Teach 3,000 Indonesian Children to Read

Dear supporters,

We would like to express our gratitude for the incredible support we continue to receive from all of you. It is truly inspiring to witness the ongoing financial contributions that help us achieve our shared mission.

Closing Program
In June, we will conclude the program we have undertaken in collaboration with the national and local government in East Indonesia (Kabupaten Kupang). Over the past three years, we have provided intensive training and mentoring to more than 35 teachers in that region. This training familiarizes them with our teaching methodology, the Saya Suka Membaca curriculum, and our instructional materials. We believe in the power of combining training and mentoring because the monthly mentoring sessions assist teachers in implementing what they have learned during their training. This approach ensures that it becomes more than just a one-time event and leads to a lasting change in their teaching methods. We are grateful for the opportunity to carry out this significant project in partnership with the national and local government, and your support has also played a vital role in its success. On behalf of the more than 775 students we have reached through this program, we want to say: terima kasih! (thank you)

Looking Forward
As we mentioned in our previous report, we are delighted with the progress we are making this year. In the past year, we have trained 119 teachers, and as of June 2023, we have already reached 99 teachers! We are grateful for this progress and the opportunity to collaborate with various partners in implementing these interventions, equipping teachers with better skills to provide language education. We firmly believe that this will have a tremendous impact on the development of these children.

New Opportunities
Over the past few months, we have reached out to potential partners with funding proposals. Unfortunately, these efforts did not yield the desired outcomes, and we did not come across any new opportunities. Therefore, we kindly ask for your assistance. If you know of any education-focused funds that might be suitable for our cause, we would greatly appreciate it if you could inform us. In the coming months, we will continue to explore potential new partnerships, both within Indonesia and beyond. Your input and suggestions in this regard are highly valued.

Salam Literasi,

Stuart Patience
On behalf of the Saya Suka Membaca team

Dear Supporters,

Thank you for your continued support of this campaign. It is of great significance to us, but especially to all the children and teachers we can support with this. Please know that your contribution has a big impact!

General Update
We are grateful to inform you that:

- Two colleagues work daily in our small office in Kupang. Partly due to the support from the Ministry of Education, we were able to train 37 new teachers there in the past month in the use of the Saya Suka Membaca material.

- This new office in Kupang will serve as a catalyst to reach more schools, teachers and children in this NTT region. We see that there is a need, so we continue to look for opportunities to make our materials available (together with other partners).

- In the coming months we will start preparations for a major project in Kalimantan. A number of about 75 teachers will be trained in the third quarter of this year. This requires a lot of preparation from the team, but at the same time it is also a wonderful opportunity to provide schools in different provinces of Kalimantan with effective reading education.

Jakarta Team
We expanded our team with one colleague in February and will do so again in April. This addition of staff is necessary due to the increasing demand for our materials and mentoring. We are grateful to see that over the past few years our organization has been growing and reaching more and more schools, teachers and children.

Looking forward
The Saya Suka Membaca team has started this new year full of energy. Last year we greatly exceeded our targets, which has given us a huge boost. We are grateful to report that we have been able to train 119 teachers in the past year. The goal for this year is to train 175 teachers, but from the requests so far, we may be reaching that goal in Q3! We hope that this news will also delight you. Together we work on a future until every child in Indonesia can read and loves to read!

Salam literasi,

Stuart Patience
on behalf of the SSM team.

Dear Supporters,

Thank you for your continued support of this campaign. It is of great significance to us, but especially to all the children and teachers we can support with this. Please know that your contribution has a big impact!

Kupang Update

Our partnership with the Ministry of Education in Kupang is going well. It will serve more than 800 new children this academic year, bringing the total to more than 1700 children. This quarter we've trained 8 new teachers, replacing teachers who were rotated to new positions by the education department or retiring, and our team has conducted more than 40 mentoring visits to remote schools. Other significant developments include:

- We have paid a deposit on a small office in Kupang, another step towards establishing an official branch office for Saya Suka Membaca in Eastern Indonesia so that the team can serve teachers and children more effectively;

- The head teachers of our 20 partner schools have agreed to pay the cost of reproducing activity books for children in their schools. This is a huge endorsement of Saya Suka Membaca, and a boost to the program's sustainability (and the impact of your donations) by more than US$3000.

