It was the summer of 2013 when Edward Snowden’s revelations were published detailing US government mass surveillance. Around the same time, the nascent Black Lives Matter movement began after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and quickly began to sound the alarm against both interpersonal and police-involved racist violence against Black people.
During this time, Alison Macrina was working as a librarian at a public library. Already a lifelong activist for political and social justice causes, she began to make connections between what Snowden revealed about government spying, and what Black Lives Matter activists were illuminating about racist targeting. Alison had been motivated to become a librarian in part because of the librarian-activists who had years before opposed the USAPATRIOT Act at a time when public dissent was marginalized. These librarians had rightly recognized that broad surveillance powers were not only undemocratic and unconstitutional, but would serve to further target already vulnerable members of our society, such as people of color, Muslims, and immigrants. What Snowden had revealed brought forth the worst of what these librarians anticipated could come from the Patriot Act. Alison wanted to continue this legacy of radical librarianship, connect with other values-driven librarians, and bring practical information to the public about how to protect privacy, intellectual freedom, and information access.
Alison began by teaching classes and installing privacy software on patron computers at her public library. She connected with Kade Crockford and Jessie Rossman of the ACLU of Massachusetts, and together they began offering trainings for other librarians in the region. There was a high amount of interest in this work, and it quickly snowballed. Alison began making connections with more people and organizations in the privacy space, including April Glaser and others at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as technologists at the Tor Project. Media attention for Alison’s work soon followed, and at the end of 2014, she was awarded funding from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge for Libraries to take her work across the United States. Thus, Library Freedom Project was born.
Since then, Library Freedom Project has trained thousands of library workers on the practical application of our values using a social justice lens. At LFP we refer to these values as “information democracy” – meaning that people should be able to access the information that they need safely and freely without barriers. Meeting library workers around the country, Alison realized that there was an opportunity to build deeper community around this work. In 2018, she launched Library Freedom Institute, an intensive training program for library workers to gain skills on protecting and promoting information democracy. Participants in Library Freedom Institute would learn together in a supportive environment, and then invited to continue building together as part of the LFP community. Alison ran different versions of LFI from 2018 through 2022.
Today that LFP community is thriving, with nearly 150 members across the US, and some in Canada and Mexico. Our community collaborates together on resources, programming, policy and more. We host meetings and support one another in making this work happen in our library communities. We continue to build through our newly launched LFP regional hubs – spaces for library workers to connect, learn, have generative conversations, and help to build the library world that we all want.
[biography taken from Library Freedom Project Values page]