Youth Literacy school holiday catchup - phones for contactless teaching!

The Rural Youth & Adult Literacy Trust had planned to run a series of three camps for teenagers whose lives have been made miserable because they have trouble with reading and writing. These at-risk youth are not dumb - but they think they are. These kids are desperate enough for help that they will give up their holiday to get it.

Now lockdown and COVID-19 has cancelled one camp and the next one needs to be a virtual camp. For that we now have an urgent need for 40 identical mobile phones! Ones we can lock up tightly so the kids can only use the phones and data for our programme. The programme will run for 20 girls and 20 boys for two weeks in July and another two weeks in October school holidays.

The phones will be used by literacy mentors during term time between camps, as well as being critically important to the success of the July virtual camp. At the end of the year, for those kids who participated with a good attitude only, we will be unlocking the phones and giving them to the students. We hope this will help keep them motivated during the discouraging times. What they are doing is both brave and very challenging for them as they have a history of feeling like failures.

Most of the time our camp students come from backgrounds where poverty and bad choices their parents made affected their ability to learn. Some kids survive these backgrounds and others fall through the cracks.

They have no hope for a better future without your help. At the virtual camps they will get one-to-one attention.

At live camp they get one adult to help every two teenagers. We help them between camps and by the end of the year we have changed their lives for good, plus those of their future children. We are breaking the cycle of inter-generational poverty and benefit dependence.

A teacher who visited the camps was stunned to see anti-social kids she had sent to camp happily participating in learning. Another school reported that the kids were still fizzing about the camp weeks later and had come back with more confidence and feeling like they were able to give things a go.

RYALT receives no government funding.