into its standard operating budget
after the initial grant ends. It would also mean
that OAS would then develop an advisory
committee that includes older adults to inform
programming and strategic directions.
The partnership with DPL has shaped NextFifty’s
broader approach to working with libraries.
An interviewee noted that they hope to build
on the experience with DPL by connecting
to other libraries around the state and create
opportunities for the OAS administrator to share
OAS’s work more broadly outside Denver. One of
the program partners said:
“The library is doing a fantastic job . . . with a
wide and dispersed network, there’s a lot of
opportunity for supporting social wellbeing
for the community. They demonstrate
innovation and creativity in responding to the
community’s needs.”
DPL’s programs, partnerships, and new
OAS Department support the health and
wellbeing of older adults in multiple ways.
All programming is rooted in an age-positive
philosophy, with related DPL sta training and
community education. Programs oer resources,
information, and support groups linked to
particular health challenges. They also provide
opportunities to engage with art, advocacy, and
physical health and wellness programming. All
programs oer opportunities for older adults to
create and maintain social connections and feel
part of a larger community.
DPL USES DATA TO TRACK OUTCOMES AND DOCUMENT IMPACTS
Virtually all DPL programs gather attendance
data and stories of impact, and the use of
satisfaction and program enhancement surveys
is also widespread. In 2019, DPL took steps to
strengthen its capacity to collect and use data.
It created a new department: Strategy and
Evaluation (S&E). S&E includes a department
manager and a senior management analyst, and
it recently adopted a new relational database
to connect and analyze data from across an
increasing number of sources. Goals for the
department include establishing a consistent and
more formal evaluation structure systemwide.
Multiple interviewees expressed hope that S&E
would help them better track outcomes. The
following examples highlight some of DPL’s
early attempts to collect and analyze data related
to its programmatic contributions to physical,
behavioral, social, emotional, and community
health.
Some programs and departments are expanding
their data collection to capture program-specific
impacts more rigorously. For example, the CRT
gathers data about individuals’ living situations,
whether they are connected to any other
services, and any substance abuse follow-up that
takes place following their contact with the CRT.
The CRT also tracks 911 calls made by library
sta. Early data collection eorts show ongoing
increases in numbers served and suggest that
about one-third of customers who work with the
CRT are not connected to any other supports;
early data collection also suggests that DPL
911 calls have declined substantially since the
CRT’s inception. These data provide the CRT
team with information about the health and
wellbeing needs of the customers it works with.
Early data tracking point to successes such as
fewer 911 calls because the CRT team developed
approaches to help meet customers’ health and
wellbeing needs and to de-escalate potential
conflicts. Early data collection eorts also point
to areas for further development, like helping
customers connect with needed services to
improve their health and wellbeing.
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Sometimes, partners help to enhance DPL’s
ability to track outcomes. For example, LinkAGEs
is a consortium of nonprofits that promotes
intergenerational connections; it recently
funded the Photography and Memory Project.
During the program, LinkAGEs administered
pre- and post-surveys for the younger and older
adult participants. The results suggested some
shifts in relationships and attitudes, including
positive changes in younger participants’
attitudes toward older adults, which directly
addressed ageism. Changing the Narrative also
develops evaluation plans for all its work, which
extends beyond the library. It uses surveys
immediately after workshops and trainings
and subsequent follow-up surveys to identify
changes in attitudes among participants as well
as changes in future intentions and actions. The
results of these evaluations provide evidence of
participants adopting more age-positive attitudes
as well as actions they have taken. This data
collection helps OAS and its partners understand
how programming is meeting their health and
wellbeing goals, such as developing age-positive
attitudes among younger participants; and also
identify areas for improvement.
The library’s goals to build community and
foster strong relationships are both central to its
eorts to support positive health and wellbeing.
However, community strength and the durability
of personal and institutional relationships within
broader networks can be dicult to measure.
Some DPL sta are developing exploratory tools
that seek to capture these outcomes. For example,
DPL’s makerspace, IdeaLAB, has developed an
approach to assess the strength of relationships
between sta and program participants and is
working to develop a behavioral observation tool
to document collaboration between DPL sta and
customers and collaboration between customers
themselves.
The programming, partnerships, and
institutional practices presented in this profile
are just a sampling of the diverse ways DPL
supports the wellbeing of its sta, customers,
and the broader Denver community. To live
the institution’s commitment as a place where
all are welcome to enjoy what the library has
to oer requires DPL to meet the community
where they are (on- and o- site), to honor and
respect the lived experiences that walk through
its doors, to make its sta and spaces accessible
and responsive to its patron’s needs, and to be
a leading example for other organizations in
Colorado and beyond for what it means to be a
public-serving institution.
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DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY NETWORK MAP
In addition to the interviews conducted during
the site visit, the study team also collected a
range of data from DPL to better understand
the connections between DPL and other
organizations in the community. Using these
data, the study team developed a descriptive
network map to highlight the dierent types
of connections DPL maintains with other
institutions in the local community. The map
illustrates the relationships between DPL and
those entities that oer programming at DPL
itself and those that support cross-marketing
eorts or have financial relationships with DPL,
and it also includes places where DPL hosts
o-site programs. The figure below provides
guidance for understanding dierent elements
of the network map.
NOTE: The network map is purely descriptive. The connections represented on the map do not necessarily, and are not intended
to, provide estimates of the duration, durability, intensity, or broader economic impact of the relationships between CDRI and
any single entity, or the broader network itself. The goal of the network map is to represent the range and diversity of dierent
types of institutions that connect to the museum in dierent ways.
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The figure above illustrates a sample of the connections of the more than 28,000 programs oered
across DPL’s 26 locations. Within the orange circle are a small sample of programs conducted on the
physical property of the institution, both programs produced by DPL, and those produced by others;
these are organized in terms of key program areas identified by DPL. Within the blue circle is a sample
of programs produced by DPL and oered o-site in the community. The gray circle represents a
sample of connections with other regional organizations and initiatives with whom the library has
reciprocal relationships.
