Nicholas Kristof Holiday Impact Prize

It’s a tremendous honor to be featured as one of the volunteer opportunities named in Nicholas Kristof’s 2020 Holiday Impact Prize. Nicholas Kristof’s column provides the opportunity for countless people to discover that Reading Partners’ mission and impact are well-aligned with their own personal values and their commitment to community.

Reading Partners is working to ensure that, by fourth grade, students are reading to learn and not learning to read. In your spare time, you can help vulnerable children read, thrive and reach their potential, creating confident life-long learners.

– Nicholas Kristof, New York Times Op-Ed Columnist

The 2020 Holiday Impact Prize

Since 2009, New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof has written an annual “holiday gift guide” column to bridge a philanthropic gap: readers who wanted to help but didn’t know how, and heroic individuals and organizations who desperately needed resources but were off donors’ radar. The column has helped raise the profiles of organizations that work on the very issues he covers in his journalism—health, education, human rights, and women’s rights, both domestically and abroad. 

Reading Partners is listed as one of two volunteer opportunities changing communities through service. 

Urgent need for community impact

COVID-19 has dramatically disrupted learning, with many students learning remotely or under stressful new circumstances. When a day of school gets disrupted, let alone a week or a month, students’ academic growth can suffer. For students who were already behind their grade level in reading, the consequences of this disruption are disproportionately severe. Volunteering with Reading Partners’ new online tutoring program, Reading Partners Connects, can make a meaningful and lasting difference in the lives of children by ensuring they have the critical literacy support they need and deserve during this particularly challenging time.

Reading Partners’ proven model matches elementary school students who are behind grade level in reading with trained volunteers who deliver personalized tutoring sessions twice a week for 45 minutes. As a result, 85 percent of all Reading Partners students meet or exceed their primary end-of-year literacy growth goals.

Take action

Due to an outpouring of community support, many local Reading Partners branches are close to engaging enough volunteers to match with enrolled students. Here are three additional ways you can support our mission to narrow the literacy gap.

1. Donate or start a fundraiser to ensure Reading Partners can continue to deliver literacy support to students across the country.
2. Follow and engage with Reading Partners on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn.
3. Do you have other skills to contribute? Are you a graphic designer, photographer, consultant, or other professional? Email us at volunteer@readingpartners.org to donate your expertise.