Literacy: Spanning the U.S.
Emmy-nominated filmmaker will help aspiring movie
makers tell of Valley life
Ten filmmakers were awarded a grant Tuesday to
produce a mini-documentary about the central San Joaquin Valley as a new way to
show the richness of the region’s people and history.
The winners will be mentored by Sascha Rice, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and
granddaughter of former Gov. Pat Brown.
The $5,000 grants came from the Central Valley
Community Foundation and Bank of America as part of a contest called The Big
Tell: Undiscovered Stories from the Central Valley. Out of 85 applicants, 10
were chosen to move forward with their storyboard to create a
three-to-five-minute documentary about life in the region.
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The Big Tell Showcase will screen all 10
mini-documentaries on Oct. 20 at the Warnor’s Theatre, which will be free to
the public, said Swearengin, Fresno’s former mayor.
Other winners are:
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| @LIFTDallas |
The Reading Barrier
City should lead in addressing adult literacy
Ron Reney, 27, takes a class at Literacy Instruction
for Texas at CitySquare Opportunity Center in Dallas. He’s working to improve
his reading skills so he can get a better job to support his family.
Ron Reney reads at roughly a fourth-grade level.
He makes ends meet by working two $11-an-hour jobs, washing dishes and working
in a warehouse. But the finances got more complicated in late May when he and
his girlfriend welcomed a baby girl into their family.
Between those long hours at work and time with his
newborn, Reney is taking classes to improve his reading and writing skills.
It’s worth the work, he says, if it can help pull him out of dead-end jobs.
Reney, 27, is one of the many faces of the working
poor in Dallas, a hard worker whose poor language skills hinder his ability to
move upward economically. Friends and family have helped keep him afloat, but
“I want to make it on my own,” he says.
Dallas has more than 80,000 residents who, despite
working full or part time, are in poverty — and poor language skills is one of
the reasons. By 2030, experts predict that about 1 million Dallas County
residents, nearly one-third of the population, will not be literate in English.
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Lisa Hembry, president of Literacy Instruction for
Texas, which runs the adult literacy program that Reney
attends, says fixing language literacy challenges in Dallas will require an
intensive intervention with resources from the city and nonprofits in a
coordinated strategy that does not exist now. Adult literacy and ESL programs
are underfunded, uneven in quality and can be difficult to track down. READ MORE @
Resident named literacy
organization’s tutor of the year
From
its hodgepodge of words with varying origins to the oddly specific
idiosyncrasies of its sentence structure, the English language is often a
daunting hurdle for people entering this country. Often coming to seek a better
life for themselves or their families, immigrants struggle with a language
barrier that can hobble their chance at a decent wage and at times labels them
as an “other.”
It
was a situation that Hillsborough resident Yolanda Rodriguez, the recipient of
this year’s Literacy Volunteers of Somerset County (LVSC)
Tutor of the Year award, knows all too well – as a two-time resident of Latin
America.
“Yolanda
is really making a difference,” LVSC Program Coordinator Susan Engelstein said.
Since
she and her husband Agustine Rodriguez married 25 years ago, Yolanda has lived
in Uruguay and Argentina. The moves were due to her husband’s career and during
that time, Yolanda said she had to familiarize herself with the Spanish
language.
“Being
that I’d lived abroad on two separate occasions, I just know how important
language is,” she said. “When I was there, I felt alone and I didn’t really
know the language very well. Based on that, I figured that helping people learn
English was something I could do to help people feel more comfortable.”
When
she came back to the United States and moved to Hillsborough 12 years ago,
Yolanda said she wanted to contribute to the community through volunteer
work. READ MORE @
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