WBZ Cares: Generations Incorporated Helps Students Improve Their Reading Skills
BOSTON (CBS) - Each month, WBZ Cares highlights a worthy non-profit organization, and tells the story of what that organization does for the community.
This month's organization, Generations Incorporated, helps improve the literacy skills of kids from Kindergarten through 3rd grade by matching them up with older adult volunteers.
The need is there. MCAS test results indicate only 36 percent of third graders in the Boston public school system are proficient readers. That's where Generations Incorporated comes in. They provide older adult volunteers for kids in kindergarten through the third grade to work with them and help improve their literacy skills.
"The people that do the work for the kids are tutors age 50 and up, so that's where our name originates from," said Mary Gunn, Executive Director for Generations Incorporated. "It's an inter-generational program."
They work with elementary schools in Boston and Revere, providing volunteers to help kids become better readers.
"They're deeply rooted in the communities in which they serve," she said. "They feel that they're doing something in their own community, something good for their own community, for the children in their own community."
Generations Incorporated has approximately 300 volunteer tutors, helping some 3,200 students. Gunn says the inter-generational program is good for the volunteers as well as the kids. She shared one volunteers' story.
"When I retired, I didn't know what to do, I found your program and have been in your program now for six years," said Gunn, relaying the volunteer's story. "And when I wake up in the morning and I have sore back, and it's even more sore now, because I am ten years older than I was from when I retired, she said, ugh, I go into that school those kids need me and I need them."
For more information about Generations Incorporated, visit www.generationsinc.org or the WBZ Cares section on the CBSBoston.com website during the month of February.