Building a literate, employable, and self-sufficient community takes the support of the community.
Volunteers make a huge difference to nonprofits like ours, enabling The Literacy Coalition of Central Texas to expand our capacity on particular projects, create new materials for our programs, and allow our staff to take on new activities. The Literacy Coalition recently hosted two volunteer groups for Schwab Volunteer Week and Deloitte Day of Impact. When companies seek opportunities to give back to their community, we are always excited to share information about the challenges of low literacy in our community and how our programs break cycles of intergenerational poverty and build literacy skills that affect every area of a person’s life.
We are thankful for all the volunteers from Charles Schwab and Deloitte who chose to support adult, career, and family literacy in Central Texas! To learn more about how your organization can become literacy champions, visit our volunteer opportunities page
For Schwab Volunteer Week this year, we hosted 24 Charles Schwab volunteers who created videos and classroom curriculum materials for our Parents and Little Scholars (PALS) program. Schwab volunteers have supported The Literacy Coalition for many years during and beyond the company’s Volunteer Week and we were delighted to welcome back repeat volunteers for these projects.
“It was a honor to share our talents, to help such a great organization with a needy cause as literacy. Can’t wait til next year.” – Dwayne Weakly, Charles Schwab employee
We watched our owl mascot come to life under the skillful hands of these volunteers in the videos created for our students that will help them learn colors, numbers, emotions, body parts, and more!
Other Schwab volunteers spent a day helping our staff create the materials that we use in our family education class rooms. The PALS program provides parenting and early literacy instruction so that all children can be school-ready. One of our students’ favorite activities is making penguin puppets – the volunteers were able to save our team many hours of work by creating all the penguin kits for families. Activities like this support parents as they teach their children through play, building on skills learned throughout the 14-week semester.
Deloitte Day of Impact is a nation-wide day for employees to give back to their community. 16 volunteers from Deloitte worked at multiple stations to help prepare materials for family education classes in our PALS family education program on June 10, 2022. Friendly competition ensued as volunteers cut, hot glued, parceled, laminated, and more in order to complete the preparation of multiple activities that support early learning for children ages 18 months-4 years of age.
Volunteers like Aman Thukral shared with us why they picked The Literacy Coaltion’s project out of all the Day of Impact options,
“I was interested in the mission of the Literacy Coalition as I have experience with volunteering at LifeWorks teaching ESL classes to young adults. I believe that the work that [The Literacy Coalition] team are doing is very impactful for the community here in Central Texas. I loved the passion that each team member brought that day and appreciated the time they took with us to give an overview of their work. The event was very well organized and everyone on the team had a great time being able to chip into the great mission. Will definitely recommend my friends and family to volunteer here more often!”
Is your company looking to support our community and provide team building opportunities to your employees? Contact us at info@willread.org or www.willread.org/volunteer to learn how you, too, can become a Literacy Champion Company!