CIES Continues Expansion with University of Calgary Student's Union Grant for Reading Room Initiative

CIES is always seeking out ways to best serve our clients and the community at large and a recent grant from the University of Calgary Student's Union is helping us further expand to do just that, The Reading Room Initiative's primary intention is to provide a quality, comprehensive reading instructional program to promote literacy through providing one-on-one or small group instruction to students who require extra help with reading.

Many of the students recommended to the Reading Room are literacy students who are learning English as a Second Language and may not be functionally literate in their own language for a variety of reasons. This program is run entirely by volunteers. We currently have a number of tutors volunteering their time in the Reading Room, and based on the high demand for this program, we hope to recruit more motivated and eager volunteers from the University of Calgary students to join us in further developing and implementing this innovative program.

Our goal is to run the Reading Room on a daily basis, estimating to serve 120 literacy students per year. The funding received through U of C’s Committee of 10,000 Grant will be used to purchase resources for the Reading Room, including adult literacy reading intervention software, and also to contribute to developing a curriculum and teaching manual for the program.

The Committee of 10,000 collects a small levy from the 27,000 undergraduate students of the University of Calgary to give to charitable causes throughout the city of Calgary, with the intention of the committee is to build relations with the community outside of the university. CIES would like to extend a big thank to thank you to the University of Calgary for approving our grant application and look forward to further collaborative efforts with our city's largest post secondary provider!