Help Families Learn Together

It's been 40 years of the Literacy Council of Norristown providing education for adults in Norristown and Montgomery county! In the last year, we educated 550 adult students in our GED and ABE tutoring, ESOL classes, Digital Literacy courses, GED in Spanish Classes, and multiple other initiatives over tens of thousands of hours. LCN has distributed more than 20,000 books to children in the community. In partnership with the Pottstown NAACP we have distributed an additional 15,000 books and counting! LCN runs the Dolly Parton Imagination Library in MontCo, which has almost 2,000 children enrolled, with enrollment continuing to grow rapidly! Thinking about all of our community services, we asked ourselves - how can we make a deeper impact?

This upcoming year, LCN will be working to open three new Family Literacy instructional sites. These sites will support families learning together over an 8 week course. Parents will receive adult literacy instruction while their children receive homework help and age appropriate developmental activities. At the end of each class, parents and children will come back together to do structured and supported activities to strengthen their literacy, and provide families with skills and activities they can implement at home together! Our aim for this program is simply to bolster parents in what they do best - loving and supporting their kids with all they have.

This program will achieve the following:

Help adults with their literacy levels to

• Help them to connect and communicate with their children's teachers and administrators
• Give them the language to advocate for their kids
• Give them skills to apply for higher paying jobs to support their families financially

Kids will receive

• Regular academic support
• Tracked developmental progress supported by appropriate activities
• Referrals when needed

Assist the school systems in

• Reaching parents that are stretched thin by obligations and responsibilities
• Relaying essential information to families
• Partnering in literacy efforts

So what can you do to help? Let's make this tangible. All donations help, but in honor of our 40th anniversary:

1. $40 will provide an adult learner with a book
2. $400 will help us to stock a Family Literacy site with age appropriate toys and activities for kiddos
3. $4,400 supports a site with an instructor or a coordinator for the year - 120 hours of instruction for a class of up to 25 students.

We need to start these sites as soon as possible - the goal is January, scaling up over the year. 103 students just this registration period indicated that they would be interested in family literacy classes. There are even more families out there who can't access literacy education because of the barrier of childcare. The need is here and it's real. Let's get this off the ground!