#GivingTuesday for LCMC

We are a team of Community Builders. As Ambassadors for the Literacy Council of Montgomery County's (LCMC) #GivingTuesday campaign, our goal is to empower LCMC's students to be active members of our community. 

LCMC's students come from 6 different continents and number over 1,400 individuals in total. Approximately 9 out of 10 adult learners at LCMC do not cite English as their first language, and often struggle to participate fully in life in the United States, facing barriers to employment, education, and the simple things in everyday life because they have trouble speaking with their neighbors, interviewing for jobs, or reading a medicine label. A chemical engineer from Ecuador may be working a minimum wage, low skill job here in Maryland just due to the language barrier, costing Maryland the wealth of knowledge and talent inside her. English proficiency builds a stronger Maryland, a stronger Montgomery County, even a stronger individual neighborhood. 

Others of LCMC's learners live what many of them describe as a double life, afraid of others finding out they never learned to read nor write growing up in the United States. Whether they struggled in traditional classroom settings, or with a learning or developmental disability, perhaps even had to drop out of school to work as a teenager to support their family living in poverty, adult illiteracy is a dire problem that all too often gets hidden in the shadows. It traps people in poverty, as they are unable to fill out job applications or get promoted to jobs that require reading or writing. Literacy builds a stronger community.

As LCMC's #GivingTuesday Ambassadors, we are dedicated to raising $5,000 as a team toward enabling LCMC to provide all learners - and their tutors and teachers - with the materials and training they need to excel and fully participate in our communities.

We are the LCMC Ambassadors, and We Are Community Builders.