Words in Every Neighborhood: Citywide Efforts to Expand Literacy-Rich Environments

This Crucible of Practice Salon explored a recently released brief developed by Philadelphia leaders, Philadelphia as a Literacy-Rich Environment: Unlocking Potential and Creating Change. Participants engaged with these leaders, along with CGLR community representatives from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Charlotte, North Carolina, about city- and county-wide efforts to create literacy-rich environments in the everyday places and spaces where children and families spend time. This “everyday places and spaces” approach, a significant priority for CGLR is focused on tapping into the broad ecosystem supporting out-of-school learning and the 80% of children’s waking hours they are not in school. This week’s session featured city and county leaders, who serve as community backbone supports for collective action, sharing how they are building cross-sector collaborations across neighborhoods. 

Moderator and youth development consultant Priscilla Little of The Learning Agenda, who also was the lead writer on the new brief, began by providing an overview of the Philadelphia Community of Practice (CoP), which involved researchers and practitioners and was funded by the William Penn Foundation. Members of the Community of Practice worked together to produce the brief, capturing key learnings from their three years of collaborative work. She then asked two members, Jenny Bogoni of the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation and Read by 4th and Rachael Todaro of the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Children and Families, to describe the collaborative literacy installations, activities and programs that provide fun and learning across their city. They also reflected on the important insights highlighted in the brief and the relevance to other cities operating similar initiatives. Bogoni described how Read by 4th, Philadelphia’s CGLR Community Coalition, creates working groups to advance their strategies: 

In the community mobilization area, we’ve been focused on how we can transform our communities into literacy-rich environments. Where can we make sure that learning is catalyzed in everyday places and spaces to use some language that we hear? And how are we making sure that we are activating individuals to be community literacy advocates? … So our partners come to us from all aspects of Philadelphia and then they join working groups that advance the various strategies. 

Little then turned to two additional GLR Community Coalition representatives, Emily Nanney of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library and Dea Wright with the City of Milwaukee, who discussed how institutions and individuals in their county and city contribute and create opportunities to bring words into every neighborhood. Wright highlighted the multiple city government offices and other entities that come together in Milwaukee to support and advance literacy-rich environments in everyday places and spaces: 

I direct the Office of Early Childhood Initiatives. I am the sole employee of the office, and I rely on a team of family advisory board members to really help me move this work in the city I’m very proud of. For the last six years, the city has remained committed to investing in this office and the programs it has managed to produce with the help of so many wonderful partners within city government. The Department of Public Works has committed to helping us put story paths in our parks. Our Milwaukee Public School Rec Department has also put funds into our spaces, like our bus shelters and our story paths that are in two of our parks. Our library, of course, is a phenomenal partner, providing books for the readers. The Health Department has been very instrumental in putting big dollars into revamping their offices, the WIC clinic waiting rooms and transforming them into what we call pop spots. And so all this is within city government, but also outside, we’ve also had a local hospital that’s transformed their waiting space. 

After learning from our featured speakers, we had the chance to engage in a peer exchange with all participants sharing the ways in which this key CGLR priority of activating community assets to support learning happening anywhere and everywhere is happening in their communities. Check out the Padlet where ideas were captured and plan to join us again for future opportunities! 

If you were able to attend the session, we would love to hear your feedback! We appreciate your help in filling out the following form as we seek to learn and understand the perspectives, ideas, critiques and recommendations that better inform our key audiences.