Literacy

Recent research indicates that nearly 50 percent of adult Americans function at a low or moderate literacy level and experience significant social, economic and personal challenges that compromise their abilities to support themselves, help their children in school and fully participate in society.  Globally, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that as much as 20 percent of the world’s population is functionally illiterate.  The UPS Foundation supports programs which provide education and employment skills to undereducated adults and their families to equip them with the tools to succeed in their communities, schools and workplaces. Through grants to nonprofits, UPS has supported the education and training of more than 42,000 adults and families, facilitating their successful entry into the workforce and pursuit of lifelong education.  The Foundation support has also fostered the development of new models for family and workplace literacy, allowing these programs to reach more people and serve them more effectively.  The UPS Foundation has contributed $19.4 million since 1989, supporting more than 400 local literacy programs in 120 communities across the United States.  In the United Kingdom, UPS provided nearly half a million dollars in grants during 2004 to three organizations to help improve literacy. Initiatives  Leadership for Community Literacy Initiative  Increasing Literacy Through Effective Volunteerism Initiative  UK Literacy Grants  Community Literacy Initiative The Leadership for Community Literacy Initiative supports training, leadership development and other technical assistance activities to strengthen the leadership capacities in local literacy organizations working to build English literacy skills in communities where there are high non-English speaking populations.  This initiative focuses on improving organizational effectiveness and operational efficiency, thereby impacting the effectiveness of program delivery and learner outcomes.  Back to Top The Increasing Literacy Through Effective Volunteerism Initiative supports efforts that enhance learners’ literacy skills by improving the quality of instruction provided by volunteers. Case Study

Grantee: Pro Literacy Worldwide Initiative: Increasing Literacy through Effective Volunteerism Through its mission of sponsoring adult educational programs and services, ProLiteracy Worldwide provides the training, technical assistance, materials, and other support that local literacy programs need to assist adults and their families in acquiring or improving their literacy skills. As the largest organization of community-based adult literacy programs in the world, the services that ProLiteracy Worldwide, its affiliates, partners, and publishing division provide aid nearly three million adults in all 50 states and in 54 developing nations each year to become better parents, employees, and citizens. Proliteracy’s project to increase the instruction in volunteer-based literacy programs, supported by The UPS Foundation, is investigating and documenting promising practices of volunteer management related to increasing intensity of instruction in order to improve student learning outcomes. The organization is also measuring the impact of changes in volunteer management on student participation, retention and progress, as well as on the degree of satisfaction that volunteers feel about their jobs and the organizations for which they work.  The UPS grant has also helped the pilot projects that ProLiteracy works with by motivating positive institutional changes in areas such as service delivery, recruiting and training. For more information on Proliteracy, please visit www.proliteracy.org.

Grantee: National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) Initiative: Increasing Literacy through Effective Volunteerism The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) was established in 1989 with the mission to help parents and children achieve their greatest potential together through family-oriented educational services.  NCFL has partnered with The UPS Foundation since 1995 to provide successful solutions to challenges faced by individuals and by family literacy programs. Through the UPS Family Literacy Volunteer Academy, NCFL will launch a guidebook aimed at building local program capacity to use volunteers effectively and a workbook of lessons to increase English language skills of parents while also increasing the quality of literacy interaction with their children.   Both toolkit products were launched at the National Conference of Family Literacy in March 2006. The UPS Family Literacy Volunteer Academy project is unique because it provides literacy practitioners and volunteers a targeted strategy to improve parents’ English language skills and increase the quality of parent-child interactive literacy activities through extended tutoring. For more information on the NCLF, please visit www.famlit.org.

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UK Literacy Grants Case Study

Grantee: Express Link UP Initiative: UK Literacy Grants Founded in 1997, Express Link UP provides computer hardware and software, internet links and teaching resources to 247 hospitals in the UK and to sick children who are educated at home. Their mission is to empower young people to maintain contact with their mainstream schools, families, and friends to continue their education and development of life skills despite hospital stays and serious illnesses. Throughout the country, more than 250,000 children are hospitalized or are so ill that they must enroll in home school.  Support from The UPS Foundation is helping Express Link UP to provide additional computer hardware and software to meet the changing demographics of the UK.  Express Link UP is also working to increase literacy standards to enable children to learn other subjects, help children to integrate back into mainstream schools at the same level as other students and increase English skills for non-English patients and their families.

The most recent literacy initiative, the Community Literacy Initiative, began in 2006 and supports projects that strengthen and expand national literacy organizations' services reaching under-served populations of all ages. Some of the projects also will improve the use of volunteers in the delivery of those services.

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