Palmetto Literacy Council

We aim to improve the literacy rates in Horry County, South Carolina for children and adults.

Palmetto Literacy Council:
1. Provides 2 hours/week of free tutoring in basic reading, writing, and/or math.
2. Work with the libraries to provide tutoring in the libraries. We hope to assign a volunteer liaison for each library to improve communications.
3. Send a newsletter to all stakeholders describing our events, upcoming fundraisers, and information about literacy.
4. Partner with several organizations to get the word out about our services. We have contacted all public and private schools, nonprofit agencies, and sent press releases to every radio and tv station in our area. Our other partners are businesses donating time, products, and/or funding to help us achieve our goal and improve their employee base.
5.Offer several events and fundraisers to inform the community about our services and help raise awareness for the need to improve literacy rates to build a stronger community.

1. The passion for improving literacy in our community is palpable among our Board of Directors, Executive Director, staff, and volunteers.
2. Our Executive Director is a retired tenured Special Education Professor (former teacher, administrator, and corporate trainer). Her research and focus throughout her career has been on how to incorporate strategies in the classroom to help students learn or to help teachers make instruction more accessible. She creates the curriculum and designs the instruction F2F and online.
3. We are well connected throughout our county through our Board of Directors and our affiliations.
4. Our Vice Chair of BOD is an English Lecturer at Coastal Carolina University; our Secretary is a retired professor of religion and philosophy, his family has lived in this community for several generations; our Treasurer is a Professional Bookkeeper; our Members-At-Large (3) are Professional Developer for our local school district, a Free-Lance writer, a Sociology Lecturer with a Ph.D. at the local university.
5. Several of our volunteers have taken on leadership roles: LACES Czar-customized and developed our database to track volunteers and students and runs reports for the ED. We have a LACES data input person. A volunteer who recruits students, meeting with various programs to partner with us. We have two volunteers who act as intermediate administrators at two of our eleven libraries, they are our Volunteer Liaisons. We plan to have more Volunteer Liaisons as our number of students in each library region grows. We have a volunteer who edits and writes for our newsletter and she reaches out and hosts our quarterly Authors' Panels. We have a volunteer who is in charge of Giving Tuesday and the Spring Online Auction. A volunteer is our Training Coordinator and presents our Volunteer Orientation and Training at least once each month.
6. We have partnered with a local college and university. We supervise student interns and provide volunteer experiences for their students.
7. We are fiscally responsible and are dedicated to keeping our costs down and our output large!

We opened our doors on August 1, 2019. By December 31, 2019 we will have more than 20 volunteers through orientation and training and more than 10 students matched and getting tutoring services. The year 2020 was rough. We shut down for several weeks 6 months after opening. We are coming back. We are tracking students, volunteers, and donations better than ever.

We need to focus next on:
1. Recruiting more volunteers and students,
2. Raising funds to pay for materials for the students
3. Raising funds to pay our Executive Director/Program Coordinator. The desire here is to establish funding, so that when our ED decides to retire, we can hire an expert to replace her.

We schedule a minimum of one session of Volunteer Orientation and Training each month.
We are applying for several grants. In order to do that effectively, we have recruited a tenured research Psychology Professor and an educator who has written grants for schools to help us find and write grants.
We have established an annual golf tournament that will occur every November, are working on establishing an annual auction, this year it will be online. We also are providing an Authors Panel, while we offer it for free online, we do request donations.