The Literacy Council is celebrating Volunteer Appreciation Week April 19-25 by paying tribute to our 150+ wonderful long-time and new volunteers! You know what it takes to serve our community seven days a week. Today, the adult learners we support through our adult literacy programs are facing even greater obstacles than ever before during these...
October 30, 2019 – Kitchen workers from downtown Frederick restaurants celebrated “graduation day” at the Literacy Council following completion of a new 10-week English drop-in class focusing on improving communication skills for beginning English speakers. Vocabulary and conversations center on the food service industry. The class will continue for another 10-week session, enabling the workers...
Our volunteer tutors receive 13 hours of training before they are matched with a student in our Tutoring Program. We continue to support our volunteers beyond their initial training to provide them with new research, resources, and materials to best serve our students. In the first six months of 2019, we had 32 tutors with...
In January we expanded our customized workplace classes to include hotel housekeeping staff at the Econo Lodge Frederick. The workplace literacy team met with General Manager, Rupali Luthra, to determine areas of focus for the housekeepers. Together they developed several objectives, and ESL Instructor Victoria Dos Santos developed a custom 10-week curriculum. The students are...
The Literacy Council is honored to be one of seven charitable organizations approved for grant funding over the next three years through the United Way of Frederick County. The Community Impact Partner grant recipients were chosen based on how the programs fit with United Way’s funding priority areas of health, education and financial stability for...
We are proud to announce that the Rotary Club of Frederick has recently awarded the Literacy Council a Significant Partner Grant to help us expand our workplace program over the next year. Our application for this grant was based upon a business model intended to build our capacity for a sustainable program in collaboration with...
What does our community lose when its immigrant workers speak English poorly or not at all? Let’s look at a Brookings Institute study, “Investing in English Skills: The Limited English Proficient Workforce in U.S. Metropolitan Areas” (Jill H. Wilson, 2014): “English proficiency is a strong predictor of economic standing among immigrants regardless of educational attainment....
Last year’s adult learners working with the Literacy Council had a total of 183 children under age 18 living at home. This is really something to think about. Think of the difference it makes to these children when their parents learn to read and write or to speak English. No longer do the adults who...
The Literacy Council is keenly aware that there are not just hundreds but thousands of adults in Frederick County who could use our help with literacy skills or learning English. So we have been working hard to find and train new tutors, and to let potential students know we are here to help them. And...
Many of our tutors say they came to the Literacy Council because they love reading and want to help others learn to read. What a generous gift this is! I remember some years ago when my Korean student began to read, very slowly and with help, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. She...
