Story-Tellers Grandmothers Program

This is a cultural development for the promotion of the readings in the poorest schools and outlying areas of the City of Resistencia (Chaco, Argentina) and its metropolitan area (Puerto Barranqueras, Puerto Vilelas and the village of Fontana).

Besides, the first transference has been made successfully and the activities of the Program are developed, at the moment, in the second city of the Province: Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña.

The activity consists of summoning senior citizens who have vocation and desires to read stories for children. These people, trained by specialized personnel, get together with children in many schools of the metropolitan area of Resistencia. Most of the children of this area, never, or very rarely, have had the opportunity of sharing this experience of affection and beauty with their own relatives.

This is a very generous and stimulating service that tries to bring what we consider spiritual food —the Reading. At the same time it is possible to bring them the particularly extraordinary spectacle of Literature to thousand of the poorest children in the nation, many of them natives that live in marginal communities. Our Grandmothers offer them an opportunity to develop ontological and aesthetic sense that will be useful for them throughout their lives.

In fact, they are Reading Grandmothers, not exactly storytellers. This means that the entire activity turns around the book. They try to teach its symbolic value through the most loving and generous way its symbolic value to achieve our specific objective which is to promote the Reading since the first age.

This is a participative Program of integration that not only includes senior citizens, but also unties energies and organizes activities in all the communities where the Grandmothers arrive (such as elementary schools, hospitals, institutes for disabled people, children’s dining halls and orphanages, whose deans, educational and professional staff and students participate actively in the experience.

The Grandmothers Program has gradually but consistently created opportunities for exchanges across generations, usually condemned to the distance by the age differences that often prevail in places conceived for culture, leisure and pleasure.

Moreover, the Program has an important impact on the self-esteem of the Grandmothers. As they are volunteers, mainly instructed women in their 50-60's excluded from the labor market by the ferocity of the Argentinean economical shock (early and for good). These women express their gratitude for they have found in this Program a new and productive way of using their time and their capacity to give affection in the role of Story-tellers.

Key dates

2000 — 2001-The Program started recruiting its first volunteers and the first experiences of reading are made in a non systematical way.

 2002-The Program consolidates, activities are systematized and the management of information is established as a key element for evaluating performance.

2003-The national prestige of the initiative grows. The first transference to another city is made. The Minister of Education of the National Government contacts the Foundation Program.

2004-The Ministry of Education of the National Government considers the establishment of a "National Program of Story-teller Grandmothers" based in our Model of Management and starts a formal dialogue with the Foundation.

Situation before the beginning of the initiative.

The pilot experience began in 2000, when the Argentine socio-economic disaster had not gone through the apex as in December, 2001. The aim was the settlement of a pioneer way to stimulate reading, something never made before in Argentina.

However, and although the first results were encouraging, the brutal economic shock suffered by our country in December, 2001 caused devastating consequences in the statistics of unemployment and extreme poverty in the Province of Chaco (historically one of the three more undeveloped of the country).70% of the population of the area was left underneath the line of subsistence. The index of infantile mortality increased drastically, and while the young adults did not find a job, the older ones were early excluded from the labor market. Many institutions of the civil society (including our Foundation through our Children's Dinning Halls Program) were mobilized to palliate the hunger.

Already the 2001 National Survey of Reading showed the slope in cultural terms and because of that we immediately noticed that the population had quickly stopped reading. 92% said that they no longer read due to the high price of books, or because they did not have time nor tranquility because of the magnitude of the financial problems. Over 55% of the population had not bought a single book in the entire last year. Moreover, the teachers noticed that their students did not understand what they read. (See: Catterberg y Asociados. Encuesta Nacional de Lectura 2001. Resultados Región NEA).

Setting priorities

1. To help in the recovery of the affective-cultural deficit in those homes in which the working parents and grandparents do not have enough time to spend with children and read stories to them.

2. To help in the increasing number of homes leaded by unemployed parents, many of them illiterate, and/or people morally broken by the extreme poverty, who cannot give education and are disabled for reading stories to his children or grandsons.

3. To establish the reading problematic as one of the bases of Education, and also as the engine of human and cultural development that allows better and effective strategies to overcome the crisis in the following years.

The objectives of the Story-tellers Grandmothers Program were mainly defined with the participation of everyone involved, based on proposals of the coordinators, two specialists in Pedagogy of the Reading and Literature Didactics for Children (dependent of the Training Centre of Studies of our Foundation), and some of the most experienced grandmothers.

