In Kalamazoo County, 13% of adults read at the lowest literacy level. These adults cannot read a job application, read a simple story to a child, find an intersection on a map, read a prescription label, or total purchases from an order form. They struggle daily to take part in the world around them and fail to reach their full potential as parents, community members, and employees because they lack basic reading skills.
The Kalamazoo Literacy Council’s (KLC) Everyone Needs to Read (ENT-R) campaign provides operational support to the KLC so that it can improve the literacy rates of adults in Kalamazoo County and increase access to adult literacy services. It will strengthen the KLC's capacity to recruit, train and equip volunteers, increase efforts to reach adults in need of literacy services through the ENT-R public awareness campaign, and improve the ability of community agencies to identify and refer adults in need of literacy services to the KLC.
By giving to the KLC’s ENT-R campaign, you can help struggling adult readers, whose lives are often linked to poverty, crime, poor health, and whose children are more likely to struggle in school. Statistics show that when these adults enter literacy programs, their children tend to have fewer nutrition and health problems, drop out of school less, have fewer teen pregnancies, less joblessness, and less social alienation.
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