What we do

Literacy Empowers All People – or LEAP – was born when Le Moyne College education students Becca Gray and Maggie Donohue traveled to the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans to help rebuild after Katrina.  As education students, they saw needs beyond the rebuilding of homes, as important as that is.  They both volunteered in an afterschool program and saw that the storm, combined with poverty, had created enormous educational deficits for the children in the Lower Nine.  The decision was made to offer literacy education over the summer – and LEAP began.

The first summer, we worked with 52 children in the Lower Nine for one week.  Now, our program, which combines progressive education with an anti-racist curriculum, serves over 100 children every summer.  This year, we are offering a 4 week problem-based learning program that draws on literature and music, art and ingenuity to help students address problems of their own choosing. 

And LEAP is growing elsewhere.  We plan on bringing our program back home to Syracuse – again addressing children who live in poverty and do not have the resources that other students have.  Living in poverty can lead to poor nutrition, increased stress in the home, health issues and a lack of educational resources (such as books and computers) in the home.  And all of those effects lead to poor educational attainment.  Children who live in poverty have only 45% of the vocabulary of a child who is raised in a middle-class home.   These struggling readers will then have extra challenges in all subjects – where the text book may be incomprehensible.  Even the instructions for homework can be a challenge to read. 

So LEAP reaches out to these children.  We strive to show them that they are smart, they have something to say, and they can find ways to say it through literacy.  We provide fun, stimulating educational experiences that will, hopefully, show these wonderful children that the extra hard work that they will have to put into their education is worth it. 

All of this, of course, takes money.  We provide children with books they can take home with them when the program is over, we use craft supplies and journals and pencils, pens and crayons.  Your support can really make a difference for a child who, through only the accident of where they were born, has to work twice as hard to get a high school diploma or college degree as other children.  Please consider donating.  We’re getting ready to launch this summer’s program and will immediately put your gift to good use.  (You’ll see a Donate Now! link above.)