Where are they now?

Literacy Connections was wondering: what do Laubach tutors do when they are no longer Laubach tutors? Here’s what two dynamic people told us about their lives.

Eleanor Millard

Eleanor Millard and her dog Lupin

Eleanor Millard is a published author, a researcher/consultant, a former Member of the Legislative Assembly in the Yukon Territory, and one of the first people to start a literacy program for Aboriginal Canadians in the far north.

The inspiration for Project Northern Tutor in 1980-81 in Dawson City, Yukon, was partly Eleanor’s own training as a Laubach tutor. She took the basic tutor training in September 1980 while visiting Nova Scotia for an orientation to the Masters degree in adult education she was pursuing via distance education.

That winter, with funds from the federal Canada Employment and Immigration Commission (as it was then known), Eleanor set up a literacy program of her own design. The goal was to tackle both unemployment and low literacy while also demonstrating how tutors might be more successful if they came from the same culture as their students.

Eleanor was not paid by the project. Instead, she collected data for her Master’s thesis and coordinated the program.

When the program ended 9 months later, Project Northern Tutor had trained 7 tutors and worked with 14 students.

Eleanor went on to found the Yukon Literacy Council and Project Wordpower (now Yukon Learn.) Although she is no longer an active tutor, she has worked as a plain language writer for Yukon Learn.

Tobias Keogh

Tobias Keogh

“I hope he returned to school, like he wanted to. I hope he reads for pleasure.”

Those are two wishes that Tobias Keogh holds in his heart for the man he tutored in 1993 in Montreal, Quebec.

“I took the Laubach tutor training because I wanted to give back to my community,” Tobias recalls. “I think everyone should be able to read, and I chose Laubach because I liked the one-to-one approach.”

A university student at the time he became a tutor, Tobias went on to graduate and to work as a fundraiser and volunteer manager in the non-profit sector. Then, he spent 8 years in the private sector, working for a firm that designed software to make forms easier to fill out.

In his current role as the project manager for Towards Clearer Communications at La Fédération canadienne pour l'alphabétisation en français (FCAF), Tobias feels that he has returned to his “roots” in literacy.

Tobias is the proud father of two daughters. “We read together every night. One of the legacies of my training as a tutor is that it showed me how much joy reading brings to people.”