World Language StoryTelling: A Diversity, Literacy, Recruiting Pilot Project

Advance notice:  Our Executive Board has once again funded 10 eight-week sessions of Bilingual Storytelling for 2005-2006.  Information about application is available here.  Read about how the program worked last time and check out all the help we have for you!

History:

Our Regional Library Cooperative, CJRLC, applied for and received a grant from the New Jersey State Library for $20,000 to offer a pilot program in World Language Storytelling. Each participating library would receive $2000 to conduct an 8 week program in a language important in its community. The library would hire a bilingual student to get some training, tell the stories weekly, work with the children’s librarian, and advertise the program in the community.

     The program had several goals: to improve literacy of children and caregivers, to extend the awareness of the library and its services to patrons who were not regular library users because of language differences, and to encourage young people to consider librarianship as a career.

     When we announced the program to our members in the Fall of 2003, the response was so enthusiastic that our Executive Board voted to contribute $18,000 to the project so that a total of 18 projects could be funded instead of the original ten.  A total of nine library systems (14 different libraries) were given grants to hold one or two eight week sessions.

     A total of nine languages were chosen (10 sessions in Spanish and one session in each of eight other languages: Arabic, Chinese, Creole, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Portuguese.

     Part of our commitment in securing this grant was to share our experiences with other libraries which may be interested in replicating our project. This website is our way of sharing what we learned.