|
As we wrap up spring quarter and move into summer, we take time to honor both Pride Month in June and Disability Pride Month in July. These are important reminders of the barriers LGBTQ+ and disabled individuals often face—barriers to education, employment, healthcare, and full participation in community life. These challenges are deeply familiar to many of our students, who come to Literacy Source as adults without the basic skills they need to building a better. Many are immigrants and refugees, far from home and learning English, often while juggling work, caregiving, and systems that aren’t built for their success. At Literacy Source, we believe in breaking down these barriers and building pathways to opportunity, belonging, and hope.
This quarter, students showcased the skills they’ve built across a range of hands-on projects. In Ready to Work classes, students created pay stubs, practiced making phone calls for job interviews, and performed their dialogues for classmates. ESOL students explored health literacy, wrote about injuries and illnesses, and gave presentations on staying well. Higher-level ESOL classes wrote and revised cause and effect essays, culminating in class presentations, while students in our Academic English class developed well-researched argumentative essays on economics and geography using digital tools. We also launched two new classes: Ratios to Recipes, a contextualized culinary math course, in partnership with the Pacific Northwest Hospitality Training Program, and the Democracy Voucher Program Student Leaders project, which will continue through student-led civic engagement this summer.
With your support from our GiveBig campaign, we were able to ensure that our Americorps are funded through the end of their contract this summer, but we still face uncertainty about next year’s staffing. Registration is full, and we’ve had to turn away students due to limited capacity—especially in digital skills and ESOL 1—highlighting just how critical and in-demand our programs are. As we take a short break June 30–July 4, we remain committed to meeting this need, one learner at a time. Thank you for being part of this journey and this community.
| 
