Live United

Our mission is: volunteers helping people improve their lives through English literacy.
Position statement: We provide instruction, assistance, and encouragement to those adult members of our community who want to improve their skills in reading, writing, or speaking English so that they can achieve their work, family, and community goals.
We recruit and train volunteers who tutor and also act as mentors for students that may need help with cultural or societal issues as well as language difficulties.

Description:
Through helping people learn to read, write, and/or speak English, our trained volunteers (we provide all necessary training, no experience is needed) help our students move forward in achieving their personal, family, or career goals. Often, our students will share with their tutors exciting accomplishments such as being able to read to a child for the first time, getting a better job, or even something as basic as becoming able to choose which medicine is the right one for a sinus headache. The possibilities are endless.

Our agency serves students from New Britain, Bristol, Plainville, Southington, Berlin, Burlington, Kensington, Middletown, Cromwell.Durham, East Haddam, East Hampton, Marlborough, Middlefield, and Portland.

We provide our volunteers with an in-depth, 12-hour training. Then, we match volunteers with one or more students, and they meet once a week in a public location for two hours.

We provide ongoing support to our volunteers, beginning with sharing a detailed assessment of the students' skill level and goals, continuing with feedback following the initial tutoring sessions and further consultations as needed, a wealth of materials and resources, in-services and more.

We offer training workshops eight times a year, and often we are able to offer a choice of morning or evening. Workshops involve sessions of 3 hours each, and 2 hours scheduled at the volunteer's convenience for touring our office and observing existing tutor/student pairs and groups.

Please contact us for information about volunteer opportunities including tutoring, administrative help, computer lab help, and Board opportunities.

History:
Our agency was founded in 1978 when a volunteer wanted to do something about the problem of illiteracy in our community. At that time the operation was all-volunteer.

Since then, we have grown to become a well respected adult literacy organization with a reputation for focusing on positive outcomes. With a staff of just 5 professional full time equivalents, last year we provided 460 students with tutoring through 250 trained volunteers. Student achievements included but were not limited to becoming U.S. citizens, obtaining first jobs, and simply becoming able to read and write sentences for the first time.

Contact people:

Darlene Hurtado, Executive Director, (phone), (email) Lynne Prairie, Associate Director, (phone), (email)

Address:

20 High Street (New Britain Public Library) New Britain, CT 06051 (See a map)

Directions:

We conduct our training at many different sites, and the tutoring takes place in different locations as well. Sites include The Family Center, Bristol Career Center, and Bristol Adult Education. We will send directions upon the volunteer's registration for a. . . (more)