Razoo Giving Guide: Literacy

Why don’t most kids enjoy reading and writing? Simple: because it’s boring.

Overworked, underpaid teachers in urban school districts don’t have the time or resources to help their students fall in love with the written word by letting them write stories, read innovative books, or play games with language. As a result, most students think of reading and writing as annoying tasks they’d rather not perform, greatly reducing their chances of successfully completing high school or finding a job.

Six years ago, writer Dave Eggers decided to inject some creative energy into San Francisco students’ lives with the establishment of 826 Valencia, a writing center in the Mission District, which provides free creative writing programs and one-on-one drop-in tutoring services to area high school students—and also hosts a pirate supply shop, which helps to support the literary organization through sales of eye patches, peg legs, and other seaworthy paraphernalia. The organization now has 1,400 volunteers, including published authors, filmmakers, and educators, and has served more than 6,065 students with fun and unique courses such as “Comic Book Creators” and “Design Your Own Video Game,” alongside the traditional SAT prep classes and academic tutoring sessions.

In recent years, the organization has grown to include chapters in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Ann Arbor, and Boston, all serving underprivileged area students with free creative writing courses and drop-in tutoring. “They completely subvert the notion that literacy is drudgery: The 826 centers are amazing, whimsical spaces full of kids and mentors who are having a ball doing something positive,” says Sara Corbett, writer and co-founder of the Telling Room, a literary nonprofit group in Portland, Maine.

Your donation to any of the 826 centers will go a long way towards helping urban high school students discover a love of reading and writing—and maybe even launch the career of your future favorite author.

In 1983, Tom Warth traveled to the town of Jinja, Uganda to visit a Ugandan woman he’d met in the United States. One day, he and his hostess stopped into the town’s library—and Warth was dismayed to discover that the shelves were nearly empty. The few books he found were tattered, and more than two decades old. Sadly, this isn't an isolated incident: the African continent has a literacy rate of less than 60%, and students are rarely provided with the books and other educational tools they need to become successful in life.

After Warth returned home to Minnesota, he decided to solicit donations to stock the shelves of the Jinja library. Before long, he had an even grander vision: he would launch a nonprofit group, Books for Africa, to ship discarded American textbooks all over Africa.

Since the organization’s launch in 1988, Books for Africa has shipped more than 20 million donated books to schools, libraries, churches, and other nonprofit partners in 42 African and Middle Eastern nations. In Northern Uganda, the donated books are used as teaching tools for thousands of reformed child soldiers; in the Gambia, a group called A Hand in Health is requesting medical books to create a health library, for assistance training future doctors and medical staff. No matter where they’re shipped, the books are empowering and educating students, providing them with the tools to build a better future.

With 99.4% of their entire budget spent on program needs, your donation to Books for Africa will fund the cost of shipping heavy containers of donated books overseas, and placing them in the hands of children who need them most.

Do you remember your own first book? Whether it was Good Night, Moon; Snowy Day; or One Fish, Two Fish, finding a favorite book in early childhood can hook you on the reading habit for life. Sadly, many children don’t have this opportunity—a recent study claims that in low-income neighborhoods, there is just one children’s book available for every 300 children.

First Book is working to increase literacy and the love of reading in early childhood by distributing free books to kids in economically disadvantaged communities. Working with book publishers and a network of libraries, churches, after-school programs, and other regional groups, First Book has distributed more than 50 million books to children throughout the United States since the organization’s founding in 1992. These “first books” can provide an immediate lifeline to the world of literacy: the organization reports that the amount of children with a “high interest in reading” nearly tripled, from 23% to 61%, after receiving free children’s books from First Book.

If you’d like to help a child get started on the path to literacy and lifelong success, it all starts with a single book.

Though a child may not begin formal education until age five, true learning begins at birth. Interacting with other children and adults, playing games, and reading books are all important parts of the earliest years of development—but not all kids are given a fair shot. Children from economically disadvantaged households are rarely given books, educational opportunities, or the chance to interact one-on-one with adults, leaving them far less prepared for the challenges of school than children from higher income families.

Jumpstart’s goal is to help disadvantaged children get an edge in the academic world by partnering preschool kids with college students, who work together in a one-on-one relationship for a full year within a preschool setting. In the program, children have the opportunity to create their own “play plans,” read books with their partners, and join in games and sing-a-longs with the entire Jumpstart classroom community. By giving young children the chance to gain valuable interactive and educational experiences, the program creates a love of literacy and learning that’s sure to help the young students for years to come.

In the last year alone, Jumpstart has provided nearly 15,000 preschool-age children with valuable educational opportunities. Your donation can help them reach even more children, paving the way to success in the classroom and beyond.

It’s wonderful when we can help children develop an interest in literacy while they’re still young—but, whether due to a lack of educational opportunities, the challenge of learning a new language, or any number of other issues, more than 30 million adults in America lack even the most basic of reading skills.

They may say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but hundreds of regional adult literacy programs across the U.S. have proven otherwise. One renowned program, the Literacy Assistance Center, has spent more than thirty years providing literacy lessons and other basic education programs to adults throughout New York state, where the literacy problem has reached crisis level: according to a survey, 36% of New York City residents are unable to write a simple sentence in English.

The Literacy Assistance Center is set on changing this scary statistic, and has developed more than 800 programs to help adults gain the basic knowledge they need to receive a GED or hold down a job, such as training courses for new literacy instructors, a state-wide record keeping system for literacy centers to track their student data, and a professional development resource library for literacy instructors. The Center certainly seems to use their money wisely: they spend over 88% of their funds on program expenses, and only 2.2% on fundraising costs.

Your donation to the Literacy Assistance Center could go straight towards purchasing an English reading primer for an adult student, helping her learn the skills to fill out her very first job application.