Dictionaries
Our club provides English and French dictionaries to grade four students in School District 35 (Langley) over 1600 of them! We have been doing this for a few years and the students get to keep the dictionaries throughout their lifetime. We find younger students look forward to “The Rotary People” coming to the schools to talk about Rotary and give them their new book. The teachers love the fact that each student and the staff have the same book and they can all look up the words in unison. We believe that literacy is one of the most important skills for everyone.
March 2009
Message from the chair — Literacy is the key to success
Dear family of Rotary,
Knowing how to read and write can transform a person’s life. These basic skills, which so many of us take for granted, can mean a job, an income, and hope for a better future for those who are struggling to break the cycle of poverty. That’s why Rotary has focused on promoting literacy for more than two decades, and why The Rotary Foundation has provided millions of dollars to support literacy projects.
March is Literacy Month on the Rotary calendar, a time to consider what your club could be doing to boost literacy rates in your community and in communities around the globe. In parts of our world, less than 30 percent of the population can read and write. Many of those people are women and girls who have few opportunities for education and who then cannot teach their own children to read. Even in wealthy countries, you’ll find substandard schools that are failing to adequately teach basic skills and far too many adults who cannot read or write well enough to function effectively in society.
Our Foundation’s Humanitarian Grants Program is at work throughout the world helping many disparate groups gain life-changing literacy skills. Foundation grants are providing books, school supplies, computers, and other educational equipment. With Foundation support, clubs are adopting failing schools and helping them to thrive and developing programs using the concentrated language encounter method that has proven so effective in Thailand and many other countries.
Literacy opens doors to employment and economic security. Let’s use our Foundation resources to provide that essential key.
Jonathan Majiyagbe
Foundation Trustee Chair
