Trails to Literacy: PHASES

Phase 2 "Action" - Renfrew County

Challenges

Geography is always a challenge for our program. We serve a rural population sparsely distributed over an extremely large area. That means that none of the individual communities has a large enough population base to feed a large program. Lack of transportation is a barrier for many. RCCUP has very few group learning activities and primarily offers 1-1 instruction or tutoring. The agency's premises are used mostly for administrative work and are not conducive to group work. These factors have caused some difficulty in getting the action portion of the project up and running. This may be counteracted by having a number of different projects within the main Bonnechere River project and/or following a new approach for Trails to Literacy participatory learning by offering a number of different projects.

However, on the flip side, it also means that people in this region do not have alternative programming. When we can find ways of meeting the challenges, we are likely to get a strong support from both the individuals and agents that need services.

Ideas for dealing with geography and transportation challenges:

• Expect to work with a small group of participants, at least to start the project
• In future, look at ways of developing the project with two (or more) teams in different parts of the county. In effect, this would mean operating separate but perhaps loosely connected projects. This idea still has many details to work out, but it is an approach that would be helpful for our widely dispersed program.