Joyful Readers (Budget $1.9m)

Joyful Readers is a Philadelphia based nonprofit started in 2021 with the mission “to ensure that Philadelphia students gain foundational reading skills they need to succeed.” It has seen rapid and very successful growth in its 2 years of operation, first serving 9 schools and 543 students, then expanding to 15 schools serving 1,000 students in 2023-2024.

All Joyful Readers’ students are in grades K-3 and identified by the schools as struggling with literacy skills. Led by a full-time executive director and 7 full-time staff, the organization also employs 44 full-time AmeriCorps tutors, 2-4 per school. The tutors receive a month of training in the best practices of science of reading techniques (Wilson Method). The Joyful Readers model involves “high-dosage tutoring,” meaning a tutor meets with 2 students at a time, for 1 hour each day, 5 days a week as part of the students’ regular school day. This is not an afterschool program. Each Joyful Readers tutor works with 22-25 students and meets weekly with the Joyful Readers’ Literacy Coach for advice and support. The target population parallels the Giving Circle’s diversity goals. The same is true for the Joyful Readers staff and AmeriCorps tutors. To evaluate its effectiveness Joyful Readers employed a highly qualified third-party evaluator, Research for Action.

The results showed that students meeting with Joyful Readers’ tutors achieved reading growth outpacing that expected in a typical school year. Students not only improved in reading, but also made meaningful progress towards closing the gap between their assessment scores and the national median for students in the same grade. Joyful Readers earned a 3-year Wm Penn Foundation grant that will end next year. There is no guarantee that the foundation will renew the grant, so Joyful Readers is seeking funding from other sources (corporate and private charities) to ensure that its important work will continue. Joyful Readers employs a fulltime development director as evidence of its commitment to the future.

Achieve Now (Budget $621,000)

Achieve Now provides early literacy instruction for K-2 students in underserved Philadelphia neighborhoods, addressing the city’s literacy crisis with two strands of programming. For the 2023-2024 school year, Achieve Now will serve 350 students, all of whom live in Philadelphia at or below 150% of the poverty line.

In two charter schools, one in North Philadelphia and one in Southwest, Achieve Now has introduced a new pilot program that provides K-2 students intensive, small-group literacy instruction with Achieve Now reading specialists. Achieve Now believes the science-based and data-driven program, now partially supported by a grant from William Penn Foundation, can be scaled to reach hundreds more schoolchildren and dramatically improve early literacy education in Philadelphia.

Achieve Now has experience with tutoring programs: From 2015-2019, most Achieve Now students were served via small-group instruction, with school staff delivering the program, guided by Achieve Now reading specialists. That model was temporarily shelved due to the pandemic. The new pilot features direct instruction from Achieve Now reading specialists, designed to increase consistency and quality of instruction — and result in greater student gains.

Achieve Now’s second strand of programming dates to its founding, in 2011, and provides one- on-one literacy sessions with a student and a trained volunteer coach. In seven public schools, Achieve Now provides 45-minute student/coach sessions weekly; the coaching program pivoted after the pandemic and is now remote, using 70 scripted lessons developed by Achieve Now educators.

In the six years Achieve Now has used CORE assessments, they report 55-65% gains in their students’ ability to decode text, three times the national norm. In the last two school years, their students realized 201% and 133% gains, respectively

Historic Fair Hill (Budget $488,000)

Historic Fair Hill (HFH) is an educational support and neighborhood renewal organization that formed around the restoration of the 5-acre historic Quaker burial ground located in the Fairhill section of Philadelphia. In addition to preserving the historic Quaker burial ground, Historic Fairhill acts as a collaborative partner in the revitalization of Fairhill through school partnerships for literacy, greening and community engagement events. HFH has an endowment that funds the majority of the maintenance of the burial ground.

HFH operates two literacy programs designed to address the structural deficiencies in educational opportunities for Fairhill’s children.

(1) The School Literacy Partnership Program which reopened school libraries in the four public elementary schools that serve Fairhill’s children; employs six trained school parents who serve as literacy-focused classroom assistants in K-2 classrooms, providing extra support to teachers and Spanish language interpretation to facilitate parent involvement in school life; recruits, trains, and deploys 30 community volunteers who serve as one-on-one and small group reading coaches; and, conducts workshops for parents/caregivers at their partner schools, with topics designed to support family literacy goals.

(2) The Family Literacy Program collects new and gently used books and distributes them to individual students, to families at school and community events, and through Little Free Libraries installed in the neighborhood. 

In addition, HFH organizes an annual community Reading Promise Festival at the burial ground that includes a variety of literacy resources and activities and they incorporate literacy activities into weekly Family Fun Days held on the HFH grounds from April-November.

Feedback from HFH’s partnering classroom teachers reported that the literacy assistants had been extremely helpful, that they have seen improvements in the reading skills of the children who work with the assistants, and that the assistants had been very helpful with family engagement support. As a result, HFH is looking to expand the program to include classrooms at all four of our partner schools, as funds become available. For this fiscal year, HFH served 1,050 children, ages 3-9, circulated 40,000 library books, collected/gifted 3,000 books, conducted workshops serving 50 parents and welcomed 400 in total attendance at Reading Festival & Family Fun Days.