Wisconsin Literacy, Inc., is a literacy umbrella organization with 45 members -- both literacy councils and other community-based organizations -- covering adult, family and workplace literacy providers. Member groups' paid staff and trained volunteers serve about 13,000 basic education and ESL students a year in a number of different settings, including community organizations, the correctional system, workplaces and in faith-based environments. The size of these organizations varies widely; the smallest serves seven students, while the largest serves over 2,400 per year.

Wisconsin Literacy, Inc. has become a major player in literacy efforts in the state and is at the forefront of shaping a changing literacy skills system.

JK: What's been going on at Wisconsin Literacy the last few years?

ME: Up until 2003 it was all volunteer-run, both the board and the organization. The board consisted mostly of literacy council directors from around the state. Then, with a grant from Verizon in 2003, it hired its first executive director. This was a big step, as we were then able to garner more support from the technical college system, and that allowed us to become more established.

Our first executive director started doing a lot of things to raise awareness of the organization, in an effort to provide a safety net for literacy councils statewide. She appointed directors with an interest in literacy from different areas of the community to gain wider support for the councils. She registered as a lobbyist, and she worked hard to put the literacy councils in front of the state legislature. We now have two legislators on our board: Rep. John Townsend of Fond du Lac, and Rep. Robin Kreibich of Eau Claire. And they've both been big champions of literacy work.

And did those moves help secure different sources of funding?

They did. We've now got funds -- $50,000 annually that are administered by the Department of Public Instruction -- that allow Wisconsin Literacy to employ four regional literacy consultants.

Where are they located and what role do they play?

They're in Green Bay, Eau Claire, Milwaukee and Madison. They've been working just five to eight hours a week, helping new and emerging literacy councils with their organizational development. They're employees of existing literacy councils in those regions. They've got anywhere from nine to 16 member agencies that they service in their region.

There's been a recent development that should help us out even more. Most of the money for literacy work in the state goes to the technical colleges. With part of that, the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) was administering community coordination grants, with each of their 16 technical college districts getting $7,000 to hand out to one or more front-line literacy providers in the area. And each had been doing so in a different way.

In some areas the literacy council and technical college have had a good relationship, and funding provided opportunities for increased services. In other areas the community coordination was not working as well. The WTCS recently transitioned those funds to Wisconsin Literacy Inc., and we will disperse those funds -- $112,000 -- to literacy councils and other community-based providers, by increasing the capacity of the Regional Literacy Consultants Project.

How will that change the role of those regional consultants?

A big responsibility of theirs will be to help bridge the gap between the technical colleges and the community-based organizations, to help them find ways they can work in a more seamless way. Also, the regional consultant will be able to provide more individualized support to the literacy providers in their region, including professional development opportunities, training, grant information and capacity building.

What's the collaboration situation now?

This gets to the different roles that our members play and that the technical colleges play. When someone who has really low literacy skills wants to get help, they often don't go to the technical college. That might be because they're at a literacy level that's too low for the college's programs to help, or they may be intimidated by the college setting, or the programs there might not be flexible enough to meet their work and family scheduling needs. There are a lot of reasons people come to a local literacy council or other local community organization instead. In the end, we typically serve a very challenging population, with lower literacy skills than those who choose to go to the technical college. That's a niche that is incredibly important, and our members fill that role really well.

Another example is that I can say to an employer who's got a small number of Hispanic workers who need to be able to read the signs up in the shop and learn to operate some basic machinery and communicate with other workers, "We can do that, and we can do that at a reduced cost because of our small overhead." But if you need workers that can read blueprints, understand hydraulics and more complicated processes like that, the technical college can come in and set up a learning center right at the worksite, have staff there for eight hours to get people involved at the shift change, and so on, and they do that really well.

In some areas of the state there are good relationships between the technical colleges and these community-based organizations. They'll refer students to each other, make use of the services that are unique to the other, and so on. There's a lot that can be gained for literacy work when the system is seamless and includes literacy councils, libraries, other community-based organizations and the technical colleges.

But in many areas of the state those relationships have never existed, and groups are largely working separately. It's interesting that in some other states things are done very differently. For example, in Minnesota technical colleges and CBOs are very closely tied. Here in Wisconsin, with the exception of a few areas, they've been working separately for a long time.

Is this changing at all?

It is. We've gotten together with the technical college system in the last year to discuss ways to improve how we help adults with low literacy skills coming in to our organizations and to the colleges. And the technical college system recognized the importance of the literacy councils and CBOs when they decided to pass the $112,000 on to us to distribute to the front-line literacy providers instead of going through each of their technical college districts. So it is improving, but we've got a long way to go if you consider that together we only reach about ten percent of those who would qualify for basic literacy services in the state.

Is there any institutional entity, a committee, work group or something else that can provide a forum to help get those essential parties together more often?

Well, it's not a state group or committee, but we've got a really good model for how to do that in Rock County. A number of partners have been getting together helping market our various services to make people aware of what we can do for them, helping to "market our message."

Who's involved in that work?

The local libraries in Beloit and Janesville, the library system, Blackhawk Technical College, the two literacy councils in Beloit and Janesville, and Wisconsin Literacy, Inc. We think this group can serve as a good model of how to bring the right people together to help create a more efficient system for literacy services. We're working on helping raise awareness of each other so students can get pointed in the right direction.

I imagine it would help with actually leveraging each other's resources as well.

Sure. The technical colleges have a lot of job market information, and resources for additional trainings and so on. Our members mostly don't have those resources. So there's a natural synergy that could exist here.

Another example is that many small literacy councils and CBOs don't have adequate funding for assessment tools and pre- and post-instruction testing, for sophisticated ways of tracking student performance and improvement. The technical college has staff doing those sorts of things all the time. Many small local organizations by themselves won't be able to afford the computer technology and training necessary to track performance, and that's a direction we're definitely going, and should go.

What's the message you'd want to leave our readers with?

There's a lot of work going on. We're starting to build bridges between the different parties involved in literacy work, and to create a stronger message statewide that there's a huge literacy issue in our state, and that we're reaching less than ten percent of those in need. To improve the economic self-sufficiency of the residents of our state and to continue to compete in the global economy, we're going to have to work together more and we're going to have to invest in adult education and literacy services.

For more information on Wisconsin Literacy, Inc., visit their website at: www.wisconsinliteracy.org.