Do – Making Contact - Interagency
Meetings
Attending interagency meetings is a good place to begin introducing
your services. We found it effective to begin with emphasizing that:
- What the project is about is access to community services for people
with limited literacy
- Our services were free
- Organizations were probably already doing things that were literacy
friendly because being literacy friendly is part of providing quality
services
We presented our services as professional development opportunities
for agency staff and volunteers. We distributed our business cards and
project information cards to service providers. Some of us scripted
how we would introduce the project to the community. We would usually
get some immediate response from individuals at the meeting, and it
is a good idea to get their business card before leaving the meeting.
At interagency meetings you can:
- Distribute Literacy is for Life Fact Sheets6 (e.g. literacy
and poverty) and encourage service providers to discuss with their
co-workers how they support their clients with reading and writing
tasks such as filling out forms or reading program brochures
- Offer to do a presentation for organizations on what people with
limited literacy experience when accessing community services and
how they can reduce literacy barriers to their services
- Distribute English Express7 newspaper and encourage
service providers to add them to the reading material in the waiting
areas of their organizations
- Talk about literacy barriers in people’s everyday lives,
and how they can contribute to removing such barriers, by simply offering
to help clients fill out forms
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