This TED Talk features librarian Shira Kowalski recorded live at TEDmed 2017.

When you walk into your neighborhood public library, you expect the librarian to help you find your next favorite book or some accurate information on a topic of interest.

You don't probably expect the librarian to come running out from behind the reference desk

with Narcan, ready to revive someone overdosing on heroin or fentanyl.

But this is happening at some libraries.

Public libraries have always been about community support with all kinds of services and programs,

from assisting with job-seeking efforts,

to locating resources for voter rights,

to providing free meals to kids and teens even.

But what we think of as community support

takes on new urgency when you're in the middle

of an opioid and overdose crisis.

I work at the McPherson Square Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

It's located in Kensington,

one of the lowest-income communities in Philadelphia

with a long history of being isolated from resources and opportunity.

And because of that, it has been the center to the city's drug trade and drug use for decades.

And so inside the neighborhood, our library is nestled inside of a park,

which has unfortunately garnered a reputation for being a place to find and used drugs,

especially heroin, out in the open,

putting us and the community in direct contact

with the drug trade and use on a daily basis.

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