Our Mission
Read Alliance works to accelerate the educational trajectory of early elementary students through the power of teens who provide one-to-one literacy tutoring in under-resourced communities.
Our Dual Impact
Read Alliance provides striving readers with the building blocks to academic success through phonics instruction based on the science of reading. Our leveled reading program reinforces foundational reading skills and phonemic awareness. While early literacy remains at the core of our mission, our unique model also employs teens to provide high dosage tutoring to their younger peers, tackling a secondary challenge of youth unemployment, particularly among low-income, young people of color.
Benefits for Students
READ students receive the one-to-one support in foundational reading skills they require to catch up to their peers, and gain the confidence to thrive academically in their classrooms.
Benefits for TEENs
READ Teen Leaders gain meaningful after school and summer employment, become economically empowered, gain career and college pathway exposure, learn important professional skills, and serve as role models for their younger counterparts.
Our Model
Read Alliance believes that success starts early.
We provide early literacy intervention to K-2nd graders in public and charter schools and community based organizations in all five boroughs in NYC through our School Year and Summer Reading Programs. Our near-peer tutoring model employs teens from the same communities as our students to deliver our proven intervention model.
Teen tutors, who we call Teen Leaders to represent the dynamic role they play in the lives of the READ students, are trained in a phonics-based leveled curriculum, as well as data collection to measure reading level progress, and in behavior and classroom management. Teen Leaders are paid minimum wage, and are provided ongoing training and leadership development opportunities. They have a chance to advance to Senior Teen Leader, a supervisory role with additional responsibilities, as well as other opportunities to advance at Read Alliance.
Our School Year and Summer Reading Programs provide 45 sessions of one-to-one high dosage tutoring. Each session also incorporates read alouds to build reading confidence, and a lending library to allow students to take books home and encourage practicing their skills outside of the program.
Read Alliance Programming impacts thousands of children and teens every year
Each student and Teen Leader in our programs has a different story. Learn about the individual impact we have on kids and teens below:
Elijah used to hide under his desk when he was asked to read. Because of the READ program, he caught up to his peers and now he can experience the joy of reading.
Ashley Martinez, who worked with READ from 2016-2018, is giving back now that she is in college and was able to make a donation to Read Alliance through a project at Binghamton University.