Educating Children, Employing Teens
Client: Read Alliance
About the Project
Over the past 25 years, the New York City-based non-profit Read Alliance has developed a unique model for early childhood literacy intervention. Through hiring teens to teach reading to young children, READ has has helped thousands of struggling students improve an essential life skill, while also becoming one of the largest teen employers in the city.
READ has been one of our longest clients and it’s hard to express how much we love and respect them. We’ve been lucky to go to many different schools and see their work in-action. There’s a real magic to the relationship between young child and their teen mentor. It gives purpose and meaning to the teen while helping the child not fall behind in a bedrock skill of getting an education. There’s beauty in the elegant simplicity of their model and their results have been astounding.
One of the benefits—and challenges–of working with the same organization year after year is trying to come up with something new each time. For this project we pitched the idea of doing interviews with the students—as well as a tutor-student pair—to hear what they thought about the program. The outcome was more than we had ever hoped for (maybe an exaggeration, because we had high hopes) and was a new approach to a program whose model has stayed consistent. This video was shown at their annual, fundraising gala.
Below are a small selection of other videos we've produced in collaboration with Read Alliance.
