We feel that the Community Learning Exchange with the Edinburgh Tool Library helped us better understand the processes of lending equipment and how to create a robust sharing network with our access library. It allowed us to discuss the nuances and differences in our sharing library and to create some processes around ensuring that it didn’t burden our staff and potential volunteers with time commitments.

It also allowed us to understand how to effectively deal with organisations who may be borrowing our equipment for events and to create processes around ensuring the equipment is returned on time. We established what we would need to include in a user agreement and what policies to have in place for staff and members. We also discussed how to set up a payment model for the different organisations and individuals that would be using this equipment that allows us to safeguard our services.

It gave us an opportunity to see how we could bring members and staff together to share skills and knowledge, creating a community ethos around making events accessible and learning from this work.

We learnt a lot about carbon tracking and how we can monitor and evaluate the carbon footprint our project has and how we can measure this as well as showcase the benefits of our project on reducing organisations buying these plastic products.

We had the opportunity to discuss the administrative factors around the sharing library such as insurance and the My Turn software. It gave us the opportunity to think about how our other offerings such as consultancy and training in this area might be beneficial to supporting organisations/individuals to create more accessible spaces within their events and the additional support they may require from us and how we can provide that.

We discussed how we can promote our access library to organisations across Scotland, curating information to promote the importance of creating more accessible spaces that we can display at events to raise awareness. It also helped us consider the messaging we use around our access library.

Learning Outcomes

• Through working with the Edinburgh Tool Library, we feel that we would learn about their processes in lending equipment, creating a strong and robust sharing network with our Access Library. Learning about the policies, paperwork and administrative side of creating a sharing library.
• This opportunity would aid us in creating hyper-local volunteering opportunities to learn skills and build a community around creating safer spaces and accessible environments.
• We want to learn how to create learning and community opportunities around our access library sharing the benefits with the organisations and individuals that we collaborate with. The Edinburgh Tool Library is an exemplary example of an organisation that has brought members together to share skills and knowledge and create a community ethos around their sharing network and we would like to learn from their work.

"The team at the Edinburgh Tool Library were incredibly welcoming and supportive and said that we could contact them in the future if we had any further questions so we have contacts with experience within the industry should we need any further support. It was a great opportunity to make connections and see first-hand how things run in a successful and established sharing library."