This post from CCR Vice-President Peter McKellar:
In 2005, then-Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, James Bartleman, himself partly of
First Nations origin, launched a program to support and improve literacy among
the young people of the small, isolated First Nations communities of
north-western Ontario, in the area from Thunder Bay to Hudson’s Bay and from
Kapuskasing to the Manitoba border. These communities are accessible in most cases only by small aircraft or
winter roads; and they are afflicted by
high rates of illiteracy, unemployment, domestic violence, alcoholism, drug use
and suicide, this last notably among young people. They have only elementary schools on site,
and the older generation’s view of education is in many cases influenced by the
history of residential schools.
Mr.
Bartleman’s initiatives were designed to help break this vicious circle by
supporting and promoting greater educational achievement among the current
generation of aboriginal children. One
of them was the creation of “summer reading camps” during the period between
school years, to keep the children engaged in educational activities,
especially involving books and reading,
in order to maintain their literacy skills.
The
Summer Reading Camps, which continue to be sponsored by the current Ontario
Lieutenant-Governor, David Onley, bring together both junior and senior
elementary school students with outside counsellors (usually university
students from southern Canada),
counsellors from the local communities and, wherever possible, local
parents. They combine reading periods,
including remedial reading help when needed, with other activities, both indoor
and outdoor, and conclude with the distribution of free books to the young
participants. The results are to improve
their educational and social skills, increase their enthusiasm for learning and
lead to greater reading in the home after school.
In 2012,
the seventh year of the programme, camps were held in 28 communities and
involved over 2,400 children and 26 local counsellors. The feedback from First Nations leaders in
the region and from the young participants has been highly positive, and there
are many requests from communities not yet covered by the camps to have them
extended further.
The
programme is administered by Frontier College, the 110-year old Canadian
literacy promotion organization based in Toronto, but it is entirely funded by donations from a
wide variety of sources. Frontier
College has charitable status under the Canadian Income Tax Act, and donations
by people who pay income tax in Canada for the Literacy Camps addressed to
Frontier College are eligible for income tax receipts.
Further
information is available from:
www.frontiercollege.ca under “Working with Aboriginal Communities” and
“The Lieutenant Governor’s Aboriginal Summer Reading Camps.” The
Toronto Globe and Mail had an article on the summer reading camps on Sept. 2,
2012, which is available at this link.