Those objectives are:

• To promote the tradition of reading at an early age as a practice of high cultural value. This proposal aims at transferring aesthetic-educative values, and creating, in the long run, citizens with critical and high demand of reading and cultural goods.
• To ensure for the first time a permanent supply of cultural activities within the educational system, supporting children in risk that come from families excluded by extreme poverty and marginality.
• To offer older adults the opportunity of recovering their community role, since they are expulsed by the economic system that early expels active and well enabled people from the labor market. This opportunity includes the possibility of knowing and enjoying aesthetic and intellectual pleasure and the concrete and direct exercise of solidarity.
• To preserve the traditional and beautiful habit of reading for children as one of the most effective forms of communication for the development of the identity of a community.
• To create spaces and opportunities for exchanges across generations.

Strategies and Leaderships

• To call reading volunteers through local media, most of them older women, in order to train them for their empowerment as Leaders of Processes of Promotion of Reading in the communities they visit.
• To reach the 111 elementary public schools (called Educación General Básica-EGB) existing in the metropolitan area of Resistencia as the space where the Grandmothers get together with the children. There are about 65.000 students between 6 to 12 years old attending everyday to those schools. That total includes at least about one thousand of native students. In Argentina, this area is still a place where people coming from different social classes, backgrounds and ethnicities get together. At the same time, Argentine schools might be the place where it is still possible to neutralize violence. This is because many kids have no other choice (or are in fact forced) to beg or "work" washing or keeping cars, opening doors and/or in prostitution).

• To provide the reading Grandmothers with the greater possible autonomy for the development of the activity, and at the same time to provide them with books (carefully selected by technicians in Pedagogy of Reading, all members of the Foundation) and other operating materials (script writing, posters, letters of institutional presentation, questionnaires, etc).
• To make the "reading experience", truer, more like a grandmother reading to her grandchildren by the fireplace.
• To design a measurement system to evaluate the success of the activity, and also to get the necessary tools to obtain strategic information (surveys, groups) in order to make the rightest decisions for the Program.
• To make the media and local administration aware of the importance of the Program, and the necessity of their support by providing them with the entire information about the Program and its development.

Movilization of resources

Many of the necessary resources to start up the Program already existed in our Foundation, which has actually set up in 1986, before asuming the actual, legal form of a NGO in 1999. The realiable image the Foundation has gained in Argentina, and in the Chaco community in particular, plus the very good relationship with the local press were some of these valuable resources.

All human resources in Communication, Pedagogy of Reading, Literature Didactics for Children and the administration ones had already worked as volunteers in other Programs of the Foundation. We already had a Literary Library with a small heap of books for children to initiate the Program, which has been increasing due to our own purchase and several donations made by publishing houses and individuals (but always insufficient). 

The Foundation has also provided a complete equipment for communication to coordinate the Program (computers, data bases, etc.).

To organize the trainers and the grandmothers, and bring them to the outlying neighbourhoods, we look for the support of local sponsors. We also ask the help of a local publishing house to print some posters, brochures, leaflets, theoretical textbooks, questionnaires, etc. In addition, a local hotel usually help us by accommodating trainers coming from other countries or provinces. At the same hotel, we get together with the press and have our monthly meetings with the grandmothers and the coordinators (two volunteers that have been managing the Program since the beginning and are responsible for the administration).

Process

The most important problems we are facing today for development of the Program are Transport and Security.

The transport of the grandmothers to schools located in the futhest suburban neighbourhoods of the city is a serious problem. We neither have a vehicle to transporte them, nor the money to pay for taxis or another kind of private transportation. These costs always exceed the budget possibilities of the Program.

What is cause for concern is the dramatic conditon of (in)security, caused by the terrible economical situation of the majority of the population of our region. There are many irregular settlements that volunteers don't dare to visit, for fear of being victims of attacks. Nevertheless, we must not forget that in those places there are still living a lot of children with unsatisfied basic needs, and for that reason the partial solution we have found consists of the recruiting of readers that live in those places where a necessity has been detected. This means that the grandmothers that live in Puerto Barranqueras, Puerto Vilelas or Fontana are the ones that cover the needs of those places, located far from Resistencia downtown. At the same time they promote the creation of new groups or story-tellers in those neighborhoods. In addition, many volunteers have decided to pay the trips themselves in order to reach the most distant audiencies.

Another problem often appears when affective bonds between a voluntary Grandmother and a same group of children grow stronger. It is not about avoiding such bonds (that affection is guarantee of the good result of the Program) but if they concentrate almost exclusively on a small group, they will end up attending a smaller amount of children per year. To solve this we constantly stimulate the recruiting of new volunteers and the permanent rotation of those already in action. By doing this, they will not only be attending their favorite group but also many other children, and, if possible, other schools.

