During the pandemic, lockdown people are forced to stay home to prevent any risk of spreading or contracting the Coronavirus. Thus, many stores are closed, including libraries and bookstores, and a lot of workers stayed home, doing their job remotely if possible, as well as many children, which cannot go to school.

But what about poor families that do not own a computer, books, and skills?

Our project to act

Volunteer In The World started a campaign that aims to give to these children the right to have educational support and materials. This project is about recuperating second-hand tablets and laptops that will be provided to these poor families so they can use them for the online lessons and with our materials already loaded.

These materials are readings of some texts made by an adult; listening to an adult voice that reads is useful for cognitive development, providing narrative structures and schemes, that facilitate the learning of the written language. It also helps the child to recognize ad use syntactic and lexical properties. Children need continuing education and intellective stimulation, especially those who do not know the language properly, like immigrants.

How can we do that?

The pandemic crisis created financial difficulties for Volunteer In The World, so we requested support at The National Lottery Community Fund and the Coronavirus Community Support Fund, which partly financed us, but we need at least 10.000£ to promote our project and support communities.

We search for teachers and good readers to increase the quality of our materials. We also need second-hand laptops and tablets, from physical persons but also from offices and companies, but if they are not able to donate us this material, we have thought of a budget for the purchase of these devices. This initiative is also aimed to draw attention to the importance of recycling/reuse of these devices.

To include as many poor families and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) in London as possible, we want to collaborate with other charities that deal with teaching English to foreigners or that deal with educational projects to offer free English lessons and many readings. We would like to involve our partners in the UK and all our volunteers from other countries.

We need all the help we can find to create additional materials and to reach ulterior economic support. We need help from everyone for reaching the devices and the budget and for creating new materials to replace books and English lessons.