Sucess Stories

Advocacy Outreach Awarded One of Ten
National Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy Grants

The Barbara Bush Foundation announced that it has awarded a $65,000 grant to Advocacy Outreach in Elgin, Texas to fund the continuation of the Advocacy Outreach Family Literacy Program. Advocacy Outreach was one of ten national grant recipients chosen from nearly 400 applications. Since its inception in 1989, the Foundation has awarded $30 million to more than 700 family literacy programs in 49 different states and the nation’s capital.

These ten national awards made annually by The Barbara Bush Foundation are a separate project from the First Lady’s Family Literacy Initiative for Texas (FLFLIT), through which the Barbara Bush Texas Fund for Family Literacy awards up to ten one-year grants each year, all within the state of Texas. See information about the ten FLFLIT grantees for 2008-2009 in the TCALL Director’s Letter.

Advocacy Outreach has provided family literacy services in the Elgin area for ten years. The organization was awarded funding in 1998, in the second year of the First Lady’s Family Literacy Initiative for Texas. Two (four year) cycles of the federally funded Even Start Family Literacy Program followed and in 2006 Advocacy Outreach was awarded a second grant from the First Lady’s Family Literacy Initiative for Texas. Last year, the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy selected Advocacy Outreach as one of only ten programs nation-wide to feature in a book about long-running family literacy programs being published by Mrs. Barbara Bush.

This year’s grant recipients were announced at the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy’s fourteenth annual fundraiser, A Celebration of Reading, held at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts in Houston on April 24th. The evening was hosted by George and Barbara Bush.
           
The nine other national grant recipients are in Massachusetts, Utah, Louisiana, Vermont, South Dakota, Alaska, Indiana, Mississippi, and Illinois.