Love Our Mission?
Help support scaleLIT! There are three ways to contribute to scaleLIT. From sponsoring our annual event to becoming a member to donating, your pledge is instrumental to our mission of helping under-resourced adult learners become economically successful. See below for our impact.
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Beyond Books is our annual celebration of adult literacy. Interested in attending or becoming a sponsor? Click here to learn more.
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scaleLIT is more than a membership organization. We are a movement. Join us and change the narrative around adult literacy. Click here to learn more.
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When you give to scaleLIT, you give directly to under-resourced adult learners. From tech tools to job training and everything in-between, your gift helps us achieve our mission. Click here to donate.
Thank You
A note from our Executive Director, Becky Raymond
Fiscal year 2023 was a year of tremendous growth as scaleLIT continued to advance its mission to connect individuals to skill-building and economic opportunities. During this timeframe, scaleLIT added 7 (14%) new staff members and increased its budget from $1,477,250 to $1,811,084. The willingness of our partners to entrust us with the resources to grow in this significant way is a testament to the relevance of our mission and our track record of profoundly understanding the community and delivering tools that provide real solutions.
Whether it's designing platforms to increase connectivity between partners at American Job Centers in Cook County, ensuring that historically marginalized groups can access those centers, or disrupting the carceral cycle through digital inclusion; scaleLIT casts a broad tent of partners who can meet today’s most pressing challenges.
And we’re just getting started. I am excited to share our impact numbers in our critical work areas and preview what we’ve got in the works in the upcoming months.
Our Impact!
1,300+
Certificates Awarded
1,700+
Adult Learners Served
3,000+
Career Navigator Referrals
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This year, scaleLIT built on our growing momentum to reach more individuals and organizations than ever before. Our team helped adult learners earn over 1,300 certificates through Northstar Digital Literacy, provided over 1,700 adult learners access critical educational resources, and referred over 3,000 job seekers to career opportunities. Keep reading to learn more about our growth and our impact in digital literacy, membership, and American Job Center services.
Membership Highlights
80+ Member Organizations
50% Members Outside of Chicago
70+ Organizations Attended One-Stop Operator Meetings
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For the second year in a row, we achieved record numbers of both membership and engagement. We collaborated with members in a host of ways throughout this year, all in line with our mission. Through hosting coalition meetings, organizing local providers for Adult Education and Family Literacy Week 2023, and briefing elected officials on legislative priorities for adult education, we continued leveraging our literacy network to strengthen communities in Chicago and beyond.
We expanded our Health Literacy initiatives by working with partners to digitize our process and make accessing our opportunities even easier. In addition to hosting monthly learning circles, we also held the Northside, Southwest, and Hispanic Literacy Council meetings monthly throughout the year. At the Nuestro Retrato (“Our Portrait”) showcase hosted by the Hispanic Literacy Coalition, dozens of adult learners highlighted their educational achievements in a testament to what we have been able to accomplish through dedicated coalition-building and goal-defining with the communities we serve.
We are grateful for all our members, new and old, and we look forward to continued collaboration throughout FY24. We will be continuing to engage members through learning circles and other program opportunities. We will also scale up our advocacy and visibility efforts to ensure members’ voices are heard.
Digital Literacy
980+
Badges Awarded
1,300+
Certificates Awarded
1,700+
Unique Learners
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Since September of 2022, scaleLIT has reached over 2,600 students through Northstar Digital Literacy, with 89% of these students achieving a Northstar certificate. In addition, we helped onboard 10 new organizations to the Northstar platform, for a total of over 50 organizations we worked with in Northstar during FY23. For all of these, the scaleLIT’s Digital Navigator continued to provide technical assistance and host office hours to best support organizations and individual learners.
With over 1,700 unique learners reached, scaleLIT has continued closing the digital literacy gap by promoting essential skills to open up opportunities for individuals, families, and their communities.
scaleLIT is continuing to implement the Digital Learning Lab, in a new way. The team will focus on engaging organizations on the south and west sides of Chicago in an effort to close the digital literacy gap.
Career Navigators
300+ Outreach Events Attended by Navigators
1,800+ Incoming Referrals to Navigators
1,300+ Outgoing Referrals from Navigators
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With the growth of our navigator team, we’ve been able to tremendously increase our impact. Our work with the American Job Centers across Chicago has become integral to our mission of expanding equitable access to job training and workforce development services. As the One-Stop Operator for the Chicago Cook County Workforce Partnership, we collaborated with 100 WIOA partners and hosted partners in hundreds of meetings, all with the goal of ensuring that all residents have access to workforce development regardless of their identities, past employment, or prior barriers.
This year, scaleLIT hired four additional navigators with a particular focus on assisting job seekers with disabilities. With over 3,000 outgoing referrals in the past year, the navigators are dedicated to connecting each person they work with to the job training and workforce development opportunities that work best for them. In the coming year, scaleLIT will reimagine the Navigator model.