AARP Hearing Center
I founded Latino Literacy Now with my compadre actor Edward James Olmos in 1997, when I was 45. Our mission is to promote literacy in the (Latino/Hispanic) community in various forms, including reading, educational, financial, health and community awareness. We do this through partnerships with other organizations and our own programs, such as the International Latino Book Awards, the Latino Books Into Movies Awards, the Latino Book & Family Festivals, and Latino Reads, a weekly podcast series.
The problem I’m trying to solve
We’re trying to improve literacy on multiple levels in the Latino community. Many Latino children enter kindergarten with low reading comprehension. This may be partly because, while Hispanic families are aware that it’s important to read aloud to kids at an early age, only 49 percent of Hispanic families read to their kids ages 5 and under five to seven days per week, compared to 63 percent of non-Hispanic families, according to a 2017 report from Scholastic. At school, children want to see teachers who look like them and relate to their culture, but school systems aren’t adding ethnically diverse teachers in proportion to the increasing diversity of their student bodies. More Latinos attend college than 20 years ago, but the challenge now is to keep them there. This is partly because of insufficient financial resources but also because of a lack of appropriate counseling. Our Empowering Students Scholarship Database, which lists $920 million in resources, has impacted over 180,000 students in the U.S.
