In some communities they believe it takes a village to raise a child. At Learning Ally, we believe it takes a community to help our members succeed. Our community consists of members, parents, educators, staff, donors, and our volunteers, with many people wearing multiple hats.
We'd like to say "thank you" to our amazing volunteers – the work they do is a critical piece of the engine that moves our services forward and drives student success. The audiobooks produced by our volunteers empower students by bringing them grade-level content to stay current with their peers. They also give students a sense of independence by allowing them to access reading material on their own without the assistance of a parent, teacher or tutor. This builds self-confidence, which, as any parent or teacher would agree, is priceless.
We recently ended our fiscal year and have some great statistics and highlights to share:
- We have over 2,200 active volunteers
- Our Voice Over Acted Community now has 130 volunteers
- Our Math community is 38 volunteers strong
- Our Virtual community has over 100 volunteers
- Volunteers contributed over 136,000 service hours
- Over 500 volunteers attended an Experience Dyslexia Simulation
- Our active volunteers donated over $1.1 million ($133,000 of that during our NAA fundraising event)
- Our volunteer community spread Learning Ally awareness through local connections such as a voice-over artist convention, local churches, and organizations
Our volunteers' hard work has helped grow our services:
- Increased audiobook quality resulted in more students engaged in reading, more teachers learning to use Learning Ally and more push to use audiobooks in the classroom. Our Professional Development team held over 100 educator sessions with over 4,500 teacher participants this year
- We have more than 80,000 book titles in our digital library, 4,000 of which are VOICEtext books
- We currently have over 24,000 individual members and over 8,000 registered schools with over 141,000 registered students
- Over 702,000 books were added to our members' bookshelves this year with over 11 million pages read
- Our audiobooks have helped members succeed academically for years and they are incredibly grateful to our volunteers. Many are now volunteering to give back to other students by mentoring through our YES! Program and College Success Program, and by sharing their personal stories on Explore1in5
To learn more about opportunities to make a difference in the Learning Ally community, visit our Volunteer pages.