“Holding Change” in Academic Libraries: Navigating Budget Cuts with Care and Collective Power

In Holding Change, adrienne maree brown invites us to approach transformation not as a crisis to survive, but as an opportunity to deepen our values, relationships, and capacity for collective action. This perspective is crucial in academic libraries facing sustained budget reductions. Too often, budget cuts are treated as inevitable, technocratic events. But they are also political. They reflect institutional priorities, power dynamics, and whose labor and learning are deemed valuable.

As brown writes, “we are at a very particular moment in human history, a period of time when we need to shift away from the competitive, directive, combative, colonial energy of toxic leadership at every level of society” (p. 9). Academic libraries must not only adapt to change—they must advocate within it. This means resisting scarcity narratives that frame libraries as expendable, and instead asserting our roles as vital, future-facing spaces for equity, inquiry, and collective well-being.

Adaptation and advocacy are not opposites. Adaptive strategies can create breathing room for advocacy to flourish. By practicing participatory budgeting, modeling inclusive leadership, and framing data around student success and community impact, libraries can challenge reductionist narratives and co-author new ones—ones that affirm libraries as essential infrastructure in higher education. 

Embracing Change as a Somatic Practice
brown writes that “change is constant. what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.” This insight encourages academic librarians to see our daily choices—how we talk to each other in team meetings, how we communicate budget realities to staff, how we make cuts with transparency and fairness—not as isolated decisions, but as microcosms of the kind of workplace and institution we want to co-create.

During budget reductions, it can be tempting to default to scarcity thinking and crisis mode. But Holding Change reminds us that how we hold change matters as much as what we change. Leaders and managers can take a somatic approach to change—centering breath, presence, and intentional pace—even when everything feels urgent. This creates space to prioritize people over systems, values over metrics.

Fractal Leadership and Participatory Decision-Making
brown’s concept of fractals—“the same patterns happening at every scale”—has powerful implications for academic library governance. When administrators model authoritarian top-down decisions during financial uncertainty, it reinforces a culture of control and fear. But if librarians instead model distributed leadership, shared decision-making, and transparent communication, that pattern can ripple through departments, institutions, and even consortia.

Libraries should resist the narrative that budget cuts automatically require centralization and hierarchy. Instead, we can explore participatory budgeting processes, create collaborative task forces for resource prioritization, and share data openly with frontline staff. These practices align with brown’s vision of emergent strategy: building resilience not through rigid plans, but through adaptability, relationships, and co-created meaning.

Grief, Gratitude, and Letting Go
Budget cuts are not only logistical; they’re emotional. Losing resources, programs, or positions can spark grief—for the work we loved, the colleagues we respected, the dreams deferred. Holding Change teaches us not to bypass that grief, but to hold it with tenderness and ritual. Acknowledging collective loss is an essential step toward collective healing.

At the same time, brown urges us to notice what is still possible—what grows in the cracks. Even amid reduction, libraries can affirm gratitude for what remains: community, mission, creativity, and the enduring belief that information access is a human right. Holding gratitude alongside grief allows us to let go of what no longer serves without becoming hardened or cynical.

Imagining Otherwise: Budget Cuts as Creative Constraint
Instead of treating cuts as pure constraint, we can ask: What are the possibilities within the limits? Holding Change reminds us that transformation often emerges from constraint. Libraries might use this moment to divest from extractive subscriptions and invest in open knowledge. We might rethink labor structures to empower paraprofessionals and student workers more equitably. We might finally sunset legacy programs that no longer meet the needs of today’s learners.

This is not optimism as denial—it’s hope as practice. As brown writes, “we are creating a world we have never seen before.” Academic libraries can be at the forefront of this creation, not despite budget cuts, but in how we respond to them—with integrity, imagination, and an unshakable commitment to community.

Conclusion: Holding Ourselves, Holding Each Other
To “hold change” is to resist collapse and rigidity. It is to soften into discomfort, listen deeply, and lead from values. In academic libraries facing ongoing austerity, Holding Change offers more than inspiration—it offers a blueprint for relational, liberatory, and sustainable leadership.

Let us practice the world we want to build, starting right where we are: in our collections meetings, in our budget spreadsheets, in our courageous conversations. Let us hold change—and hold each other.

Further Reading

brown, adrienne maree. Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation. AK Press, 2021.