The Storytellers Are All Dying Out Linda Hyatt Landmark Communications Foundation Storytellers are a dying breed. And that may be just as well since their audiences are disappearing too. We spend evenings watching television instead of sitting on the front porch drinking iced tea and listening. Listening to the stories about how grandmother nearly lost her preacher when the stupid young man made the mistake of trying to use the farmhouse�s front door and fell through the rotten porch floorboards. Or the time when grandfather turned the tractor over on a steep hillside she�d forbidden him to plow and walked away with only a scratch, and that from a blackberry bush. Instead we find ourselves in front of a computer terminal cruising the Internet or e-mailing family or friends. Maybe we read the newspaper, a magazine or a book. Never in the history of the world has the written word been so important. Taken together, words give us knowledge of ourselves and all of life outside ourselves. Never has it been more important that everyone have access to words and what they mean. Those who care about sharing the power of words with all adults have never been charged with more responsibility. To not know what words mean is to try and live in a life so boxed in by limits-economic, social, spiritual-that it amounts to being less than a full citizen in a land spilling over with opportunity. And who cares that all of us in this country are not equal participants in lives that are defined by written words? You, the staff, the tutors, the board members, the students of LVA chapters around the country, the individual donors and the companies and foundations who give funds so that more people can learn to read. Everyone who cares, especially students, are impatient for progress. The numbers of those who cannot read well enough to grasp the changing shape and size of the American dream are doubling and tripling, growing far faster than the numbers of people we are able to help achieve literacy. Add to this picture that there are fewer volunteers in America available to do traditional kinds of volunteering. There is also more competition for money among nonprofit organizations-and more tax-exempt organizations exist than ever before. Differences are everywhere. We are hearing unfamiliar languages spoken in our cities and town. New residents from other countries are changing the character of our communities. Take Nashville, the site of last year�s LVA meeting for example. It has the largest population of Kurds than any community outside of their native-speaking territory. The combination of these factors spells massive challenges to everyone associated with the Literacy Volunteers of America. Can we meet these dizzying challenges by working faster and harder and longer and asking more loudly and often for money? Is that what it�s really going to take? No. I invite you to step back instead with me and search for this answer: How can we do it smarter? While stepping back, we look at what is comfortable and familiar about the way we work and we remember that we either have waiting lists for clients or, worse yet and more often the case, we haven�t found the way to reach our would-be clients at all. Our resources are often being under-utilized. Please pardon me, but in the eyes of numerous foundations, many literacy providers are thinking and working and teaching as though it was yesterday. As though our favorite great-aunt was still here every Thanksgiving to keep everyone around the table laughing with her nonstop funny family tales. It isn�t yesterday. It�s today and we are badly in need of innovation, the kind of innovation that joins more people to the power of words. That�s what foundations like ours want to see: innovation, new ideas, ways to utilize existing progress in the field of literacy. But don�t get scared off. Funders are not looking for a thousand points of light that no one has ever seen twinkling in the dark before. We want to see LVA chapters who have taken the time to recognize their capacity, who want to enhance it, who understand their particular challenges and have prioritized their needs. Critical self-study and strategic planning accredit literacy providers to potential grant makers. We want to see that LVA chapters have gone several essential steps forward: done their homework and identified best practices. How have some of their counterparts increased their capacity without loss of quality? Have some LVA affiliates tried to identify other LVA communities that resemble themselves in demographics and program needs? Have organizations at least explored what technology has to offer? If searching for best practices is something that you don�t have time for, expect to pay the price. It is a heavy one. You will be less effective to those who depend upon you, and less attractive to those who could fund you. TECHNOLOGY. It is not the horn blast of the second coming. But it has revolutionized our personal and professional lives. It has changed the way that all kinds of organizations do their business, including foundations. Did you imagine ten years ago that you would be using a debit card more often than a checkbook? And in my six years of turning up ground looking for new practices that work, I have seen technology in the literacy arena used in ways that take my breath away and make me believe that the challenges are certainly not beyond us. Custom written software, self-tutorials for almost every purpose, inexpensive �mini computers� that let students continue their work at home, networked small group instruction for the right audiences at the right time in their educational progress-these are only a handful of tools being put to work now. In South Hampton Roads, Virginia we have a mobile literacy program that takes tutors and computers to some of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in our cities. Paid literacy organizers bang on doors and coax reluctant learners into the �literacy bus.� There is no fear of leaving their home environment, working alongside people they don�t know, and being looked down upon by well-intentioned tutors who may not understand a student�s background and cultural limitations. Inwardly some of you out there are groaning. Funders just don�t get it, you think. We don�t appreciate the limitations of technology, why it won�t work in your programs with your volunteers and how you can�t get anybody to fund it even if you could make it work. It takes a long time to get clients to move from reliance on individual personal instruction to group work, much less wrestling with computer literacy on top of the mandate to deal first with words. You have limitations of space, there is no one to offer ongoing support, you can�t afford maintenance and technology becomes outmoded too quickly. And nothing replaces the interaction between a tutor and a pupil. (Trust me, I do understand this last point and what I am advocating is the smart use of technology for the right population at the right time in these students� language development.) Good. Then you don�t have to worry about writing grant proposals. You haven�t tipped the lid off the box, much less started to think outside of it. You haven�t come close to importing what is working somewhere