Literacy Project - first steps!
Posted
on Jan 22, 2016
Today our first gift of Student Dictionary and Gazetteers was delivered. Bev Eisner accepted a box of 24 dictionaries on behalf of Saint Benedict Parish. Each book is a gift from us to a student of English at the Church. Saint Benedict RC Church has a busy and successful refugee program and also holds ESOL (English as a Second Language) classes. They are keeping 10 books as classroom resources, and the remainder will be given to students to keep. We hope to be able to provide more books in the future to support their work as our program is very large..............
Literacy is one of Rotary's main goals. We had heard of successful Dictionary projects both in the US and UK, and so made enquiries of the non profit organization www.dictionaryproject.org about how we might be involved. Usually we would fundraise to buy these books, but to due to excess stock because of a reprint due in 2016 we were gifted over 3000 dictionaries free of charge. We are working with Halifax Regional School board to ensure that every Third grader in an English program is gifted a Dictionary if their school has not already had dictionaries from another organization. We are sending 96 books (4 boxes) to Cameroon as part of the Awing Village Partnership. We are working with both the Interact Club of Sackville and Area and The Dalhousie Rotaract Club to provide books for their projects and will continue to outreach to projects similar to today's gift to Saint Benedict Parish.