Literacy Plan At-a-Glance

I. Introduction

From January to October 2008, the RenfrewCollingwood community worked together to create a vision for literacy that will help shape its future.

Led by the Renfrew-Collingwood Literacy Plan Committee, many residents, community leaders and service providers took part in a community-wide discussion on literacy. (See Appendix I for a list of participants.)

Community members came out to visioning consultations, filled out surveys and welcomed resident Julie Cheng, the Renfrew-Collingwood Literacy Plan Coordinator, to meetings, programs and classes to talk about their literacy vision and literacy needs.

What does literacy mean to Renfrew-Collingwood? What kind of future do we want for children, youth and adults? How can we build on our community’s assets to achieve that future? We are indebted to

the community members who shared their ideas, knowledge, hopes and even fears.

This report brings together the results of our community discussion. It presents a community profile, a summary of our process and findings, a vision for literacy that is common to us all and a plan for working together to move literacy forward in our community. We hope that the report provides a framework for the community to plan, enhance and create literacy programs that make the best use of our resources. To do this we continue to build on local strengths: the gifts and talents of our residents and the longstanding collaboration among service providers.

The plan is a starting point for our community to work together on such emerging initiatives as the City of Vancouver’s Ideas Gathering, Collingwood Neighbourhood House’s Early Childhood Planning Council and the Vancouver School Board’s Neighbourhoods of Learning. By bringing together public, community and private services to coordinate and develop programs, we’ll be best able to tailor programs for local areas of our community.

This report is a living document. Our next step is to send it to the many people involved in the process and revise it based on their input.

Part of the Bigger Literacy Picture Renfrew-Collingwood is one of two communities in Vancouver who worked in early 2008 with the Vancouver Literacy Planning Support Committee on developing a community literacy plan. The Vancouver Public Library first received funding for the project through Literacy Now, an initiative of 2010 Legacies Now. Diana Guinn from the Vancouver Public Library and Valerie Overgaard from the Vancouver School Board were instrumental in moving the funding into the community. Much of the activities described in this report have been incorporated into the Vancouver Board of Education Annual Literacy Plansubmitted to the BC Ministry of Education in July 2008.

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