January 2005

Family Literacy Partnerships

The agencies that participate paint a broad picture of the community at large. Some agencies provide some funding and personnel as facilitators for a program. Other agencies such as Health Units provide space, access to potential participants, or release staff that have been trained to serve as facilitators. Agencies like schools provide appropriate space for program delivery. The Department of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta has involved students in program delivery as part of a course requirement. Because of the collaboration among agencies, much more can be accomplished than could be achieved by one agency alone.

The COW bus (Classroom on Wheels) that travels across several inner city neighbourhoods circulated more than 10,000 books to over 450 parents and 800 children. This program has more than tripled over the past year and its influence has been considerable. On the last day of June, a little girl ran up to the bus. She was very excited. She said, “We’re going to miss coming to the bus so mom got us library cards and signed us up for a reading program.”

Considerable integration takes place between preschool and public educational efforts. For example, libraries have had difficulty attracting less literate parents to make use of their services. The Books for Babies program incorporates a library component within its program, and works with library staff to encourage library use; the libraries, in turn, offer their facilities for part or all of the program and provide free library cards to participants. Results from this partnership have been very positive with 65% of participants indicating they use the library more frequently.

In the past year, CFL staff has liaised with over 1200 individuals through its Community Outreach Information Sessions. One of the major goals of CFL is to heighten the awareness across the community of the importance of oral language and literacy development from birth to adulthood. To this end, CFL works hard to network and to provide expertise to agencies and individuals across the community, the province and the nation in order to sensitize them to how they may:

• Include language and literacy events within their current professional practices.
• Have a greater understanding of the developmental nature of oral language and literacy development.

One outcome of this partnership work is that we are now seeing more and more non-literacy agencies adding “literacy specialists” to their staff. This is heartening in that agencies are obviously seeing the benefits of literacy work with families and are wanting to do more. However, it also brings its challenges in that the staff they hire often lack the background to do the work effectively, so this is where our training programs come into play. But that’s another story!