MANY MODELS, MANY PARTNERS
Nonprofits: Community- and Faith-Based Organization Partners

The nonprofit sector plays a big role in the partnerships in most of these communities. Organizations as diverse as the Chamber of Commerce, Urban League, United Way, Catholic Charities, labor unions, immigrant organizations, and foundations, among many others, all make important contributions to these partnerships for adult education. In many cases, forming a partnership with a nonprofit community group has made adult education providers eligible for grants that they could not have obtained individually, enabling them to expand their services. While most of these nonprofit partners provide referrals, space, instruction, and supplementary services, some take a leadership role in the partnership.

For example, Nine Star Enterprises, a nonprofit corporation in Anchorage, is the primary regional provider of adult education services for a region that covers 27,220 square miles. Nine Star is the hub of a broad and diverse partnership that provides 65 percent of the adult education services in the state, serving more than 7,000 learners a year. An administrator for a state agency there noted that one of Nine Star's strengths is that, as a private nonprofit, it was not subject to political whims.

In the South Carolina Midlands, the local United Way provided a home for the Midlands Literacy Initiative, staff, leadership support, and funds. Partners there stressed how the "neutral forum" offered by the United Way allowed them to set aside their differences and begin to collaborate. Impressed by the MLI's success, the United Way incorporated the partnership as one of its own divisions in 2003. No longer a separate organization, the MLI is now the United Way's Education, Jobs and Life Skills Community Council.

At the other end of the spectrum are small community organizations that serve specific populations. For example, the Riverside Plaza Resource Center, founded by the nonprofit tenants' association of the Cedar Riverside public housing facility in Minneapolis, provides adult education classes to a hard-to-serve population who are primarily immigrants from Somalia. READ/San Diego staff have worked with a nonprofit healthcare organization serving Campo, a small hamlet on the Mexican border. READ/San Diego and Mountain Health and Community Services (MHCS) joined forces to obtain a grant to create a family literacy program and computer lab. When the initial grant ran out, MHCS took on the financial responsibility for the programs, while READ provides an instructor and pays for her travel to Campo.

Churches and other faith-based organizations are significant partners, too. They help recruit both learners and tutors for adult education services, spread the word about available programs, and provide classroom space and other in-kind donations. In Houston County, for example, the CLCP hosts pastors' luncheons to give clergy leaders information about literacy programs to share with their congregations. The Greater Springfield Baptist Church devotes the entire second floor of its gymnasium to adult education. The Greater Word of Deliverance Baptist Church sponsors an English literacy program for Latino mothers and children, working with the CLCP to design courses, write syllabi, obtain materials, decorate the building, and recruit instructors and learners.

In Louisville, JCPSAE works with Kentucky Refugee Ministries, Catholic Charities, and Jewish Family and Vocational Services to provide English literacy instruction to the area's growing immigrant population. The partners share instructors, materials, and classroom space. These partnerships have increased the overall number of learners receiving EL instruction in Louisville, and in 2002, more than 400 adults received services through these partners alone.