Launching Activities

Community events

During a weeklong awareness campaign, special events promoting literacy awareness broaden our reach, draw in the public, involve community partners and adult learners, and attract media attention. The special events can be a wide variety of activities. The common element is that they draw attention to pressing literacy needs and proven and available solutions.

Each community develops its own activities with the help of their community partners. Here are some of the types of community events that can be developed, with some examples of events that took place in the 2003 campaign.

• Open houses

Community partners could offer to host an open house. The open house could include:

  • Posters
  • Distribution of bookmarks and information about literacy
  • A demonstration of activities such as sewing, woodworking, storytelling, and karate, with an explanation of how literacy skills are used in that activity
  • An opportunity to try the activity being demonstrated

• Presentations

Offer to give presentations to groups in the community about the importance of literacy skills. Speaking teams could include adult learners.

The topic of the presentation could be:

  • Understanding Literacy - what literacy skills look like at different levels of ability, and the actual scale of literacy needs in the community
  • Clear Language – educating the community on the meaning of clear language, giving examples of how to implement it and its impact

If doing presentations in the workplace, please ensure that the people who have literacy challenges are taken into consideration. The message should be developed carefully.

You may want to use the PowerPoint Presentation available here.

• Mall walkabouts

Staff and volunteers from the literacy organization, including adult learners, could do a “walkabout” in a mall. They could hand people bookmarks, invite them to complete the bookmark, and talk about the importance of literacy skills in everyday activities.

Prior to planning a mall walkabout you should contact the manager of the mall to get their permission to undertake the walkabout and you can use this opportunity to inform them about your particular organization. This will include them as part of your community partners.