Though the Literacy Center of West Michigan has been open since 1986, the staff and programs offered only began to significantly bloom in the last few years.

When the doors first opened to the formerly known Kent County Literacy Council, there was only an executive director and secretary on staff, in addition to the organization’s board members. Space was shared in a Grand Rapids public library and their mission was to train tutors who would be sent to community education programs throughout Kent County.

Today, there are 19 staff members in addition to the 18-member board, and the center offers programs for the adult learner, the workplace and the family. They’ve moved to a more-spacious building of its own in downtown Grand Rapids with the proper space needed to serve the community.

“We have our own training room, tutoring rooms and space for staff. In the past year, we’ve served nearly 1,000 people,” said Susan Ledy, the executive director of the Literacy Center of West Michigan. “We keep growing; the need in our community is so huge.”

The center offers three types of programs; an adult tutoring program, a customizable workplace program and family literacy program.

The adult tutoring program matches volunteer tutors with an adult learner for one-on-one sessions that would either take place in one of the center’s tutoring rooms, or a designated public place in which a room was offered, such as a library, church or restaurant. With 300 volunteers available for adult tutoring, Ledy estimates that 500 adult learners took advantage of this free program last year.

The customizable workplace program, available since 2001, was developed to meet the needs of companies who may be facing communication barriers with ESL employees. This on-site program, which has expanded beyond Kent County, uses paid teachers instead of volunteers to prevent costly errors the company may have been experiencing due to communication problems. This program is customizable to the company and their industry, and the teachers can use jargon in a particular industry to better suite the company and learners.

Aside from teaching a company’s employees, the literacy center also works with management to help them overcome the cultural barriers.

“We found that often we encountered management who would ask, ‘OK, you’re helping the employees, how can you help the management in relating to employees,’” Ledy said. “So one of the things we thought of was that management could benefit by … multicultural (management) training.”

Though the workplace program for ESL learners comes at a cost to the company, Ledy said that the literacy center has been successful in receiving grant money to take that program out into the community. They have been able to provide the program to non-profits and other organizations that may be serving ESL clients.

The center helped around 400 employees using the workplace program last year. Some of the companies that have used the program include the Gentex Corporation, Butterball Farms, Behr Industries and Cherry St. Health Center.
The third program offered by the center is called family literacy. This program, developed three years ago, started in partnership with Head Start in Kent County. Similar to the adult tutoring program, a parent with a child in Head Start, and selected by that organization, can receive free one-on-one tutoring. In the last year, more than 100 parents used the family literacy program. In addition, the literacy center holds a family literacy night once a month. Entire families can come to the center and enjoy dinner and literacy activities.

The center felt so good about the family literacy program that they wanted to bring that same program into the Grand Rapids Public Schools, Ledy said. This program, called “Schools of Hope Family Literacy,” is currently used in three elementary schools where the Literacy Center of West Michigan provides ESL in a classroom format.

“In both family programs, we’re following the family literacy model,” Ledy said.

The model includes parent education, where parents are taught ESL and how to read; the child’s education, which is taught by either Head Start and Grand Rapids Public Schools; and the parenting component, where time is given for the parent to discuss parenting and its relationship to literacy.

“Parents might have questions about the schools, or why it’s important to read to their child every day,” Ledy said. “So it’s not discipline parenting, but specific to education and becoming good leaders.”

Though the literacy center does its best to provide the community with appropriate resources, like any non-profit, funding is a constant challenge.

“In the beginning, it was ‘where can we look for people to support us?’ Later, it was involving organizations, like (the Department of Energy, Labor & Economic Growth) … and how to encourage organizations to understand the need enough to support us,” Ledy said. “It’s one of the biggest challenges, but in that same span, it’s an accomplishment.”
The organization receives money through the Workforce Investment Act in addition to raising local money and writing grants. The center also received a No Worker Left Behind grant, making college accessible. A partnership with the local community college benefits the center’s students by connecting them with that next step in their lives.

Ledy, who has been at the Literacy Center of West Michigan since 1989, finds power in what the center is doing for the Grand Rapids community.

“It means a lot to me to be able to see the change it makes in an individual’s life. It makes me keep going; knowing what a difference it makes,” she said. “The knowledge and knowing what our training does and the confidence it gives them in moving forward in their own lives, it makes a difference for me. And it’s just the excitement around the ability to connect with the community; the reason we’re able to grow our programs is because the community is saying ‘we need you’ to help with our workforce and families.”

If you wish to learn more about the Literacy Center of West Michigan, please visit their Web site or call (616) 459-5151.