Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, Inc.

The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy is committed to building a stronger, more equitable America through literacy. We work towards this mission by designing programs and interventions that support key pillars of the organization’s strategic framework:

Innovate and Incubate: Foster innovation and incubate technological advances in adult literacy to accelerate the implementation of effective literacy strategies and resources.
Reach and Access: Scale evidence-based practices and resources in adult and family literacy.
Educate: Promote awareness and engage the public to participate in efforts to solve our nation’s literacy crisis.
Impact: Measure and report on the progress and social impacts of investments ensuring transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Every Barbara Bush Foundation program and initiative utilizes evidence-based learning theory, and is continually evaluated to assess impact. Our commitment to measurement and accountability provides critical data that informs not only our work, but the work of the entire field, and ensures better outcomes for the families and communities we serve. Our results-driven initiatives include:

• Technology: We believe that technology and innovation can help us meet families where they are. We are committed to developing and scaling solutions that can reach learners where they live, work, play, and pray, expanding opportunities for learning beyond the traditional classroom. The Foundation is working to bring groundbreaking edtech tools like mobile apps and artificial intelligence to market for adult learners.
• Reading Mentoring Programs: The Barbara Bush Foundation has offered reading mentoring programs in 18 states and the District of Columbia providing opportunities for parents and children to work with mentors to improve their literacy skills. Over our history, we have provided more than 513,000 books to nearly 35,000 struggling readers. We continue to develop and scale new programs designed around mentoring from Pre-K through adults, which is a research-proven strategy for boosting reading skills.

• Research and Awareness: We also invest in research to create the knowledge and evidence bases that we need to move the needle on this crisis and improve outcomes. It is absolutely critical that we “put a face” on the problem by pinpointing the people and places that it impacts directly.

- Our Adult Literacy Gap Map (map.barbarabush.org) visually represents the relationship of literacy to health, income, and education nationwide—literally putting low literacy and its devastating effects on the map at a county-by-county level to inform resource development and decision making.

- A first-of-its-kind economic study commissioned by the Barbara Bush Foundation recently assessed the issue at a macroeconomic level. This analysis of our Gap Map data, conducted by Gallup economists, found that the U.S. could be losing a staggering $2.2 trillion in gross domestic product (GDP) due to low adult literacy rates.

- Our Barbara Bush Fellows program fuels critical literacy research. These two-year grants support academic research that will help increase learning, accelerate innovation, and incubate the most effective initiatives, as well as explore the most pressing questions faced by literacy practitioners today.

• Convener and Thought Leader: In our role as a thought leader and convener, we are working to build a national movement focused on innovation and investment in the field of adult and family literacy. We have commissioned a cross-sector task force of experts from both inside and outside of the literacy sphere to create a National Action Plan for Adult Literacy, which will be launched in 2021.

Our approach aims to build upon the Barbara Bush Foundation’s strengths from the past thirty years, while prioritizing and focusing on projects and activities that lead to data driven outcomes and scalable approaches. As we evolve, we are identifying new evidence-based practices, to achieve improved outcomes for low literate adults and families. However, we see literacy as intrinsically linked to complex issues of equity, access, economic mobility, workforce development, health, and gender. Therefore, our programs collaborate with partners and stakeholders across the spectrum for a collective and wholistic approach to sustainable solutions.

A few key accomplishments and focuses of the Foundation include:
Teen Trendsetters – Teen Trendsetters® is among the Barbara Bush Foundation’s longest-running programs. The Barbara Bush Foundation has supported more than 1,600 Teen Trendsetters programs in 18 states, providing more than 513,000 books to nearly 35,000 struggling readers. Over 37,000 mentors have volunteered more than 675,000 hours to help their mentees improve their reading, with outstanding results.

Overall, mentees progress one grade level or more in reading after seven months in the Teen Trendsetters program. A five-year meta-analysis of the results of the Teen Trendsetters program in Florida concluded that, in conjunction with their participation in Teen Trendsetters, these students began to close the gap with their peers. Specifically, mentees showed between 18% and 31% more growth in their reading skills than one would expect for the average student.


Technology and Innovation – We believe that technology can help us meet families where they are. In 2015, the Barbara Bush Foundation made history by incentivizing the development of mobile apps to help adults learn to read anytime, anywhere. Now, we are working to put these groundbreaking apps into the hands of learners nationwide. We have incorporated an award-winning adult literacy app into our literacy programs, and we serve as founding partner in a national initiative aimed at distributing the app to one million adults in the next year. To guide and accelerate our technology-focused efforts, we have enlisted the expertise of our Technology Advisory Council. This group provides critical input that will shape not only our work, but the trajectory of the entire adult literacy field in the years to come.

COVID-19 Relief – Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the Foundation has channeled our 30+ years of expertise in family literacy into supporting America’s low-literate families, who have been among the hardest hit. We were pleased to be recognized by both Forbes and Fortune for the at-home online learning toolkits we created to help students of all ages navigate these challenging times.

Looking ahead:
In today’s increasingly digital environment, successful literacy programs must leverage innovation to meet learners where they are—expanding beyond the traditional classroom environment. While there are many solutions available for K-12 children, very few existing tools meet the unique needs of parents and adult learners.

The Barbara Bush Foundation will continue its groundbreaking work to bridge this gap by identifying and scaling educational technology solutions for adults, including mobile apps and artificial intelligence, investing expertise to optimize tools, assisting with pilots and comprehensive evaluations, and helping to bring promising solutions to market.