Jakarta and Beyond

The Jakarta team has also been busy training new teachers, providing SSM training for than 23 teachers in three training events in the last three months. 8 of these were teachers working at a school on the outskirts of Jakarta; 5 were leaders of an organisation with plans to use SSM in Sumba, Eastern Indonesia, in 2023; 10 were teachers from three new partner organisations in Pekanbaru, Riau. A small grant from one of these groups enabled us to provide training more affordably for the other organisations, multiplying the effectiveness of your generous donations.

Plans for 2023

We're so grateful for your support throughout 2022, and are excited to look forward to 2023. Watch out for our end of year social media campaign, where we'll look back at what you've helped us to achieve this year, and share more of our plans for the year ahead.

We wish you and your family all the best as we head into the festive season.

Salam literasi,

Stuart Patience

on behalf of the SSM team.

Progress in Kupang

The program in Kupang has been going well, despite reductions in funding from the Ministry Of Education. The field team have just finished collecting endline testing data for the program's first cohort in order to evaluate their progress. Initial results look promising - more in our next update!

More than 940 children are being taught to reading using Saya Suka Membaca materials as a result of this program. You can see the story of one of them, Bryan, by clicking on this link to Youtube.

Teacher Training in Jakarta

At the end of June we delivered three days of training for 9 teachers from across Indonesia at the office of a partner charity in Jakarta. Several of the teachers involved serve in extremely isolated rural communities, so we're very happy to have been able to equip them with the materials they need to teach reading effectively in the field.

You can watch a video of highlights from the training here.

Mentawai Loves Reading

Surfers travel for thousands of miles to experience the world-class waves of the Mentawai islands. Sadly, children living on these beautiful islands have little access to quality education or reading books - in some cases, they don't even have electricity. We're delighted to be partnering with a group of surfers from the U.S. to provide training for teachers at six schools on the island of Siberut, in what we hope will be just the start of a program to serve many more teachers and children across Mentawai.

Thank You

As ever, your donations and other support are vital enablers for this work. Thank you.

With your help, we'll continue to improve the quality of our programs and serve more teachers and children across Indonesia.

Best wishes,

Stuart Patience
Jean Oberlin

Yayasan Tunas Aksara - Saya Suka Membaca

Links:

• Documentary video from Kabupaten Kupang Loves Reading
• Video highlights from SSM teacher training in Jakarta, June 2022

Dear Friends,

We hope you've had a good start to 2022!

Kalimantan

Our team started 2022 by running three training events in remote areas of Kalimantan, in partnership with the Corporate-Social Responsibility program of PT. Kalimantan Prima Persada (PT. KPP).

This is a full implementation of SSM in three schools, and will serve approximately 150 children in its first year. If this pilot program is demonstrated to be effective and is well received by teachers and the local education department it will be expanded to other local schools, also funded by PT. KPP.

Kupang

In mid-February we received confirmation from the Ministry of Education that our program in Kupang will also be extended... once again with a radically reduced budget. Nevertheless, the extension of the program will enable us to provide teacher training and the next level of the SSM curriculum to 37 teachers in remote schools, getting more books to 942 kids in 20 target schools.

Papua 

Plans for a signficiant training partership in Papua have been put on hold after our local partner had their budget cut (they are part of the same government program that has funded our work in Kupang). In the meantime, in early March we trained a single trainer from Yayasan Pensil Peduli, also working in Papua. They hope to train teachers in five schools after field-testing our curriculum.

Tune in Next Time...

... for a video from Kupang and news of the SSM App!

With gratitude as ever for your partnership,

Stuart Patience
Jean Oberlin

On behalf of Yayasan Tunas Aksara