Our programs and campaigns build self-confidence, promote leadership, and strengthen children and their communities. LitWorld's LitClub and LitCamp programming cultivate a new generation of leaders, storytellers and academic achievers, effecting change for themselves, their communities, and their world. Our campaigns mobilize children and adults from around the world to advocate for literacy as a human right that belongs to all people.
How Are We Impacting the World?
Worldwide at least 793 million people remain illiterate. Recognizing that literacy is the foundation for emotional and physical well-being, intellectual growth, and economic security, LitWorld is filling a devastating gap in support and services in education for children who live in the most challenging circumstances around the world. We are responding to an urgent need to intervene and help children and young adults grow in ways that are fresh, new, and build resilience and capacities for lifelong learning.
LitClubs and LitCamps: Mobile, Portable and Democratic Educational Models
LitWorld’s educational programs are pioneering integrated approaches that value the story, the creative spirit, and the holistic lives of children. LitClubs bring together children in praise-centric environments to foster a lifelong love of reading and writing. They meet in small groups in safe environments where they can cultivate strong community bonds and lifelong friendships and mentorships. LitClubs deeply value children’s own stories, and use these stories and life experiences as a catalyst for growth and learning.
LitWorld created the LitCamp model to complement the work of LitClubs and to provide intensive intervention and inspiration. The LitCamps are one to five week intensive literacy and enrichment programs designed to combat the reading loss that happens when children are not engaged in reading and writing during pivotal out-of-school time.
Through the innovative combination of active literacy support, community-building, and directed free choice of classes that span a variety of disciplines and interests, LitCamps provide children with a fun, joyous, and safe way to learn and grow academically and personally and to see the value of a reading culture while creating one together.
Annual Advocacy Days
To spread the larger messages of their work, LitWorld created two annual advocacy days: World Read Aloud Day, held annually on the first Wednesday of March, and Stand Up for Girls, held on the International Day of the Girl, October 11. These two campaigns call upon girls, boys, women and men around the world to use their own voices and their powerful stories to advocate for every person’s human right to a quality education. This year over one million people from more than 65 countries participated in community-led reading rallies to celebrate World Read Aloud Day. Thousands more participated in Stand Up for Girls, led by the LitClub girls themselves. Register for these movements at litworld.org
Stories Are Power
LitWorld knows that access to education for all is the fastest and most democratic vehicle to achieve social justice, and that people’s own stories are the greatest tool every human being has for learning to read, shaping their own future, and changing our world.