Caroline Gaver: Empowering Lives Through Literacy and Education
If you’re having trouble figuring out how to put your spare time to good use, consider what Caroline Gaver did in 1975. She became a volunteer with the Literacy Council of Frederick County, and it’s a choice that has come to define a truly well lived life.
“I don’t believe it myself,” Caroline Gaver laughs, looking back at her 50 years as a volunteer with the Literacy Council. “When I first volunteered, I didn’t have any intention of it being forever. I kind of got drawn in…” Soon enough, she was wholly immersed in the council and devoted to moving the organization into its vital future. 
The hours Caroline poured into tackling numerous duties, from training tutors to serving multiple terms on the board of directors (as president, vice president, and now board member emeritus), number in the tens of thousands. She even helped found a training program to teach inmates at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown to read and had a hand in establishing councils in other counties around the state. Her vision and commitment to the cause of literacy, and her service to the community have earned her much respect and admiration, including being named a Wertheimer Fellow for Excellence in Volunteerism by the Community Foundation of Frederick County (2012) and winning the Governor’s Service Award for Lifetime Achievement (2015).
Caroline’s interest in helping people learn how to read began at home, on the dairy farm she and her husband owned in Libertytown, Maryland, where she encountered farm workers who were unable to read. The desire to help led her to call the Literacy Council in 1975 for information about tutor training, and soon she was on board. She quickly found herself assuming roles of greater responsibility. It wasn’t what she’d initially signed up for, but she put aside her reluctance “because the organization was filled with good people who gave so much of their time helping others. And the feeling of being in a family is what has kept me involved as a volunteer for so long. Being part of that caring community has been worth all the work and gives me purpose.”
Dramatic events over the years have created new needs for the council to address, but Caroline is proud of how they’ve always found a way to meet the challenge. “When I started out, [the training] was almost all about teaching English speakers to read.” The English as a Second Language (ESL) program grew as “more people were coming to the area from Viet Nam and Southeast Asia in general.” As the need for volunteers to provide ESL tutoring grew, Caroline stepped up for ESL training as well. (That aspect of her work became even more meaningful when she and her husband adopted three small children from Korea.)
The Covid pandemic had the greatest effect on her experience at the council—and brought about the most change overall, she believes. “About eight of us spent months on Zoom, completely redoing the training and bringing it online for the students. Most of us didn’t really have the background or training,” she says. But somehow the volunteer tutors learned what they needed to keep the programs going forward.
Looking at the future, her hope is that the council can avoid growing to the point that “we lose the family-feel that we have now. I hope that it remains predominantly a volunteer organization. Some [councils] have gotten away from that, and I think that’s a huge loss. Volunteerism is at the heart of what we do. It allows students to have that individual relationship with tutors, that feeling of trust and support. It’s that personal connection. That’s who we really are, and my biggest hope is that we can stay that way.”
In thinking about the world today, Caroline says there will always be the need for the Literacy Council. “There will always be people looking for our help.” Which is why she intends to keep doing what she’s doing as a volunteer “until somebody tells me I shouldn’t.” And that is not likely to happen anytime soon.