Partnerships

Broadway Housing Communities

Broadway Housing Communities was founded in 1983 to redress homelessness by promoting hope, stability and dignity through the provision of permanent housing. Today in New York City, 40,000 homeless people, including 18,000 children, sleep in emergency shelters every night. Families now comprise the largest growing segment of those homeless in the City. Broadway Housing’s solution to homelessness is remarkably simple – a permanent, affordable place to live together with support services for those that need them. With the opening of Broadway Housing’s first housing site, The Heights, in 1986, Broadway Housing Communities helped to pioneer this model, known as supportive housing, which has been widely replicated throughout New York City and the nation. LitWorld partners with Broadway Housing to run LitClubs, hold special events, and pilot new ideas in a vibrant community.

The Children's Village

The Children's Village works in partnership with families to help society's most vulnerable children so that they become educationally proficient, economically productive and socially responsible members of their communities. Our work with The Children's Village precedes the formal creation of LitWorld as an organization. Since 2000, Pam has been working with The Children's Village after founding the Books for Boys program. This year, we expanded our partnership through the creation of The Resilience Project, which was piloted with a group of 20 young men who are refugees residing temporarily at the Village and expanded to include a group of ten young men living in an alternative detention facility on the campus. We are also working at The Children's Village's newest partner site, Polo Grounds Community Center in Harlem, running three Girls Club programs, a FLY program and now launching our first Boys Club.

Millennium Cities Initiative

The Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI), a project of the Earth Institute, Columbia University, assists sub-Saharan cities in their efforts to attain the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, thereby helping to make severe poverty a thing of the past. LitWorld partnered with the Millennium Cities Initiative during World Read Aloud Day in 2010. MCI hosted events in their sites around the world, raising awareness and increasing literacy for children worldwide. We are also partnering with Millennium Cities Initiative sites in Kisumu, Kenya to form Girls Clubs in vulnerable school communities and connect them to our network of Girls Clubs worldwide.

Red Rose School & The Children of Kibera Foundation

LitWorld has embarked on a long-term partnership with Red Rose School in the Kibera slum of Nairobi to bring Kenyan educators innovative teaching methods and strategies. Red Rose School is a beacon of hope for the children of Kibera. Led by educator Ken Okoth, who grew up in Kibera himself and is now a history teacher, Red Rose provides excellence in education for children who are HIV/AIDS orphans. Okoth is also the founding director of The Children of Kibera Foundation, which serves thousands of children in Kibera, the second largest slum in the world. There are over 200,000 AIDS orphans in this area alone. The Children of Kibera Foundation supports schools of excellence and scholarships in order to create opportunities for orphans and vulnerable children living in Kibera and to help them realize their dreams as productive, healthy citizens.

Sharing to Learn

Sharing to Learn, led by Denise Ortiz, works with the Makuleke community in South Africa to create learning experiences and cultural exchanges for communities around the globe, while sharing ideas and resources with one another. Through global education, Sharing to Learn creates a forum for children around the world to be part of the solution to poverty. LitWorld is working with Sharing to Learn to spread the message that children are the key to achieving global literacy.

Sponsor Iraqi Children Foundation

Sponsor Iraqi Children Foundation, co-founded by Iraq war veteran Jonathan Webb, has launched a Surge of Love to help Iraqi communities reach out to the estimated 2.5 million extremely vulnerable orphans in Iraq today. LitWorld is creating a landmark book for the children of Iraq in conjunction with The Children's Village Community Care Worker teams. These teams will train Iraqi childcare workers for the work they will do while visiting children in their homes. This book will reflect LitWorld's "Seven Strengths," a model concept LitWorld is pioneering to foster resilience and renewal for children across all cultures.