Make People Feel Comfortable

Think about what happens to a person who uses your services. Are there ways to make someone with poor literacy skills feel more comfortable each step of the way? Are there opportunities for you to tell if the person has a problem reading and writing? Do you take advantage of these opportunities? Here's how you can.

Listen and talk

• Listen for clues as the person tells you about the issue that your agency will help with.
• Make sure that the person understands any instructions you have to give. Ask if it is all clear. Ask the person what their next step will be, to make sure they know. Don't rely on a piece of paper or a pamphlet to explain how your system works, or to get someone back for a meeting. Give people a calendar page and a small drawing of a clock showing the time and date of the person's next visit, instead of a written appointment slip.
• Train your staff. Call a literacy organization and ask if someone could come by to speak to your workers and volunteers about how they can best serve people who don't read and write well. Take the opportunity to find out about literacy programs in your area, so that you can recommend them to people who might be interested.

Can you do your work a little differently?

• Take a look at your programs. Many have lots of opportunities for staff and volunteers to see if a person has a hard time reading and writing. Do you ask people joining in on your programs to read manuals or instruction sheets? Do they have to make lists or keep track of money? If they do, you have an opportunity to watch for people who try to avoid doing things in ways that involve reading, writing, and using numbers. But maybe you could change the way parts of your programs work so that people won't have to do so much reading and writing...

• In group workshops, do you ask people to write down ideas or describe their problems or challenges in writing? How about inviting people to use tape recorders instead? Give everyone a choice. Don't divide up the group into good writers and poor writers. Let each person decide whether they'd rather be part of the group that writes their answers, or the group that uses tape recorders. And if you use tape recorders, make sure that you show people how your machines work.
• Invite a literacy worker to help your staff and volunteers find other ways to make people with poor reading and writing skills more comfortable using your services. And ask the worker to give you ideas on what to look for to tell if someone might need to brush up on these skills.

If you know there's a problem...

• If different staff members and volunteers will work with someone who has difficulty reading and writing, consider using colour codes on your files to let workers know. In this way, workers can think about how they can do their work without embarrassing the person.

Talk about literacy programs

• Let people who use your services know about literacy programs in your area. Could literacy be one of the services you let people know about as a matter of course? If you offer life skills or employment skills programs, you may want to invite a literacy worker or a literacy student to talk to each of your groups. When talk about literacy is a normal part of a program, it can make it easier for a person to take the next step. And word of mouth is the number one way that people find out about literacy programs and get interested enough to join them.
• If you know someone who uses your services and who might be interested in taking a literacy course, take your time bringing the subject up. As you and that individual get to know one another, you can develop a relationship of trust.

That trust is important. People need to know that you are really interested in hearing about whether reading and writing is a problem, and whether they want to do something about it. They may need time to think things over. Give them all the time they need. The literacy programs will wait.