Abstract

Recruiting volunteers to serve as reading tutors is a challenge for many programs in poor, urban communities. This practice shares recruiting ideas that have worked for other tutoring projects. Excerpted from Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's So That Every Child Can Read.

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Issue

Recruiting qualified volunteer tutors can be difficult for a new tutoring program in a community with a high poverty rate, related social problems, and low education levels among adults. Sometimes a program needs to go beyond the traditional recruitment methods — such as sending fliers or letters and holding volunteer fairs — to access community assets that might otherwise remain hidden.

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Action

Recruitment ideas specific to poor urban communities:

• Hire a community liaison to visit and build relationships with community organizations and agencies, and to encourage community involvement in the program. Cleveland Reads in Cleveland, Ohio has found that personal contact with the community can work when other recruitment efforts have failed.
• Approach public servants such as police, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians to serve as tutors. University Park Tutoring Program in Worcester, Massachusetts believes these groups are already comfortable with serving a low-income population.

Other general recruitment ideas:

• Encourage businesses to provide release time for employees to volunteer by providing discrete goals for each tutoring session. Wichita America Reads in Kansas feels that business owners are more likely to allow employees to tutor if they can see the "product" of tutoring.
• Consider media publicity, such as press releases or interviews on local television and radio talk shows. Hooked on Books in Louisville, Kentucky obtains up to 30 responses from potential volunteers each time a newspaper article features their program.
• Target the media outlets to specific age groups. School Reading Partners at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill finds that posting fliers around college campuses is the most efficient practice for recruiting for college-age tutors.

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Context

The communities are urban, low-income areas, with low education levels for the adult population.

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Citation

Potter, Jana, Judy Blankenship, and Laura Carlsmith. So That Every Child Can Read... America Reads Community Tutoring Partnerships. A Review of Effective and Promising Practices in Volunteer Reading Tutoring Programs. Portland, Oregon: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, April 1999. p.12.

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Outcome

As a result of successfully recruiting volunteers, the programs were able to serve low-income communities through tutoring.

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Evidence

Programs employing one or more of these practices were able to successfully recruit volunteer tutors.

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Source Documents

Related Practices

• Recruiting hard-to-find members

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