It seems for the past several years I’ve opened my annual summary by talking about the uncertainty we’re facing regarding funding.
I think it’s safe to say that is probably the only constant in this work, so I won’t say any more about it in this report.
Instead, I’d like to highlight some of the things we’ve been doing this past year.
The Partner-Assisted Learning (PAL) and English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) programs, with their dedicated, trained volunteer tutors, continue to work with more than 100 learners at any one time.
Books for Babies, which is funded by Kiwanis, distributed by the Welcome Wagon, ordered, packaged and co-ordinated by Cariboo Chilcotin Partners for Literacy (CCPL), gives about 400 bags of books to new babies every year.
Our roaming advocates in 100 Mile House and Williams Lake do a phenomenal job reaching and assisting vulnerable individuals and providing training and support for other organizations and front-line workers, and developing programs and partnerships with First Nation communities.
The Bright Red Bookshelf program has really taken off, providing free children’s books at several locations around our communities. We continue to provide Clear and Plain Language workshops to businesses and organizations, to help them reach and serve their clients more effectively.
Our proposal to the federal Office of Literacy and Essential Skills (OLES) to work with several local partners on workforce literacy is still being bounced around in Ottawa. It is frustratingly slow, but still encouraging.
We’ve just received approval from SEDI (the federal government’s Social Enterprise Development Initiative) and the TD Bank to put on a series of financial literacy workshops, so we will be training some of our contractors and volunteers to deliver those in the new year. We were one of only 19 successful applicants out of 217 from across the country.
Executive director Shelly Joyner will be on the Literacy B.C. board to help steer it through the restructuring with Literacy NOW, as the two organizations work to combine forces and services.
Our fundraising efforts took a bit of a hit when the province stopped matching the funds we raised through Reach-a-Reader, but with the success of the golf tournaments (now in 100 Mile House as well), the great success of the Thyme for Tea’s Pumpkin Patch, the work of all of our volunteers and the generosity of the communities, we are able to maintain all of our programs.
As government looks for places to cut costs, programs like literacy constantly seem to be in its sights. One argument we’re trying to get across is that an investment in community organizations like CCPL has a huge return.
Our seven part-time contractors all put in extensive volunteer hours: our directors are all hard-working volunteers, and our tutors and helpers for all of our programs are volunteers. A preliminary count shows there are more than 5,000 volunteer hours a year going into CCPL work.
It is that support and commitment from so many that makes CCPL so successful.
Bruce Mack is the CCPL board president.