Karen’s Korner tells how to get your church involved

Having been the wife and daughter of a minister, I know from personal experience that churches are filled with wonderful, caring volunteers and have classrooms where adults can be educated. Also knowing our agency is limited in its resources for buildings and staff to provide literacy and High School diploma equivalency education, I began speaking to groups from churches about beginning to offer classes as an affiliate of our program. We pledge to provide training, expertise and when possible, materials. The church is asked to pledge a person to coordinate for eight to ten hours per week. There also needs to be a beginning core group of at least five volunteers to tutor. Having tutoring available twice a week is ideal and churches need to have several classrooms for individual tutoring. Churches will also recruit new students and be assisted by LearningQuest through its website and referral of any students who would be better served in the church program. Two churches are currently providing such a program – Christ Community Church in Modesto and Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Turlock. Coming this Fall will be an application process for new churches to provide sites and three will be chosen. The application will ask for the coordinator and a core group of volunteers and the ability to have facilities with classrooms for individual and small group tutoring. Good Shepherd’s program, for example, now has 12 volunteers and 12 students meeting Monday and Thursday nights. They call the program “Learning Matters.” This program was launched one year ago and has shown great success in providing an opportunity for adults to receive individualized attention from caring and committed adults. To learn more, call me at 209-522-0656 ext. 113 or email kwilliams@lqslc.com.