Christine Van Walraven

Target Audience: Public Library Boards, CEOs, and Executive Leadership Teams.

Why You Should Be Interested: Public library boards bring together a wealth of diverse professional backgrounds and community perspectives. However, synthesizing those unique viewpoints into a single, unified vision takes structured effort. Often, the sheer urgency of the present—annual budget cycles, facility issues, and immediate community needs—crowds out the space required for high-level, visionary governance.

This program uses "futures thinking" to lift the pressure of the present off the board's shoulders. By collaboratively exploring the library a decade down the road, boards naturally distance themselves from daily operational management and focus on their true mandate: shaping long-term legacy, assessing strategic risk, and developing proactive policy. It builds a shared strategic vocabulary that unites the board and management team around a common destination.

Service Description: This is an experiential consulting engagement designed to build a board’s capacity for foresight and forward-thinking governance. Rather than simply learning the theory of futures thinking, the board will actively practice it. Over a focused, multi-month period, we will guide your board through a collaborative process of identifying emerging trends and translating them into actionable governance priorities.

The program is structured to maximize board engagement without overwhelming their schedules:

• Phase 1: Foresight Foundation Workshop: An interactive kickoff session that introduces the board to the practical frameworks of futures thinking. Board members are trained on how to identify "signals of change" in their daily lives and professions, and are equipped with a simple, shared platform to log these insights.

• Phase 2: Curated Signal Collection (3 Months): The board actively practices foresight. As members log their signals, I act as your strategic curator—synthesizing their inputs, adding high-level industry trends from the broader library sector, and delivering concise, monthly executive summaries to maintain momentum and alignment.

• Phase 3: Visioning & Synthesis Workshop: The board reconvenes to analyze the curated signals. Through guided, collaborative scenario-building activities, we connect the dots between the collected data and possible future realities for the library.

• Phase 4: The Strategic Compass Report: Delivered one month after the final workshop, this comprehensive executive report synthesizes the board’s work into a concrete roadmap. It highlights the key strategic issues identified during the engagement, providing a ready-made foundation for your next strategic planning cycle, budget prioritization, or policy development.

Investment:

• The Strategic Foresight Board Engagement: $6,500 CAD (Foundational Client $4,500 CAD)

  • Includes the Phase 1 Kickoff Workshop, three months of curated signal collection and monthly executive summaries, the Phase 3 Visioning Workshop, and the delivery of the final Strategic Compass Report. Travel expenses may be billed separately.)

Target Audience: Public Library Executives, Board Members, and Frontline Library Staff.

Why You Should Be Interested:  For many library staff and board members, artificial intelligence is a source of anxiety rather than excitement. This training helps attendees understand what artificial intelligence is, where it can go wrong, and how to recognize and build guardrails for AI into your workflows, your organization, and your governance. It is grounded in a technical understanding of AI, but uses interactive elements and familiar metaphors to illustrate the technology side in an approachable way. Participants will leave equipped to act as trusted digital advocates, helping your library and its patrons navigate the realities of AI with safety and confidence.

Investment:

• Half-Day Virtual Workshop: $1,400 CAD (Foundational Client $900 CAD)

  • Includes the core literacy and guardrail curriculum tailored for either staff or board members.

• Full-Day Strategic Session: $2,900 CAD (Foundational Client $2,100 CAD) 

  • Includes the core curriculum plus a facilitated, hands-on workshop to draft or refine your library’s specific AI Acceptable Use Policy.

• (Note: Costs can be adjusted based on library size and specific customization requirements. Travel costs may be additional to the stated fee.)

Target Audience: Public Library Executives, Branch Managers, and Innovation Teams.

Why You Should Be Interested: A successful makerspace, digital studio, or creative business support centre requires more than just purchasing flashy equipment; it requires a sustainable ecosystem of technology, staff capacity, and genuine community interest. This service focuses on aligning your library’s physical space with real community needs while ensuring your staff develops the hands-on confidence, ownership, and operational foresight required to keep the space thriving long after the launch.

This consulting package provides a phased, realistic approach to building a new makerspace or revitalizing an underperforming one, focusing heavily on long-term operational sustainability.

