By Yaya Yuan | Innovation Developer
Greetings Global Giving and LitWorld Community!
We are so grateful to have you with us as we build the LitWorld story together. Your support has made 2013 a year of developing, implementing, and sharing LitWorld’s big ideas that are transforming the landscape of universal education. LitWorld is a leader in the field of global literacy, creating immediate, practical, on-the-ground solutions to the hard-to-tackle issue of illiteracy, while disseminating our mobile, human-centered models for literacy empowerment for all to use. We operate locally, but think globally.
LitWorld creates robust literacy cultures in the most marginalized communities in the world. Rather than an outcome or end goal, we view literacy as an everlasting tool that is mobile, nimble and flexible, so that it can strengthen people everywhere no matter what their dreams or circumstances. In this way literacy is a life raft to hope, resilience, joy and independence.
In the last half of 2013 we brought Girls LitClubs to new communities in Faisalabad, Pakistan and Ahmedabad, India. In these two communities we are working side by side with local grassroots organizations to create safe environments for girls to gather and cultivate strong community bonds and lifelong friendships and mentorships. LitClubs deeply value children’s own stories, and use these stories and life experiences as a catalyst for growth and learning.
This fall we had hours long training sessions over video chat with the new LitClub leaders who will run and manage our programs on the ground (pictured below). They trained on our 48 week LitClub 7 Strengths curriculum. LitWorld’s strength-based model of social emotional learning fills a critical gap in education that other literacy organizations often overlook. Our curriculum cultivates core strengths that inherently exist within each child. The LitWorld 7 Strengths – Belonging, Curiosity, Kindness, Friendship, Confidence, Courage, and Hope – are ideas that are key to resilience-building. The process of narrative framing we employ in our LitClubs and LitCamps not only cultivates children’s literacy skills – reading, writing, speaking, and listening – it gives them the lifelong skills they need to face the challenges of their everyday lives.
After completing their training, our LitClub leaders of the Seeds of Hope Foundation in Faisalabad, and of Kadam Education Initiative in Ahmedabad launched LitClubs in their communities. Shortly after launching, Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines. Our LitClubs in Ulingan, Philippines are in an area that was safe from the destruction. However, our partner organization in Ulingan, Project Pearls, rallied our global LitClub community to create letters of hope and love to send to the children and families that lost everything in the tyhphoon. Our LitClub girls responded immediately. This act of giving our words is the foundation of our work. This exercise showed our girls and their communities that regardless of challenging living situations, we all have something to give: our stories and our words.
In this way, LitClubs are a vehicle for dignity and hope. The girls in our LitClubs around the world know that they are part of a global community, a worldwide LitWorld that is lit from within, lit from each other, lit from their own stories. The power of this work comes from the children, and they are leading the way. It is our job now to work together to make is safe for girls to learn and to receive an education. In the 21st century this is the human rights issue of our time.
By Yaya Yuan | Innovation Developer
By Madison Graboyes | Global Community Builder
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