Here are excerpts from our May '97 newsletter.

We are very proud of "our own" Don Trembath who has just won the Writers Guild of Alberta award for best children's book of the year. He won it for his first novel The Tuesday Cafe. Don has been a volunteer tutor and writing instructor with us for seven years. He also stays home as a full-time dad and looks after his two young children Riley and Walker. And in his spare time he writes great stories!

Don will launch his new book A Fly Named Alfred at Orlando Books on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton, May 23 at 7 p.m. Everyone is welcome to come and listen to Don read from his book and congratulate him on his great achievement!

Fundraising Efforts

"Take Literacy to Heart" Campaign

During the month of February, we held our "Take Literacy to Heart" mailout campaign. We were delighted to raise about $4,000 through this fund-raising event.

The Great Human Race

We had a pleasant day for this event and all who came out to to join in the fun-run/walk had a good time. We raised about $1,000 for our programs.

Many thanks to those who supported the event and especially to the tutors and students who took part and collected pledges.

Readers Theatre Dinner

This was held on May 10th and was a great success! We had a full house, a delicious barbecue dinner, and wonderful entertainment. The Prospects readers: Gail Lewis, Tim McCaskill, Candice Smuda and Paul Walker did a superb job with their Reader's Theatre scripts and the local authors who generously volunteered their time were also very entertaining.

We had some lovely donations for the Silent Auction and the bidding was hot on some items, especially a year's supply of cookies from the Board! All in all it was a wonderful evening. Our final figures are not in, but we estimate we raised more than $4,000 towards next years programs

Sincere thanks to Board member, Lynda Tutty, who headed up this event, and to her committee members Susan Barry, Diana Seemann, Donna-Lynn Moos and Merle Harris. They laid the ground-work for what promises to be a terrific annual fund-raiser.

One of the great things about this event is that it made some important connections between the literary community and the literacy community. We want to build on these links in the coming years!

Literacy Collaboration Project

Since Christmas, coordinators from all the literacy programs in Edmonton have been meeting together. We have been looking at ways of working together to improve literacy services in our area.

We have set a number of goals in areas such as Student Services, Volunteer Services, Community Involvement and Fund-raising/Promotion. Each literacy program will now get feedback from its members before we discuss them further.

We will be asking individuals or small groups of students and tutors to give some feedback on some of these goals.

Working with the Junior League

The Junior League of Edmonton has just adopted our Books for Babies program to be the focus of their next three year project! The Junior League is an organization of women committed to developing its members as trained volunteers to strengthen the community. They will provide both funding and excellent volunteers for this project.

We have already started the project in a small way, through our early intervention funding, but we will now be able to provide many more book bags to low income families and their new babies. We will distribute the book bags mainly through Health Centres and the Health for Two network. We are thrilled about this new collaboration. It will help us to reach parents of very young children and draw them into some of our other literacy programs. The goal is to help parents to provide a strong language and early literacy foundation for children so that they will be successful in school.