The Words Alive Reader: March 17, 2022

Welcome to the Words Alive Reader, our newsletter keeping you up-to-date with the latest in how we’ve been connecting children, teens, and families to the power of reading. We have exciting new stories and opportunities to share as we continue our celebration of National Reading Month!​​​​​​​

Thank You Bentivoglio Family Fund!

We are thrilled to share Words Alive recently received an astounding $200,000 gift from the Bentivoglio Family Fund - the single largest donation ever received by Words Alive! We are humbled by such an investment in our work to uplift children, teens, and families through the power of reading!

​​​​​​​In partnership with local Head Start, Boys & Girls Clubs, elementary and high schools, and more than 1,000 volunteers all over the world, this historic gift will help Words Alive reach more than 4,500 students and families throughout San Diego this school year. To learn more about this gift, click here.

Reading with Teens at the Jackie Robinson YMCA

This week, Words Alive is launching new spring book clubs for teens at the Jackie Robinson YMCA in collaboration with United Way, San Diego Foundation, and amazing community partners. We are training YMCA leaders to run our Adolescent Book Group for students in the Lincoln High School cluster, starting with the award-winning graphic novel, Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett Krosoczka.

Are you an experienced or past ABG volunteer? We would love your help training and coaching partners to facilitate the program. Email us at [email protected] if you're interested!

New Books and Learning Kits for 2,400 Students

This week 2,460 students at 15 partner schools throughout San Diego will be receiving a new hardcover book - Bruce's Big Storm by Ryan T. Higgins - and a learning kit for each student with the supplies to make their own cloud viewer!

This project is thanks to an amazing collaboration: books were donated by the San Diego Council on Literacy and were paired with a learning kit imagined by the Fleet Science Center, supported by Hunter Industries, and compiled by UCSD's Center for Student Involvement.

Check it out and read along! Click here to download the learning kit and family guide (available in 8 languages). You can find the book at your local library.

2021 Volunteer Trends

Words Alive's volunteers are amazing! Our 2021 Volunteer Round Up report is hot off the presses with incredible data about the community who supports our work!

Did you know:

• 58% of Words Alive's volunteers are under the age of 25

• 35% of our volunteers identify as Asian

• 20% of our volunteers have a graduate degree

• 6% of our volunteers are active-duty military or veterans

Representation matters at Words Alive, and we are dedicated to reflecting our community's lived experiences in everything we do. This report highlights our evolving demographic data on our volunteer base's ever-changing gender, racial, educational diversity and more.

Check it out here to learn more about our 2021 volunteer trends.

Thank you EY!

In a celebration of service, 225 EY employees from around the world participated in Words Alive projects around Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year! We'd like to thank our corporate partner, EY, for their commitment to empowering communities through reading!

Do you have a group of 25+ people and/or might be interested in sponsoring a service day for your team? Email us at [email protected] or call us at 858-274-9673. We'd love to talk about custom group service projects and/or opportunities to host service events at your office.

RSVP For Volunteer Appreciation Celebration

Register at our Zoom link to attend Volunteer Appreciation Celebration!

You are cordially invited to our 13th annual Words Alive Volunteer Appreciation Celebration that will take place virtually on Thursday, April 21 at 4:00 pm Pacific. Words Alive would not be the robust, thriving nonprofit it is today without the contributions of our volunteers!

Join us at this hour-long virtual event by signing up at this Zoom registration link. We hope to see you there as we honor our outstanding volunteers!

This newsletter, in addition to our blog and social media content, is written by us, a cohort of staff, interns and volunteers! Do you love writing and have an interest in helping Words Alive create this type of content? We'd love your help! Email to learn more.

The Words Alive Reader: December 18th, 2020

Welcome to The Words Alive Reader, a regular newsletter keeping you up-to-date with the latest in how we've been connecting children, teens, and families to the power of reading. What have we been up to and how can you help? Read on to find out!

This newsletter, in addition to our blog and social media content, is written by us, a cohort of volunteers! Do you love writing and have an interest in helping Words Alive create this type of content? We'd love your help! Email our Volunteer Coordinator, Robyn, to learn more.

- Zoe, Eli and Titiksha, Words Alive Storytelling Team

Words Alive Alumni Give Back

A screenshot from a call with some of our Westreich Scholarship alumni! Lexi (top left) has connected us to the organization where she now works.

We are always thrilled about any opportunity to get books to students, but we're especially excited about our new partnership with SAY (Social Advocates for Youth) San Diego because we are working with one of our Westreich Scholarship alumni! Lexi graduated from San Diego State University last year and is now working as a case manager for this wonderful organization. We loved supporting Lexi through her college journey and we're honored to be able to partner with her now! Thanks to this connection, more than 500 kids will be receiving a new book this holiday season. 

Help us develop even more partnerships by purchasing supplies from our Amazon wishlist! Many of these items will go towards innovative programming at Monarch School, Lexi’s alma mater. 

Become a Champion for Youth

A graphic with text that reads “Become a Champion for Words Alive This Winter!” above the “Champions for Youth” logo.

Words Alive is constantly seeking new ways to inspire a love of reading and promote educational equity. Help us reach this goal by signing up to become a part of Words Alive's Champions For Youth campaign!

Champions for Youth is an exciting peer-to-peer fundraising campaign that runs from December through January. When you create a fundraising page, you can inspire your friends and family to invest in the joy of reading. Every $10 you help raise will enable us to provide a bedtime story to a child.

The best part? The funds you raise will be amplified by gifts from Farners Insurance and the Century Club of San Diego. Sign up for an information session here!

Thank You, EY Page Turners!

