A Tucson nonprofit is one of just 10 organizations in the country to receive a national grant that supports early literacy as a pathway to equality, access and social change.

Make Way for Books provides children, parents, and educators inside and outside of Southern Arizona classrooms with support to help children read and succeed. It believes that literacy is the ultimate life skill and its development is important, especially in the first five years of a child’s life.

The grant it received comes from Writing Change, a partnership between the National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman and the Estée Lauder Companies. 

Writing Change was launched in 2021 and has raised $3 million that will be disbursed to groups over the next three years.

“Our work through Writing Change is creating new paths of access for the next generation of thinkers, leaders, and changemakers,” Gorman said in a news release.

Make Way for Books is the cohort’s only organization in the Southwest. The funding will allow the group to expand its work and empower more families across Arizona to build foundational reading skills for their children, said Development and Marketing Manager Lenna Mendoza.

“I feel like there is just such great potential for us to work and collaborate with these organizations,” Chief Information Officer Fernando González.told Tucson Spotlight “It’s an incredibly valuable resource for us to get the word out and do more together.”

Make Way for Books uses a two-generation approach, meaning it focuses its programs on the adult and the child, González said. This approach allows parents to be their child’s first and most essential teacher. 

“We work with as many adults in the child’s life as possible,” he said. “We do this so they feel empowered with the skills and confidence… to be able to help the children that they care for to develop those critical fundamental early literacy skills in the first five years of life.”

González, who took over the nonprofit’s app in 2016, said his favorite moments with the organization have involved real human interactions. He pointed to a time when he was launching a program for a group made up mostly of Syrian refugees who spoke mainly Arabic.

One of Make Way for Books’ key messages is for parents to read to their children in the same language they use to say, “I love you”. To help with this, González and the other early literacy specialists learned how to read in Arabic.

He remembered seeing the parents' faces light up with warmth and smiles of appreciation, and a little laughter at their bungled pronunciations. 

“Your home language is your strongest language,” he said. “That is the language to be interacting with your child.”

In 2018 Make Way for Books expanded their reach outside of Tucson and opened a satellite office in Phoenix, where there had been a large demand for the organization’s work.

González said the grant will increase their ability to support families in Tucson and beyond and grow literacy and artistic expression, particularly for underserved children.

“I do believe that this grant is going to be a critical launching point for us to continue to expand the work we are doing,” he said.

Make Way for Books CEO Yissel Salafsky wrote in a news release that she looks forward to working with the other grantees.

“This partnership empowers us to deepen our impact in advancing equity through literacy,” she said. “We look forward to collaborating with our fellow grantees and working together to create meaningful social change through the power of literacy.”

McKenna Manzo is a journalism major at the University of Arizona and Tucson Spotlight intern. Contact her at mckennamanzo@arizona.edu.

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