Our nonprofit partner, The Literacy Cooperative, is spreading awareness about available opportunities in NEO for National Adult Education and Family Literacy Week. Read their guest blog to learn more about their programs and how you can help!
Written by The Literacy Cooperative
Adult Education and Family Literacy Week is here!!
September 20-26, 2020 is National Adult Education and Family Literacy Week! The whole week is devoted to spreading awareness about adult education opportunities and resources for families to help them learn together as a whole. The Literacy Cooperative invites you to join us to spread awareness about the great opportunities available to adults and families in Cuyahoga County!
Our goal is to create enough momentum around #AEFLWeek, #AdultEd, and our own #AdultsLearnCLE and #FamiliesLearnCLE hashtags that adult and whole family education will become a hot topic all over Northeast Ohio! To get involved, click here.
The Literacy Cooperative is an umbrella organization that brings foundations, organizations, and people together to find practical solutions to improve literacy. We are mobilizing Northeast Ohio resources to increase reading, math, and digital literacy, beginning at birth, so our kids are performing at grade level throughout their educational journey. Our support, coordination, and facilitation of adult literacy initiatives are creating pathways that lead to rewarding and life-sustaining careers. We are sharing our research and introducing best practices and pilots that are innovative, interactive, and effective. The Literacy Cooperative provides oversight and overall strategic coordination currently not being fulfilled by individual providers.
Why is this work so important? An assessment of the state of literacy in Cuyahoga County done by The Literacy Cooperative found:
- 42% of all children enrolling in kindergarten are not adequately prepared to succeed
- 10% of all adults do not have a high school diploma
- Nearly 40% of those without a high school diploma are ages 18-44
The Literacy Cooperative and its partners are working with programs such as Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a monthly book-gifting initiative that mails books to young children from birth to age five and Aspire for adults, the state of Ohio’s adult education programs. Efforts such as contextualized curriculum that blend academics and job-related skills are becoming increasingly effective.
Most promising of all are new two-generational (2Gen) projects and programs, involving both children and adults in a family, that are being developed by a 2Gen committee, led by The Literacy Cooperative, of more than 20 educational and human service agencies. Most significantly, the committee has issued 2Gen Cuyahoga: A Community Call to Action to Address Our Economic and Social Gaps on how this collaboration will work to improve social inequities on a whole family basis.
To learn more about The Literacy Cooperative’s work, go to www.literacycooperative.org.
