The Centre for Literacy

News from The Centre
DECEMBER 2005

The Centre has two seats available on its board of directors for a two-year term from 2005-2007. We are a working board of nine members drawn from a range of constituencies served. We are currently looking for members from the adult education, university, health, or business sectors, or any combination of these. The roles and responsibilities are described on our web site. If you or someone you know would like to help guide the organization through a three-year drive toward greater sustainability, consider submitting a nomination. We would like to have the new members at our next meeting on January 24, 2006.
Nomination deadline: January 10, 2006
For more information, please call (514) 931-8731, ext. 1415.

We said good-bye this fall to Claire Elliot, our dynamic and capable librarian who worked at The Centre for more than four years. Claire joined us in 2001 directly out of her Master’s program at McGill for what we thought might be a brief apprenticeship. She stayed to become an integral part of our small productive team, creating new links to the community, streamlining our collection and producing invaluable research documents. Claire will be exploring new career paths. We wish her great success.

We welcome Paul Beaulieu to the job which has been recast as librarian-researcher. Paul graduated from McGill in the late 1990s, and worked the nonprofit sector doing research for the Human Rights Foundation here and abroad before joining the Brooklyn Public Library for three years. Most recently he created a public health database for Santé Québec. We look forward to a long working relationship at The Centre.

After long planning, HIPPY programs began in October at two Montreal locations, in Cote des Neiges and NDG, with more than 30 families. The Centre for Literacy will be tracking the impact of the program on the children, their parents and the home visitors who train the parents. In the coming year, HIPPY expects to begin fund-raising efforts, create a board and double the number of families served.

The start-up was tinged with some sadness by the tragic drowning of Crystal (Jing) Zhao and her daughter, Su Yuan, in late November. Crystal had begun working as a home visitor only a month earlier. In those few weeks, she brought a wonderful energetic spirit to her tireless effort recruiting families to the program. Crystal was determined to create the best possible life both for both her own family and the families in her community. All of us who had the good fortune to know her, even so briefly, will remember her.