Renewed for 2022—Trainings from Ryan Dowd

Great news! The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has renewed Wisconsin libraries' access to the Ryan Dowd trainings for the year 2022.

What are the trainings?

Ryan Dowd

Ryan Dowd is the executive director of Hesed House, the second-largest homeless shelter in Illinois. Ryan offers libraries and other organizations relevant, practical training on working with a variety of patrons—individuals facing homelessness, individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and challenging patron interactions. Ryan's trainings come highly recommended—even if you do not believe your library serves individuals facing homelessness.

What can I learn?

There is a 3.5-hour core training which is highly recommended for everyone; some libraries have taken a staff development day to watch the core training. There are also one-hour webinars, with a new webinar added every month. The webinars reference principles taught in the core training, but the core training is not essential to understand the webinars.

Here is a sampling of the available webinars:

• Getting hit on by customers
• Kicked out!: How to safely ask someone to leave (without calling the police)
• Ornery teenagers: Compassionately and effectively managing their problem behaviors
• Prejudice: How to respond to prejudicial comments from customers
• Unattended children: How to talk to parents about their children's behavior

How do I access the trainings?

Visit this link here: https://my.nicheacademy.com/dpi-wi-staff. You will need to create an account; you need to use a work email address when creating the account. If you do not have a work email address, talk to your supervisor to see if your library has a general email address you can use. If you have trouble accessing the training, contact your regional continuing education consultant or someone from your library system office.

How do I stay informed?

To receive weekly emails containing tips for patron interactions, sign up here. To receive the links to upcoming live webinars, sign up here. Note—all webinars are first given live and a few days later archived on Niche Academy for on-demand access.