Literacy Connections Dutchess County

To our friends in other lands we say: Namaste! (India) Witamy! (Poland) Shagatom! (Bangladesh) Bienvenidos! (Spanish) Bienvenue! (French) Salaam! (Arabic) Huan Ying, (Chinese) Bem-vindo (Portuguese) Welcome!We changed our name, but the service remains the same!

Literacy Volunteers of America has merged with another organization, and is now known as ProLiteracy Worldwide and ProLiteracy America. Literacy Volunteers of Dutchess County will continue its affiliation with this new organization, but will be known locally as Literacy Connections-Dutchess County or simply Literacy Connections. However, your local contacts and services remain unchanged.

Literacy Pins!
Check out these very unique pins which you can purchase for a mere $12 at our offices at The Family Partnership Center. Or, if you can't come in person, just call 452-8670 or e-mail, and for an additional $3, we'll mail one to you.

The profits help keep us going...every little bit helps!

Director's Monthly column
in The Poughkeepsie Journal

Found in the Family Almanac section of the Poughkeepsie Journal the first Sunday of the month, Marj Pfaff's excellent column focuses on Literacy and related topics. Her final column in this series follows:

National Library Week and Goodbye!

April Fool's Day, Easter, Passover.........spring vacations. April is full of fun, tradition and rites of spring. In Washington DC, the cherry blossoms are already blooming, and soon flowers and trees here will be showing their colors too.

There is another important demarcation for April that deserves our attention: National Library Week, this year starting on April 12th. Started in 1958, National Library Week is meant to celebrate libraries, and the people who work, volunteer, and support them. This year's theme: "Worlds connect @ your library."

How true that is. Libraries are user friendly: if they don't have a book, they will get it for you. If you don't know what book you want, but know what subject you are interested in, someone will help you. There is almost no subject that you cannot find, no country you cannot visit, no topic unexplored. Libraries now have extensive technology waiting for you to discover, that will help you find more information and possibilities than you can imagine.

And there are book clubs, story times, and so much more at the local library....including movies, music, job searches, family tree research, and a quite space to discover more about yourself, as you discover more about the world.

I hope you will celebrate National Library Week by doing what library folks want more than anything: for you to visit your local library, and re-discover the treasure that is right in your neighborhood.

In 1997, Larry Hughes and Stuart Shinske from The Poughkeepsie Journal contacted me. It was my first week at Literacy Connections as the Executive Director. (At that time we were Literacy Volunteers.)

The Poughkeepsie Journal had won an award for a series of articles published on education, and they wanted to do something meaningful with the money. Together we created a program we called "Project READ", a simple idea that we hoped would help children to love books. Twelve years hence, the program is thriving. Volunteers are reading to children in classrooms, and we are donating the books to help build the classroom library. Sometimes we wonder who is having more fun: the kids or the volunteers. It's a tie, I think.

When Project READ was created, the folks at the Journal decided to also offer me the opportunity to write a column about literacy. For 12 years, I have been sharing with you personal stories, professional research, and lots of ideas about how to help the children in your life become readers. The Journal also allowed me to write about adult illiteracy, and how Literacy Connections asks those who love to read, to volunteer to teach those who can't.

Just as we started this column together, together we have come to realize that this column has run its course, and so this is my last regular column. I hope that those who have read this column regularly or rarely have gotten the message that reading and talking to your children will set them on a path toward fulfillment of their potential. Nothing can make as much of an impact on your child's future success as you can.

To all of you, to my editor Laurie, to Larry Hughes & Stuart Shinske, I cannot thank you enough for what you have helped to create, and for the chance to share this message with the community. It has been an honor, a privilege, and, I hope an inspiration. As the immortal Dr. Suess said, 'The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.' So, let's go! Read!

Literacy Connections | Volunteer Tutoring Adults & Children, Project READ, Annual Community Spelling Bee, English Learning Centers