OUR COMMUNITY PARTNERS
We have learned alongside our Community Partners as they have faced challenges, overcome barriers, and achieved extraordinary successes. Find out more about each project and the outcomes below.
YEAR
2010
GRANT CATEGORY
Culture
GRANT AMOUNT
$105,000
Organization:
The Library Foundation (fka Badgerdog Literacy)
Project Title:
It’s Elementary
Project Description:
Badgerdog Literary Publishing’s mission is to publish work that furthers our culture’s collective vision and to equip at-risk children with the language skills necessary to create literary art from their joy and their jeopardy.
With the Impact Austin grant, Badgerdog’s "It's Elementary!" program will bring the art of creative writing and the joy of seeing their work in print to 4th graders at all eight East Austin elementary schools that feed into Eastside Memorial High School. Each school will be assigned a paid "Writer in Residence” (a published author) who will work with each class for 25 weeks, teaching the children to use a wide variety of literary forms such as poetry, playwriting, fiction and creative non-fiction.
Grant Status:
During the Impact Austin grant period, Badgerdog served 469 students in 24 classrooms with 25 hours of programming. Badgerdog also delivered professional development for the language arts teachers within the participating schools.
A total of 96% of students had their work published in the Youth Voices in Ink anthology, Rise, which was distributed to students, teachers, principals, school libraries, Austin Public Libraries, and BookPeople.
After going through the program, Badgerdog students exhibited increased self-esteem, not just about their writing, but also about their academic experience as a whole. They learned to use their writing to understand their feelings – a lifelong skill that will be sustaining to many of these at-risk children. Additionally, 89% of Badgerdog students showed improvement in their writing skills.
Badgerdog Literary Publishing is now part of The Library Foundation.