New Orleans has a big goal for its 300th birthday in 2018: Leaders want to make New Orleans the most literate city in America through a program called Turn the Page. The initiative kicked off January 22 with an effort to break the Guinness world record for the largest read-aloud event. About 500 kids attended to hear some of the city’s finest musicians play, including Grammy-winning bandleader Irvin Mayfield, one of the major forces behind the literacy campaign, and New Orleans actor Wendell Pierce, known for his work on “The Wire” and “Treme,” who read aloud from “The Bourbon Street Band is Back.”
The Turn The Page program unites 11 library systems and many media organizations throughout southern Louisiana in a simultaneous effort to improve school readiness among preschoolers, reading ability among school-age kids, digital literacy, and literacy among adults. Last month’s kickoff began a blitz of 30 literacy-encouraging events in 30 days, such as the “Super Bowl of Reading,” through which people vote for their favorite author to be featured at area libraries, individual computer classes to help people get online, and a pajama story time for kids. The Turn the Page website will make literacy tools available.
Central Connecticut State University conducts an annual literacy survey of in cities across America, measuring such factors as educational attainment, the number of booksellers, and the availability of library resources, and ranks cities. Last year New Orleans ranked 25th out of 75. Given all the efforts the people of New Orleans are making to improve literacy, 2013’s number one city, Washington D.C., is going to have to hit the books to hold off New Orleans’ challenge.
MORE: What Looks Like A Birdhouse And Promotes Literacy?
Tag: new orleans
Finish This Sentence — and Change Your Town Forever
If you could change one thing about your neighborhood, what would it be? A farmer’s market in that abandoned lot on the corner? Speed bumps? A park bench?
Such wishes are becoming less and less idle, thanks to a growing New Orleans startup called Neighborland. The company built a web platform that functions as a community bulletin board, one that begins with a simple Mad Lib: I want _____ In ______. I want a bike lane, for example, on 6th Street in San Francisco.
Then, the magic happens. One by one, other community members, either people who actually live in that neighborhood or those who use and care about it, signify that they want that thing too, by clicking “me too.” It could stop there, with the same kind of “clicktivism” for which millennials are so often mocked. But then Neighborland steps in and catalyzes the idea, either with funding help, institutional know-how or by creating partnerships with the appropriate local organizations that can corral those latent desires and get things done. Continue reading “Finish This Sentence — and Change Your Town Forever”
Farm-Fresh Food Delivered to Your Doorstep Without the Middleman? It Can Be Done. Here’s How.
If you want fresh fish, you drive to the docks. Fresh vegetables, the farmer’s market. But what if it came to you, hours after being plucked from the ground, hauled out of the water or coaxed out of an oven? What if you could buy all the food you eat from local, sustainable growers and ranchers and fishermen, all year round, every day, without having to traipse from place to place?
If the San Francisco startup Good Eggs continues its impressive run, that’ll soon be possible in cities all over America. Bay Area residents—as well as folks in Brooklyn, N.Y., New Orleans and Los Angeles—can now order and eat enough local food at www.goodeggs.com to avoid supermarkets altogether. Continue reading “Farm-Fresh Food Delivered to Your Doorstep Without the Middleman? It Can Be Done. Here’s How.”