September | VOLUNTEER NEWSLETTER | 2026

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a time to spotlight a crucial dimension of our mission: keeping adult learners safe online. Fostering these protective skills ensures our students can access education, employment, and essential services without compromising their privacy.

October 10 marks World Mental Health Day, a reminder that our mental well-being is deeply rooted in community, connection, and belonging. Feeling connected to others is essential to how we thrive and navigate life’s challenges.

In adult literacy, we see every day how learning is about much more than developing new skills. For many learners, having a welcoming place to practice, ask questions, share experiences, and build confidence creates that vital sense of community.

Our volunteers play an important role in creating that environment. Through tutoring, conversation, encouragement, and simply being present, volunteers help make learning feel safe and supportive. A friendly conversation, celebrating a small accomplishment, or patiently working through a challenge together can help learners feel seen and valued.

Literacy and volunteering remind us that we don’t have to learn or grow alone. The relationships built through our programs create opportunities for people to connect, gain confidence, and take steps toward their personal goals.

This World Mental Health Day, we’re grateful for the volunteers who help create communities where everyone has the opportunity to learn, connect, and feel supported.

Sawyer Auer 

In our recent staff DEI training, we explored Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s framework in "The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma-Informed Care to Healing-Centered Engagement." While trauma-informed care recognizes the impact of past harm, it can inadvertently reduce people to their struggles. Healing-centered engagement flips this script by moving from “What happened to you?” to “What is right with you?” through four key pillars:

• Explicitly political: Recognizes that civic awareness, self-advocacy, and collective action restore personal agency and hope.
• Culturally grounded: Anchors healing in identity, cultural traditions, and shared history to cultivate deep belonging.
• Asset-driven: Focuses on curiosity, strengths, and future aspirations rather than merely managing symptoms of distress.
• Sustaining for providers: Acknowledges that adults also navigate trauma, making staff and volunteer well-being essential to community health.

This framework speaks directly to our community as we look ahead to October’s Global Diversity Awareness Month and World Mental Health Day (October 10). Many adult learners at Literacy Source navigate systemic inequities, displacement, and trauma, yet their lives are defined by resilience, multilingual skills, and rich life experience. Ginwright reminds us that mental well-being is not just clinical or individual—it is deeply collective, rooted in culture, dignity, and connection.

For our volunteers, this doesn't mean acting as counselors; it means meeting learners as whole, capable adults shaping their own futures. Creating a welcoming environment is only the starting point; this framework invites us to go deeper: stepping back so students can guide discussions, encouraging them to dream beyond day-to-day pressures, and celebrating what they bring to the room rather than what they have survived.

Questions for Reflection:



• How might you invite learners to weave their cultural knowledge, life experiences, or first languages into your sessions?
• When discussing goals, how can you make space for students to dream about long-term aspirations rather than focusing solely on immediate obstacles?
• In what ways can we step back during tutoring to let students direct the conversation and advocate for their own learning?

Tutoring Space 

Literacy Source is growing! If you have been in the office lately you may have noticed there are more people around. If you are unable to find space for tutoring sessions while in the center, please let a staff member know and they can assist you. Some staff offices are available for tutoring, just check with a staff member! And please be flexible with the space you are using, some days we are pretty full! As a reminder, two or more tutoring pairs can use an available classroom at the same time.  

Ideas for Effective English Tutoring Sessions 

I would like to share a few tutoring tips that have been helpful in supporting our students. I hope these ideas will make your tutoring sessions more effective, engaging, and enjoyable for both you and your student. 

• Start each session with small talk (how they are, what they did recently) and model natural conversation. 
• Help students organize their class materials so they can easily find class materials. 
• Practice common questions and answers used in everyday situations. 
• Build vocabulary using translation tools as needed, especially with beginning-level students. 
• Practice phonics, sight words, pronunciation, reading fluency, and vocabulary using class materials. 
• Support writing practice (free writing or dialogue journals) with more advanced students. 
• Check and assist with homework if needed. 
• Model first, then have students practice. 
• Connect lessons to students' background knowledge before reading. 
• Pre-teach unfamiliar vocabulary. 
• Use visual cues or annotations to maintain attention. 
• Allow adequate wait time for students to think before answering. 
• Give students plenty of opportunities to speak. Ask questions rather than doing most of the talking, and allow students to finish speaking without interrupting. 
• End each session by reviewing what was learned and asking the student what was most helpful. 

