Sometimes civic leadership can surprise you. It can come from parts of society you’d never expect to be the first to step forward and lend a hand.

In Thunder Bay, a city whose leadership has complained it is under siege from the national media after the suspicious deaths of First Nations youths in the city’s rivers, after a provincial body found systemic racism existed in the police force, after the books and the podcasts and even after the opening of a Globe and Mail bureau to chronicle it all, one organization has stood out from the rest.

The Thunder Bay Public Library has emerged as an unlikely hero in a city in crisis.

The city’s library system offers the community much more than rows of books, microfiches and the Dewey Decimal System. It has become a leader in a city whose racial struggles are openly displayed for the world to see.

Libraries have long been community hubs, places of collective learning and knowledge sharing. And this has been especially true — and especially important — in Thunder Bay in recent years.

I have spent a lot of time at the Brodie St. branch of the Thunder Bay library system. When I wrote “Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Deaths and Hard Truths in a Northern City,” I spent hours sifting through old newspaper articles in the library’s great room on the main floor.

While reading old issues of the Chronicle-Journal, there was a constant collection of folks who’d wander in from the cold to use the free Wi-Fi service and computers, to get in touch with family in northern Ontario fly-in communities and others that would come to sit and read from the stacks.

The library offered safe space in a troubled and grieving city.

This has been a collaborative effort led by Indigenous liaison Robyn Medicine, community hub librarian Samantha Martin-Bird and the library’s Indigenous advisory board, notes Tina Tucker, the TBPL’s communities director. As city council has made excuses for its failure to enact the recommendations of a 2016 report on the deaths of seven Indigenous youths between 2000 and 2011, the city’s libraries have worked hard to address the needs of the community, to stay relevant in this time of crisis.

They have done this not only by providing a safe space for readers, but by broadly interpreting their mandate.

At the Brodie branch, there are now street outreach nurses from the Thunder Bay district health unit every Friday afternoon. The nurses provide free, confidential, non-emergency support such as wound care, harm reduction services, counselling, infectious disease follow-ups and sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment.

On Thursday afternoons, there is a walk-in social work service. The social worker assists community members with completing forms or getting government identification, provides information on mental health and addiction services and helps connect people with housing in the area.

Both the public health nurses and the social work service come in to the library’s space at no cost to the library — a lesson to city council that a positive difference can be made even without additional funding from higher levels of government.

The library has even created a “relationship building and reconciliation action plan,” a recommendation of both the truth and reconciliation report and the inquiry into the youth deaths in the city.

Leading their work is the wish to do for the community of Thunder Bay what its leadership seemingly cannot: to create a place where everyone feels safe, a place of belonging and respect for one another, a place with less fear, violence, hatred, crime and death among Indigenous youth.

That’s a big job for a library — especially in Thunder Bay.

When the library went to the city asking for a bit more funding for cultural competency training for their staff, the city said no. At the same time, council cut $150,000 for planned river lighting, which was one of 145 recommendations out of the youth inquest.

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The city, according to CBC Thunder Bay, reports there have been 13 additional river deaths since 2011.

It’s time somebody gave Thunder Bay’s librarians the keys to the city — and let them drive.