Frequently Asked Questions

Our Mission

To amplify, strengthen, and progress the futures of New York City’s three public library systems through community-led organizing, action, and increased funding.

Our Core Values

Libraries are radical

• To pursue education and critical thought is a radical act.
• Public libraries are thus inherently political spaces: they provide resources for people of all ages, backgrounds, and ways of life.

Commons are a model for the future

• Public libraries are a model for the power of the public commons to
• build the emancipatory and liberatory futures our communities deserve.

Care and community are priorities

• NYC’s public libraries offer a model for how cities can educate, care for, and provide sustainability for all people, regardless of financial circumstances, race, disability, or legal status.

Libraries must be decarceral

• Libraries must be anti-carceral to ensure that they are spaces for all people.

Abundance is the future

• We build more through abundance than austerity. An abundant future is ours if we fight for it.

What we’re working on

• Sustained library funding, with a commitment of at least half of 1% of the overall city budget.
• Planned library funding for FY ‘26 is only 0.42% ($480,334,000) of the total New York City expense budget.
• An increase to 0.50% (to $572,500,000) would translate to about
• in public library funding in the FY ’26 cycle, or a 19% increase in total library funding in this upcoming fiscal year.
• This is a realistic but significant number which will allow libraries to continue to serve NYC.

How to get involved

• Donate to our work at LibraryPAC.
• Stay up to date with us through our newsletter. (signup coming soon)
• Join us as an active member!
• Contact info@nycplan.org to connect with us.

How do we work?

• We meet once a month as a full group, usually on the 2nd or 3rd Sunday of the month.
• We alternate between in-person and virtual meetings to allow people from all boroughs and mobility needs to participate.
• To help keep our community safe and keep our meetings accessible for all, we wear masks in our in-person meetings.
• After attending a meeting, each member joins one Working Group they will participate in.
• Working Groups meet regularly as needed to plan and execute actions towards our mission.
• For people who cannot regularly participate, we send out a newsletter with specific things you can do to make a difference.

Member working groups

Logistics / Admin

This team supports the larger NYC PLAN group by handling logistics and administrations for key infrastructure. This includes managing and moderating the group’s shared Google Drive and asynchronous communication channel, as well as booking and managing spaces for in-person meetings.

Research and Data

This team is a labor force for running research – qualitative, quantitative, informal interviews, and more – and would love to work with other working groups to understand how we can collaborate or take on research objectives on their behalf. At our core, we are here to support your efforts, to collaborate, to centralize, and to share new information to support the larger goals. Additionally, we are working as a group on determining the research objectives that we will initiate.

Outreach

This team welcomes people into PLAN by sharing information that puts our collective values into practice. We steward PLAN’s branding, website, newsletter, and other resources to inform the public about our work, on-board members, and hone our resolve through popular and political education.

Governance

This team explores the power structures, policies, and practices that determine how New York City’s public libraries are managed and operated. We develop and share resources related to existing library governance, while also investigating alternative models that could move us in the direction of community-based collective governance. Our areas of focus include elected and unelected individuals and bodies (including boards of trustees) who have power over public libraries, compliance requirements, funders, and library policies and operational norms.

Legislative

This team supports the PLAN mission by mapping out the political landscape of NYC, communicating with legislators, bringing information back to the entire PLAN group, and developing proposals about legislative action