Our mission statement is:

  • To focus attention on literacy.

  • To provide instruction to individuals with limited literacy skills.

  • To empower students to achieve their goals so that they may be contributing members of the community.

Our current goals:
  • Hire a Program Director that has a master's degree or higher in an education related field.
  • Have a dedicated Tutor Resource Center in Vero.
  • Serve 275 students in calendar year 2013 with our students achieving over 375 personal goals ranging anywhere from advancing a reading level, improving a job situation, obtaining a GED, obtaining citizenship, or helping their child with schoolwork.
  • Strengthen our family literacy program which includes our read to Babies/Toddler program, encouraging our students to read to their children, and creating family literacy within the family. 
  • Focus on maintaining services in north county (Wabasso, Sebastian and Fellsmere) with a goal of serving at least 75 students a year, up from the 30 students a year we typically serve in that area).
  • Increase our annual revenue to a minimum of $150,000
  • Obtain 100 Friends of Literacy willing to commit to a minimum gift of $100 to Literacy Services, 40 to commit to $250, 25 to commit to $500 and 10 to commit to $1,0000 every year for five years to help us meet our mission of improving adult literacy in our county
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2013 Board Members:

We always welcome prospective new Board members who are dedicated to our mission as well as committee members interested in fundraising (Family Holiday Fest, Love of Literacy luncheon, and Reading Between the Wines event), PR/marketing, community events, and tutor training. Please call if you are interested!

Don Mann, President

Matt McManus, Vice-President

John Banitt, Treasurer

Jill Robb

Stu Monaghan

Jason Nunemaker

Evelyn Mayerson

 
 
History/Purpose

Literacy Services of Indian River County, Inc. is a non-profit corporation that had its origins in 1971 when eight local community residents came together to assist adults who needed to improve their literacy skills. Our organization provides free, confidential and individualized literacy instruction to adults who request assistance in improving their reading, writing, or English skills. We tutor at the pace of the student and based on THEIR goals and not some bureaucratic defined goal. Besides one-to-one tutoring, we also provide tutoring in small group levels when requested by our students or when a church or employer requests that we initiate a program at their site. All students are encouraged to read to their children if they have kids. In addition, we provide family literacy events.

The organization focuses on phonics, an internationally proven method. In particular, the Laubach Method is one of our primary teaching methods. Other teaching materials, including the Challenger book series, LifePrints, Oxford Pictures Dictionaries, Reading Horizons, spelling, writing, grammar, and other related materials are utilized.

Tutor Volunteer Efforts

All tutors are volunteers. Prospective tutors attend a ½ day workshop to learn about our organization and tutoring techniques. After attending a workshop a tutor will then be matched with a student. Once matched, it is the tutor’s responsibility to contact the student and set up a time and meeting place convenient to the tutor and student. A tutoring session generally lasts 90 minutes and occurs primarily twice a week (some tutor students once a week). All tutoring takes place in a public facility such as a library, church, or worksite. The organization gladly accepts seasonal tutors and a number of our tutors are only in town several months of the year.

Funding

Literacy Services of Indian River County is a United Way agency. The organization receives a significant portion of its funding through individual private donations. We do NOT receive any money from the government and although the county library has been kind enough to provide us office space, we are not part of the library system. As we only have access to private and not public funding, without support from the community our organization would not be able to exist.
 
 

Literacy Services of Indian River County believes in a Code of Ethics and a Donor Bill of Rights and has adopted the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Code of Ethics (please see files/Code Ethics - adobe(1).pdf ) and the AFP's Donor Bill of Rights (please see files/Donor Bill Rights - word.doc).