From The Chair

By Allan B. Cutrow

One of the challenges that I face as the Chair of KOREH L.A. is to address the possible expansion of the program and, at the same time, attempt to ensure its continuity. There are two tasks that we addressed during the last few months that will take center stage for KOREH L.A. moving forward.

The first is our Teen Literacy Corps Project (TLC). It is a natural and appropriate outgrowth of what KOREH L.A. embodies. The TLC Project is currently in place at Roosevelt, Manuel Arts, and Cleveland High Schools where high school students adopt elementary school students as reading partners. The expansion of this effort will increase the number of readers available for elementary school students. It also offers an opportunity within the community to institutionalize a communal commitment to literacy and an acknowledgment that all of us share a responsibility to the larger community's success. We are working with additional high schools to match them with elementary schools and also have several grant requests outstanding to expand and implement this program.

My second challenge is to begin institutionalizing our community's response to literacy. In this connection, we are building and developing an endowment to ensure that our basic KOREH L.A. program can continue. We hope to announce this endowment effort within the next three to four months, to find a lead donor in connection with sponsorship of the overall program and to offer opportunities to adopt volunteer efforts within specific schools. While there are many issues that need to be addressed and the importance of those issues come and go, dealing with literacy is a need that will never disappear. While we can hope to increase the number of people who are helped, the need will always exist. In addition, it is important that there be a Jewish response to this particular problem which, in many respects, emphasizes and sustains our involvement with the broader community in which we live.

Both of these efforts reflect a strong commitment to expand the number of people who are touched by the literacy program and to ensure that an ongoing broader communal involvement exists within our community. It is my hope that we will have more people who will participate in the volunteer effort to match more readers with more volunteers and to ensure that we can endow this community’s response to literacy on a permanent basis.