When we think of libraries, we think of dusty old books, full of pages and stories and words that someone took the time to write in it.
You pick the one you need, take it home and from there you learn what you can from an author’s words.
But what if there was a better way to learn about something? What if, instead of just the words on a page, you got the story from an actual person? That’s just what one new type of library is hoping you’ll want – a human library.
Here, you can learn what it’s like to be another person just by checking them out, and spending time with them. It’s something that these libraries are hoping might change the world.
You can ‘borrow’ a police officer. A single mother. Someone on welfare. A veteran. A former gang member.
The goal, according to the Human Library’s inventor, Ronni Abergel, is to bring people together in a way that they might never have the chance to otherwise.
“The policeman sitting there speaking with the graffiti writer. The politician in discussions with the youth activist and the football fan in a deep chat with the feminist. It was a win-win situation and has been ever since,” Abergel said, on the Human Library’s site.
A police officer, also considered a library ‘book’, talks with a young man at the Human Library in Denmark. Courtesy of the Human Library Organization
The first Human Library was started in Copenhagen in 2000. “I figured that if we could make people sit down with a group attached to a certain stigma they don’t like or even know about for that matter, we could diminish violence,” Abergel told reporters at Today.com.
Abergel said his goal is to provide a safe environment for groups that normally wouldn’t sit down with one another.
“It’s meant to be a safe space to ask difficult questions and not to be judged,” he said. “To try and gain an important insight into the life of someone you think you know something about, but (you don’t).”
Since the beginning of his library, Abergel said that, “the world has changed, for the worse.” He said there is less tolerance, understanding and social cohesion than there was at the beginning of his idea.
Abergel believes that it is time for people to face and confront our fears over stereotypes, preconceived ideas of one another.
“When you meet our books, no matter who you are and where you are from or which book you will be reading, in the end, inside every person, the result will say: we are different from each other, we see things differently and we live life differently. But there are more things that we have in common than are keeping us apart.”
“Sometimes you see someone in the supermarket and think things about them, but you don’t dare go ask them questions,” Abergel said. “I wanted to build a space where you can ask them anything because they volunteered to answer.”
Watch this amazing project below and ask yourself, who would you want to borrow and what would you hope to learn from them.