else and bringing it into your community. You have left the field more open to those who are committed to innovate. Our foundation once made a grant to an LVA chapter who conditioned the acceptance of the check on our willingness not to bother them about doing anything in a different way. We like ourselves just the way we are, we were told. This while tottering on the brink of financial insolvency and serving a handful of students. It is not unlike the recent widow who lived 20 miles from town and learned to drive after her husband of 40-some years passed away. I was scared to death to do it, she told her driving instructor, but I couldn�t let my life slip away from me. You can�t afford not to seek out and embrace change. Every LVA chapter in this meeting is taking up a lot of slots in the parking lot of opportunity. If you are a literacy provider in your area, you have an imperative to provide. That means overcoming fears and prejudices about technology, appropriately using small group instruction, utilizing a best practice in training tutors with other literacy providers, forming coalitions with organizations with similar missions for resource-sharing purposes, and giving up a sense of ownership you and others may have for �your� program. And if you haven�t recognized and practiced this, then you too probably don�t have to worry about writing grants. Funders like the Landmark Communications Foundation want to take well-calculated risks. Landmark Communications itself took a huge risk when it dreamed up The Weather Channel. For five years, we were the joke of the television industry. Who was going to watch 24 hours of weather, nothing but weather, a day? Well, we hung in there when the conventional wisdom was that we would fail and who is laughing now? We aren�t interested in funding business as usual, or a business plan that is fraught with problems. Or a program that is being �lifted� from another place without any attempt to alter it to fit the needs of your community�s learners. But before I get any more deeply into funding, I want to give you a fast rendition of the grantseeker�s primer. Points so obvious you can�t imagine they need saying, but practices that are violated so often that they clearly do. Know that the foundation you are asking for money actually funds literacy programs. Find out by visiting your public library and asking the reference librarian where guides to foundations are kept and how to use them. Better yet, visit a participating Foundation Center library. Follow a foundation�s guidelines for submitting a grant. When in doubt, call the foundation and ask if you are doing it correctly. Do not assume that money spent on a professional grant writer is the key to success. Almost certainly there is the capacity within your own organization to do it. Work from an outline, write economically, and follow specified directions. Have someone who was not associated with the grant read it before sending it. Making sense, spelling correctly-pay attention to the essentials. Tell the truth. Your data, your goals, your budget, your board list: every word of your grant should be truthful and realistic. Know that �realistic� means different things to different foundations. Don�t try to sell a foundation that makes very modest grants a major three-year model program. If you are going after a grant for the first time with almost any foundation, be modest. Establishing a good relationship is key. But don�t write the grant to fit the foundation. Write a grant that fits your needs. It goes back to honesty and credibility. Into every grant, build in some means of measuring your success. If you get the grant, immediately acknowledge the award with appropriate gratitude. Let others know that you have gotten the grant. Live up to all the conditions of the grant and report back to the donor even if this is not required. If you fulfill these basics, you have already shuffled yourself to the top quarter of the deck. If you do not succeed in getting funded, try and find out why. If you determine that the reasons you are given are valid, take the information and do something with it. Like submit a grant again, yes, even to the same organization. Likewise, if you are fortunate and do get funded, take that information and do something with it. Get the word out. Strengthen your appeal to other donors. Raise community expectations, for if your newly funded initiative is going to succeed, you will need the community�s support. Then get behind that project and make it work. If for some reason you can�t, don�t be afraid to ask for help. Turn to those inside your organization and have candid discussions. Study your agreed-upon measures. Is the measurement piece faulty, or some aspect of delivering the service? Go straight to your users. And don�t forget about your peers. Nothing impresses a funder more than a grant recipient�s commitment to getting a program on track, maintaining progress and adding to it. If you believe you have further validated a good practice, improved on it, created a new one, then tooteth thine own horn for no one else will tooteth it for you. You owe each other your successes. As I travel throughout the five regions that our Foundation serves, I am constantly asked what other literacy organizations are doing. What�s working in the field in general? You are all so busy raising the money to stay alive and meeting core program needs that you don�t have hours at a stretch to surf the net, read all the relevant publications and attend conferences-if you could afford to. I am not just a talking head. I�ve been there. I�ve run a nonprofit organization and struggled to keep it viable. But some of my greatest difficulties resulted from not taking the time to think, plan and figure out how to make processes inclusive. Surviving is a worthy objective, but prospering is a better one. I hope you have been able to use this conference well. Take advantage of as much information as you gained and commit to keep on learning. Excite your board members with stories of what is working and what is being funded. Celebrate your successes so foundations in your area are aware of what you are doing to improve the life of your entire community. During this LVA meeting I hope many of you have been storytellers, and that you�ve listened to each others� tales. Surely some of them have been about frustration. These are the conversations that will help you connect others to written words, full citizenship, better livings, and greater pleasure in life. Back home on darkened porches you can still hear people talking. But upstairs behind that lighted window, you may be able to glimpse someone reading. And just maybe you were one among others who helped that person open the book or understand what�s on the computer screen. And a foundation you approached for funding may have helped you and others like you fulfill the expectations that unite us here today. What better place for me to end my story? Thank you for listening. For general information call Peggy May at 843/671-2008 or E-mail to [email protected] For exhibit information call Kathy Freeman at 803/794-5370 or E-mail to [email protected] For sponsorship information call Anu R. Ailawadhi at 914/838-4624 or E-mail to [email protected]