A $52,250 grant will allow a literacy mentoring program developed at the University of Georgia to expand to additional communities in the state.

Supported by funding from the Sandra Dunagan Deal Center for Early Language and Literacy at Georgia College & State University, MENTOR Georgia – which is housed at the UGA J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development – will support community-based organizations in customizing and implementing a novel literacy mentoring program in four additional Georgia communities over the next year.

“Because research shows that mentors can have an impact on children’s literacy learning, we are thrilled to support MENTOR Georgia’s efforts to create and pilot a scalable volunteer training program for literacy mentors,” said Lindee Morgan, executive director of the Deal Center.

This will bring the total number of communities utilizing the literacy mentoring program to six by summer 2025.

“Supportive relationships and the ability to read are among the most foundational building blocks of a happy, healthy life,” said Leslie Hale, executive director of MENTOR Georgia and the creator of the literacy mentoring concept. “We’ve seen significant interest in how schools and programs can unify these powerful levers of success into a single program, and I’m excited to partner with the Deal Center to scale this concept in new communities.”

Coordinated by the UGA Fanning Institute, MENTOR Georgia is the statewide affiliate of MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership. It supports youth development by providing professional learning, capacity-building, and training in evidence-based best practices to youth mentoring programs around the state.

MENTOR Georgia helped introduce the first literacy mentoring program in Colquitt County in the 2021-22 school year, partnering with the Colquitt County Educational Foundation.

Following that, MENTOR Georgia assisted Books for Keeps, an Athens-area nonprofit, in starting its Storytellers Literacy Mentor Program at one pilot school in the Clarke County School District in 2022.

Program data from Books for Keeps indicates students matched with mentors are showing 3.4 times the growth in reading proficiency over the course of the year compared to their non-matched peers. Having started in one Clarke County school, Books for Keeps is in the process of expanding the program to one additional school in the current school year.

“As we begin to see the effects of the test scores, we are already seeing noticeable increases in excitement and confidence around reading,” said Colleen Craven, literacy mentor program manager at Books for Keeps. “One mentor shared with us that their student was feeling much more confident as they sat down to read, with the student saying now that he is a reader and that he was wrong to think he was not before.”

With the Deal Center grant funding, MENTOR Georgia will identify four communities in Georgia to partner with on implementing similar literacy mentoring programs and help those communities launch the programs.

MENTOR Georgia will consider partners that can demonstrate significant support available in the areas of assessing readiness, developing curriculum, and providing training.

To learn more about the program and explore whether a community or organization is a good fit for implementing literacy mentoring, email Hale at [email protected].

For more information on MENTOR Georgia, click here.