Dear Supporters,

Thank you! We believe we've made amazing progress in our first year, and we're grateful to you for being a part of it. 

Seattle Literacy is an all-volunteer group of instructors providing free language and reading classes especially for adults who want extra help learning to read and write in English. We specialize in teaching adult students with limited literacy skills, regardless of their English level.

The vast majority of our spending is on rent. Having a dedicated place to offer classes and tutoring sessions and to conduct assessments has been invaluable. We moved into our new space in April and began increasing our class offerings in July. In September, exterior signage was installed, and we saw our walk-in traffic increase exponentially. We began offering a new class in October that was driven exclusively by students who saw the location and came in to enroll. 

In a distant second place, our next-largest expense category in 2022 was one-time start-up costs, including furniture and teaching supplies like whiteboards or textbook teacher editions. 

We also provide students with any supplies, like textbooks, paper, or pencils, that they need for classes, and those items make up the majority of what remains of our expenses. 

When we started, we knew we wanted to focus on reaching adult students with limited literacy skills, but this initially proved to be more of a challenge than we expected. There are a lot of people in the Seattle area who want to learn English, and at first, we struggled to turn people away. As we saw our traffic grow, however, we realized we needed to be more selective about the students we admitted in order to better serve our target population. To this end, we've now also become something of a referral service and frequently assist English language learners in finding more appropriate classes. We've also reduced the number of classes we offer in favor of additional one-on-one tutoring services, because that was where students were seeing better progress. 

We expect that 2023 will include additional shifting of class schedules and tutoring sessions. We've begun making more connections with other organizations serving the local immigrant population, and we expect to build on that in 2023. We also anticipate continuing to assist students looking for English classes and hope that our growing network will help us make those referrals.