Joining forces to combat illiteracy
Phil Duffy
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Apr 27/01) - Six women from different parts of the country gathered for a business lunch Wednesday in order to strategize over their plan to promote literacy.
This wasn't the first meeting of the minds for Cate Sills and Lisa Campbell from the NWT Literacy Council, Kim Crockatt and Cayla Chenier from the Nunavut Literacy Council, Sarah Thompson from the Frontier College, and Janet Skinner from the Labrador Literacy Information and Action Network.
The meeting was about the ongoing joint project by the Northern literacy organizations of Nunavut, the NWT, and Labrador, called Tools for Community Building.
The project involves conducting community workshops in the NWT and Nunavut, and the development of resources that can be made available for Northern communities.
"We've been working together for the past three years doing collaborative work," said Sills. We don't all get together very often because of being so far apart," said Sills.
Four of the six women had to fly in to Yellowknife in order to attend this meeting, which has already lasted several days. Skinner had to fly for quite a while over quite a distance.
"Last week I left at 6:30 in the morning from Goose Bay on a twin-engine Dash-8 to Deer Lake, Then from there to Halifax.
Then it was off to Labrador, and from there I arrived in Toronto in the evening. The next day I left with Sarah Thompson on a six-hour flight to Yellowknife via Edmonton," said Skinner.
Thompson works out of Toronto, but is an advocate on promoting literacy in the North.
"I have been working with the Northern literacy agencies since the early '90s.
My work has been primarily aiding small Northern communities to set up their own successful literacy programs," she said.
"This involves developing, and adapting existing materials so that they will be relevant in that they will have a Northern focus to them."