Kaeyoung Park, Instructional Advisor

Online Instruction at Literacy Source (Online)

Thursday, October 1,10am or 6pm

Are you volunteering in an online class or tutoring over Zoom? Come and learn best practices about teaching online from Literacy Source instructors. Register here.

Immigration Issues Explored (Online)

Thursday, September 24, 12pm

Please join the ILRC for its next Immigration Issues Explored Zoom event. We will discuss how naturalization is under attack and what the ILRC is doing to push back. 

This hour-long discussion with Q&A - moderated by Eric Cohen, Executive Director of the ILRC - will provide an overview of naturalization and its importance, the current administration's attacks on naturalization, and what we can do as a community to circumvent these attacks. 

Panelists include: 

• Lucia Martel Dow, Director of the New Americans Campaign 
• Liz Taufa, Senior Policy Attorney & Strategist 

The event is free to attend, and donations are welcomed. 

Unique Zoom links will be sent via email to individual registrants on or just before Tuesday, 9/22. Registrants attending as a group must fill out registration forms individually. 

Register/RSVP here. 

In observance of Hispanic Heritage Month and African Immigrant Heritage Month, we are featuring books that center the voices, histories, and lived experiences of African immigrant and Hispanic/Latino communities.

Solito

Staff: Miles Beran

Call Me American

Staff: Allie Azersky

What is the What

Staff: Katherine VanHenley

Transcendent Kingdom

Staff: Liz Wurster

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

Staff: Tiffany Ban

The House on Mango Street

Literacy Source's Book Club Class Book

TEDx Issaquah

Saturday, September 19, 3:30-5:30pm (The Fleming Arts Center, $124.50)

Every visible thing has an invisible half.

The things that last are built slowly, and mostly out of sight. Old-growth forests. Strong communities. Ideas that hold up for decades. We see the rise. We rarely see the roots: the quiet years and the hidden systems that held everything up long enough to grow.

Roots remind us that meaningful things can't be rushed. Rise is what those roots make possible. The growth. The reach. The ideas we build together.

TEDxIssaquah 2026 is a day for both. What's underground and what reaches up. What takes time and what finally arrives. What we inherit and what we choose to build.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor with Mayor Katie Wilson: End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World

Thursday, September 24, 7:30 pm, (The Great Hall 1119 Eighth Avenue, $10-$50)

Has it ever felt like the planet is burning, shared reality is melting, and a new iteration of the extreme is on the march? In their new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, activists and authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor help readers not only understand this development, but how to resist it.

Offering a scathing assessment of the contemporary scene, Klein and Taylor explore how religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists, and ethno-nationalists make up an apocalyptic alliance that share more than one might think: they are united in the belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, whether through the manifestation of messianic prophecy, the rampages of artificial intelligence, or the purported existential threat of immigration and cultural replacement. Klein and Taylor contend that rather than avoiding this conflagration, this group welcomes it, convinced they will be among the saved on the other side.

“End Times Fascism” is the ideology of the actors who strive to make the world unlivable and then seek to protect themselves from the fallout — whether by retreating to luxurious private islands, rocketing off to Mars, or bunkering the nation to keep their enemies at bay. The new survivalists have accumulated power, but they are far from impregnable. As Klein and Taylor show via original reporting and analysis, their many internal conflicts, contradictions, and nihilistic inability to envision a shared future leave them vulnerable to a new kind of politics — rooted in reverence for our shared existence and regard for the earth we inhabit and must protect.

State Parks Free Day

Saturday, September 26, All Washington State Parks

Washington State Park free days are designated dates throughout the year when visitors can explore state parks without a Discover Pass. Held on select holidays and outdoor milestones, these days waive the standard $10 daily vehicle access fee for day-use areas. It is an ideal, budget-friendly opportunity to hike new trails, visit scenic coastlines, and explore unfamiliar parks without committing to an annual pass.



Our next New Volunteer Orientation (via Zoom) will be on October 7 at either 1pm or 7pm. 

Potential volunteers are invited to register online here. 

Miss any of our past volunteer newsletters? You can access archived newsletters at the bottom of the Volunteer Page of our webpage.