Your gift to The Edward Stevens Literacy Center provides timely support in sustaining critical community outreach in numerous, diverse relationships with local schools, businesses, and other community agencies.
When you give to The Stevens Literacy Center, you advance the educational missions of The Patton College of Education and Ohio University. You help transform the lives of our students and our client families. You help make the world a better place.
Established in 1997 by Dr. Edward W. Stevens, Jr., a distinguished professor of history and philosophy of education, The Stevens Literacy Center focuses on improving lives by researching, developing and promoting literacy across the lifespan. The professional staff seeks and secures external funds to design and implement applied research projects that create solutions for issues of low-level literacy and language development.
The Center is the parent organization for the Helen M. Robinson Center for Reading (a community tutoring center), and it provides adult workforce readiness education through the OHIO Career Ready Campus- an Aspire grant program. The Stevens Literacy Center co-sponsors a biennial literacy conference held at Ohio University.
We need you to help champion the great work of The Stevens Literacy Center.
From infants beginning to babble to children reading their first books to teenagers engaging in scientific inquiry, literacy skills lay the foundation upon which every individual’s education depends. When a learner is provided the tools to develop strong language and literacy skills, they are enabled to confidently achieve personal independence and aspirations.
The Stevens Literacy Center has become a hub for education in the community and engagement for aspiring teachers from Ohio University around this issue, but we need your help. The Center needs your support to continue its mission.
Your gifts to the Center will help us to continue to build a technology lending program for our Aspire students to work on their GED and workforce education training. One of our students started GED classes while in a recovery program. While her case manager had some uncertainties about the OHIO Career Ready Campus lending laptops, she said surprising things began to happen.
“In every call home, my client shared her pride in her GED work and being ‘trusted’ with ‘this really cool’ laptop, and in return, her family shared how excited they were for her and told her to really take advantage of this opportunity and all the things she can do with her GED,” the case manager said. “My client became more and more motivated. It has changed her belief about her potential. The women I work with are constantly being pushed down, and when I see them being lifted up, it gets rid of that uncertainty about loaning a laptop. That's a long story to explain something so simple, but it’s a moment that can really change a person’s life, and those are the moments that count.”
Your gift will support the Center’s focus on these main priorities for our community:
- Workforce Literacy and Job Training — One of the easiest ways to help adults get and maintain employment is through basic literacy education. It is hard to work a machine, perform a task, or assist with a service if you cannot understand the directions. The Stevens Literacy Center provides fundamental job readiness education to help adults get back on their feet and into the workforce
- Completion of Basic Education — The literacy center helps adults to complete their basic education for a high school equivalency. This achievement is fundamental, not just to employment, but additional education and skills as well.
- Family Literacy — The Stevens Center helps families across southeastern Ohio with on-site literacy education. This includes children in head start and their caregivers, as well as on-site assistance in more rural areas for adults without access to transportation.
- Out of School Programming — The Stevens Literacy Center provides high quality out of school literacy programming for children. Afterschool reading labs and summer camp programs held in campus and in community centers are held. Literacy ambassadors are undergraduate teacher candidates that serve as literacy tutors and camp counselors. The programs promote language and literacy development with an emphasis on the joy of reading and an integrated curriculum.
Give now to support The Stevens Literacy Center!
| Rank | State | Gifts |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | NY | 3 |
| 2 | WV | 1 |
| 2 | OH | 1 |