• Audit & Assessment: A thorough analysis of your current equipment inventory, existing staff skill levels, and specific community demographics.

• Strategic Visioning: Collaborative development of 2-3 tailored blueprints for the space. Each vision includes concrete equipment recommendations and the realistic staffing models required to support them.

• Community Engagement (Optional): 1-2 facilitated, in-person feedback sessions to validate the proposed visions with your community before committing capital funds.

• Co-Piloted Implementation: Guided assistance with unboxing, setup, and initial testing of the chosen equipment. This is intentionally designed as a collaborative process rather than a standalone installation—working directly alongside your team ensures the crucial transfer of knowledge, leaving you with in-house experts ready to run the space.

• Maintenance & Operational Planning: A concrete roadmap detailing the ongoing reality of running the space. This includes outlining required staff workflows, preventative maintenance schedules, and projected budgets for consumables and repairs to ensure the space remains financially viable.

Investment: Because physical spaces, equipment needs, and community scopes vary significantly, makerspace implementation is custom-quoted to ensure your library only pays for the exact level of support required.

• Phase 1: Audit & Strategic Visioning: $2,500 CAD (Foundational Client $1,750 CAD)

  • A fixed-fee engagement to assess your current state and deliver your customized blueprints and maintenance roadmaps. This provides your board with a predictable cost for the initial strategy.

• Phase 2: Co-Piloted Implementation: Custom Quoted

  • Once the strategic vision is selected, implementation and community engagement phases are quoted based on the specific equipment and training hours required.

• Ad-Hoc Hourly Support: $150 CAD / hour

  • Available for specialized troubleshooting, additional staff training, or equipment consultation outside of a core project package.

Target Audience: Library Marketing Teams, IT Managers, and Executive Leadership.

Why You Should Be Interested: Many libraries rely on traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help patrons find branch hours, programs, and catalog items. But the public's behavior is shifting. People are increasingly asking questions to AI-driven search engines and chatbots, which don't just provide lists of links—they synthesize answers. If your website isn't structured specifically for Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand, these AI tools will either ignore your library entirely, pointing patrons to commercial alternatives, or confidently hallucinate incorrect information about your services. This service isn't about chasing a tech trend; it is about protecting your library's status as the community's definitive source of truth in a new digital landscape.

Service Description: This consulting package bridges the gap between traditional web management and the new realities of AI search. We restructure your digital footprint so AI tools correctly ingest, understand, and surface your content to the public.

• The AI Visibility Audit: We test how major AI systems currently "read" and summarize your library’s website, identifying critical blind spots, missing data structures, and existing AI hallucinations about your services.

• Structural Optimization Roadmap: A plain-English, actionable guide to restructuring your digital content. This includes recommendations for conversational FAQs, clear data formatting, and the backend structures (like schema markup) that AI systems prioritize when searching for authoritative local answers.

• Staff Workflow Training: A hand-off session for your communications and web teams, teaching them the new rules of writing and formatting content so it remains easily discoverable by AI moving forward.

Investment:

• AI Search Audit & Roadmap: $1,800 CAD (Foundational Client: $1,250 CAD)

  • A fixed-fee engagement that delivers the comprehensive audit, the structural roadmap, and the staff workflow training session.

• Implementation Support: Custom Quoted / $150 CAD per hour

  • If your IT or marketing team lacks the capacity to implement the recommended changes, hands-on restructuring support is available on a project or hourly basis.

Future Library Dreams is dedicated to building practical, road-tested strategies for public libraries. To ensure our frameworks remain deeply aligned with the realities of the sector, we are offering a specialized Foundational Client rate to the first three library systems that book an engagement.

This rate is structured as a mutual exchange of value. In return for premium consulting at a significantly reduced investment, Foundational Clients agree to partner with us in building our professional portfolio by:

• Providing a brief written testimonial upon project completion.
• Granting permission to feature the library’s logo as a community partner on our website.
• Allowing non-sensitive deliverables (such as anonymized strategic blueprints or a redacted Strategic Compass Report) to be used as educational case studies.

This partnership model allows your board to maximize its professional development and strategic planning budget, while directly contributing to a robust portfolio of real-world, public library success stories.