An infographic titled “EY and Page Turners By the Numbers.” The infographic includes the statistics: 275 book reviews; 28, 334 pages read for Page Turners; 51 titles reviewed including What Color is My World? by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Come On In by Adi Alsaid, and Nino Wrestles the World by Yuyi Morales; 546 hours spent reading; 211 Page Turners; and “Want to learn more? Visit us at www.wordsalive.org/page-turners”

We’re excited to say that our partnership with EY has brought 211 new virtual volunteers into our Page Turners program from all across the country! Together, they’ve read more than 28,000 pages and written 275 book reviews to help us identify the best books for our curriculum.

And they've had a great time doing it! "We appreciate the opportunity to live our values by volunteering with you...Thank you for making it so easy for our people to give back during this unprecedented year," the EY Ripples team says. Thank you, EY, for helping us make a difference! 

If you’d like to join them as a Page Turner, visit our website to learn more.

Virtual Family Literacy Program with Oceanside Public Library

A young child draws with colored pencils in a notebook.

Recently, we partnered with the Oceanside Public Library to create a successful fully-remote version of our Family Literacy Program. Eleven families joined us for the virtual course, which pursued a bilingual approach to literacy.

Through books, crafts, and songs in both English and Spanish, families and their preschool children built key early literacy skills—and just as importantly, a love for reading! One of the participating families says their three-year-old is still talking about the program and even reads to his stuffed animals now. We love it!

If you'd like to help us inspire more families to read together, check out our volunteer opportunities here!

1,780 Brand New Books for Kids

A picture of our Executive Director, Rachael, with lots of boxes of donated books!

San Diego showed off the spirit of giving this week, as we received 1,780 books for kids and teens. We want to say a huge thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the San Diego Council on Literacy for their generous donations, and hope you’ll consider joining them. Help us get even more books into kids' hands this holiday season by donating to our Champions for Youth campaign!

Stock Donations

A young child holds up a sign that says “I’m a Summer Super Reader!”

Donating stock to Words Alive is a meaningful investment in our life-changing literacy work! It's a simple process with many benefits:

1. You receive a charitable income-tax deduction for the full fair-market value of the stock at the time of the gift.*

2. You incur no capital gains tax on the increased value of the stock.*

Words Alive has an account at Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. Your gift must be postmarked by December 31 to qualify for a deduction in that tax year. A stockbroker or trust officer also can arrange for a year-end gift of stock from your account.
To learn more or to make a donation, click here!   

*subject to IRS deduction limits​​​​​​​

Donate here to support Words Alive!

#LetsReadSD with the San Diego Council on Literacy

Did you know Words Alive is a proud affiliate of the San Diego Council on Literacy (SDCOL)?

For the past 30 years, the SDCOL has worked to bring awareness to the literacy cause in San Diego by uniting the community through advocacy, partnerships, resources, and coordination. As a convener, the SDCOL also brings together 30 affiliate literacy providers from across the county for networking, professional development, and resource sharing.

These opportunities have undoubtedly benefited Words Alive by connecting us with expertise of other passionate providers doing whatever it takes to create a more literate San Diego. And together, we certainly achieve more. Last year, the 30 affiliate partners of the SDCOL delivered no-cost literacy-building services to more than 170,000 children, youth, and adults across San Diego.

One of the central goals of the SDCOL is to instill the importance of literacy in the region. On that front, in 2014 the SDCOL spearheaded a Region that Reads campaign fostering partnerships with the 19 mayors of San Diego County in which each would support the work of the SDCOL. It also encouraged mayors to designate a liaison from each city to ensure greater connectivity and communication between the cities and literacy providers on the ground. Words Alive is proud to have contributed towards this effort as a member of the public policy committee. The SDCOL also shares resources with its affiliate programs, where most recently, the SDCOL contributed to our Read Aloud Program with a donation of new, high-quality children's books that will be distributed through our program-wide giveaway later this month.

Currently, the SDCOL is promoting their #LetsReadSD campaign to empower individuals to share their love of reading on social media. We encourage you to "get caught reading" this month, and learn more about the SDCOL and its affiliate programs to see the amazing work we do together!

Click here for more information about the San Diego Council on Literacy and its affiliated programs, and on the image below for more on the SDCOL's #LetsReadSD campaign.

Preventing the Summer Slide

Words Alive was honored to have been a partner in the Readers in the Heights program this summer alongside Community Housing Works, San Diego Workforce Partnership, San Diego County Office of Education, San Diego Council on Literacy, City Heights Public Library, and United Way San Diego. Readers in the Heights was a pilot program aiming to prevent summer slide by aligning and leveraging existing resources to bring summer learning opportunities to the City Heights Community Development Corporation (CHCDC). This year there were 51 children enrolled in the program and 36 children with perfect attendance. The diverse demographics of the children involved in the program is reflected in the varied language spoken at home. Families reported Somali, Amharic, Spanish, Arabic, Kizigua, or Haitian Creole as their primary language spoken at home. During the program the children had the opportunity to take field trips to the library, be read aloud to, create arts and crafts and make new friends. 

Words Alive modeled our Small Group session during the Readers in the Heights program and providing volunteers to read preassigned books to the children followed by a small group book discussion. During the small group, children are divided into groups of 4 and have the opportunity to look more closely at the book. The Words Alive volunteers ask questions that encourage participation and analytical thought while providing a space for every child to share their opinions about the story. The Readers in the Heights facilitators have noticed and reported the positive impact of the program, “The kids look forward to the reading components as the ‘special part’ of the program”. 

After 4 weeks of hard work and fun the participating families graduated from the program. Graduation day celebrated the families for their dedication and time they have invested in their children’s education. We wanted families to walk away feeling appreciated, empowered, and fulfilled.