Decoda launches a community campaign bringing learners, literacy leaders, donors and partners together across BC.

On International Literacy Day we join more than sixty organizations from across the country in a simple belief, that literacy is the foundation of nearly everything else we ask of ourselves and each other. It is what lets a person make sense of a lease, follow a diagnosis, fill out a job application or sit down beside a child and help with homework. Miss that foundation and a great deal else becomes harder than it should be.

This September, Decoda Literacy Solutions is proud to become part of the National Literacy Alliance, a coalition working to give literacy the standing it deserves as a shared national priority, carried from the earliest years of school through the whole of adult life.

Here in British Columbia this is already an everyday experience rather than an aspiration. It is the daily work of 101 Literacy Outreach Coordinators and more than 400 community programs, already underway in towns like Kamloops, Cranbrook and Williams Lake. Joining the Alliance means this work now stands shoulder to shoulder beside literacy organizations in every province, as part of something larger than any one region could build alone.

Three Threads Running Through the Work

The Alliance shaped this year’s campaign around three ideas, people, planet and prosperity. We would happily add a fourth, community, though in truth it is the result of all three. Here is how each materialises in the work we see every week.

Literacy and the People We Serve

Literacy carries a person’s voice into the world. It lets someone walk into a bank, read the fine print on a lease or speak up at a parent teacher meeting without needing another person to translate that world for them first.

“Strong communities include everyone. That’s what resilience looks like.”  — Maureen Kehler, Acting Executive Director, Decoda Literacy Solutions

We have never believed in a single curriculum handed down from above. Across British Columbia, our network of coordinators and programs wraps itself around what each community actually needs, which is why someone like Fatna, a newcomer mother in Kamloops, could move from what she calls starting at zero to shopping and banking with confidence in the space of six months. Multiply a story like hers across more than 400 programs and the sum is not a statistic so much as hundreds of small, hard-won independences, taking root community by community.

Literacy and the World Around Us

Each year brings more to make sense of, climate policy, information generated by machines, shifting public health guidance, new political currents and trading partners, and somehow less time in which to weigh it all.

Literacy is the skill needed. It lets someone test a claim, notice where an argument thins out, or simply know where to look before passing something along. As information grows easier to produce and harder to verify, that skill becomes not a nicety but a necessity.

Literacy and the Work We Do

A job application. A safety manual. A new piece of software introduced without warning on a Monday morning. Literacy lets people move with a changing workplace instead of being left behind by it.

That matters to someone building a career, and it matters to British Columbia’s economy as a whole. A province full of people who can keep learning, adapting and solving new problems is, quite simply, a sturdier one.

Why This Work Needs a National Home

Community organizations already know where the barriers lie, which approaches earn trust, and what real, sustained progress looks like up close. What often goes missing is the coordinated attention that keeps literacy visible where policy and funding decisions actually get made, usually far from any single community.

That is the gap the National Literacy Alliance was built to close, connecting organizations across regions and stages of life so the work happening locally, including here in British Columbia, no longer goes unseen at the national level.

Watch the National Literacy Alliance Campaign

Our partners at the Alliance put together a short film to mark the launch, and we are sharing it here alongside this post. [Literacy.]

Two Ways to Carry This Further

International Literacy Day also falls in the middle of our own campaign this month, Your Gift. Their Next Chapter., which is raising funds for the very same community programs this post has been about.

Learn more about the National Literacy Alliance

Support B.C.’s community literacy programs through Your Gift. Their Next Chapter.