A $15,000 Re(a)d Zone grant was awarded to the Santa Clara City Library Foundation & Friends from the 50 Fund, the legacy fund of the San Francisco Bay Area Super Bowl 50 Host Committee. The grant funds are supporting literacy outreach this summer for needy kids in Santa Clara. The City of Santa Clara is home of Levi’s Stadium, the home of Super Bowl 50.
Read Santa Clara’s family literacy outreach team is putting this grant funding to work, conducting literacy programs in local shelters and for families in the Santa Clara Unified School District’s Migrant Education program. In just under a month, 100 children from low-income families have signed up for the Library’s Summer Reading Program. The literacy programs encourage families to take on the challenge of reading books together and to keep a log of the books they read. Since many of these families are not familiar with online resources, the team is teaching parents how to access online books and giving access to assistive technology and devices. One of the assistive devices plays back a recording of a book as the user touches a pen to the pages. “A child from a refugee family whose mother doesn’t speak English used the pen. He picked up the technology right away and was so excited to hear the book read to him! He is still learning to read and write, so the pen was a revelation for him,” said Shanti Bhaskaran, Literacy Librarian at Read Santa Clara, a City of Santa Clara Library program.
The Foundation & Friends of the Santa Clara City Library is grateful to the 50 Fund for their support of summer reading, a program serving an important community need.