Results achieved

The coordintators measure the evolution of the Program based on the following indicators: a) The amount of volunteers (Grandmothers); b) The amount of schools and other institutions attended; c) The amount of reading experiences performed; and d) The amount of children benefited from the Program. The development and growth of the Story-teller Grandmothers Program can be illustrated by the following graphics:

In 2003 the Grandmothers reached a total of 49 institutions, most of them elementary schools located in the outlying, poorest neighborhoods. There was a record of 444 reading experiences. Also by providing questionaires we were able to measure the satisfaction of everyone involved in the process (volunteers readers, deans, teachers and students) and the grades were very high. Actually, we are paying special atention to the good attitude of the government authorities, the positive reports in the local and national press and the good development of the transferences from the experience to other cities, as well as the permanent consultations that we received requesting our advising and transmission of the experience. All the volunteers accepted to be trained in Literature Didactics for Children and were faithful to the selection of texts proposed by our specialists in this field. They also attend some workshops with three distinguished argentine writers, specially invited by the Foundation: Carlos Balmaceda, Graciela Cabal y Luis Pescetti.

It is remarkable how the Grandmothers already observe the positive change that is taken place in the children they have been constantly visiting for the past three years. The little ones begin to talk about their own personal readings, and also they started taking the books they are interested in to the meetings (in some cases taken previously from libraries), and some of them even show their desires to become writers and try "to make their own books" so the grandmother can read aloud to the rest of the group.By doing this, the matter of reading is implemented in schools: parents and teachers ask for training, that the Foundation always provides. Grandmothers become an important part of those schools: in fact they are often invited to read in official commemorative meetings, field trips and camping; they are also invited as jury of the children writings; they are distinguised with diplomas and/or presents. The affection of the children is enormous, and that is the actual gratification.

Sustainability

The Program is highly sustainable and it has endless growth possibilities. The only thing required is a person in the mood to read, and someone with needs of affection and lecture willing to listen. Where this connection is possible, it's possible to start this Program. The job of the Foundation is to promote these connections.

Financial Aspect: The Program works with very limited economical resources. It is not necessary to ask for loans for the Program to start up (it does not incur high administrative costs either). Everything can be obtained when sponsors are willing to collaborate in kind: printings, places for meetings, transportation, etc. In our case, we are always looking for resources to ensure transportation and safety in order to reach the children living in the poorest neighborhoods.

Social and Economical Aspect: The Program has gathered many people to promote a cause (the reading) that concerns members of all the social conditions, economics and of age. Having it achieved without more interest than the exchange of culture and affection, is almost a miracle in a society that has suffered an economical shock as the argentine one of December, 2001, that broke society in two: a part that enjoys total well-being and the other that suffers from extreme poverty.

The volunteers of the Foundation have established an extraordinary connection among themselves, in spite of their different origins. It is overwhelming to see how middle and upper class Grandmothers establish bonds with the poorest children without prejudices. At the same time, other young boys and girls reach the Foundation asking for  opportunities to read to another young persons, marginal students, orphans and/or disabled.

Cultural Aspect:The nutritive cocktail that offers "affection + high quality literature" promotes social and cultural integration. The stories transferred from generation to generation always fortify the community identity and the collective memory. In every place visited by the Grandmothers the demand of reading is increased and changes of awareness and attitude arise. We are convinced that we are collaborating to create a population with a strong reading culture and much more integrated for the future.

Environmental Aspect:Even though it is not a specific mission of the Foundation, many of the texts that the Grandmothers share with the children include messages that promote friendly attitudes with the environment, as well as of sanitary security and citizen behavior (without leaving the aesthetic quality).

The successfull coordination of the Program ensures the continuity and the development in our local scope, but it is also important to emphasize the interest showed by the Ministry of Education of the Nation since the end of 2003. Because of the simplicity of the transmission of the experience, there is an extraordinary possibility of organizing a similar Program for the whole nation.

Lessons learned

Although our initial intention was that the Story-teller Grandmothers concentrated their work in schools, from the beginning it was evident that there were other potential hearings and that the volunteers longed to respond to those requirements. That's how the volunteers also started reading for kids benefited from the Children's Dinning Halls Program (one of the most actives programs of the Foundation) and for children living in orphanages, wards and others that come from the rest of the province waiting for ill relatives to recover in Resistencia hospitals. But this is not the total expansion of the Program: our Grandmothers also visit the so-called "Niñas Madres Canguro", a group of very young girls who have premature babies and stay with them in the Pediatric Hospital of Resistencia; the handicaped kids at “Casa Crecer con Todos” special care institution; the kids of the Institute of the Blind; the younger readers at public libraries such as the Biblioteca "Lidia Guasti"; and even the senior citizens living in the "Nazareth" Geriatric Hospital.

Besides, the Grandmothers read for the orphans living in the "Casa Cuna", where there is already a small library with an initial heap of books donated by the Foundation.