Message from the Chair

Our Mission: Literacy Nova Scotia provides leadership to advance literacy by ensuring that all Nova Scotians have equal access to quality literacy, essential skills, and lifelong learning opportunities.

Literacy Nova Scotia ensures quality programs for adult learners as evident in our mission statement. We also strive to be the best organization we can be. We are grateful to receive confirmation of the work we do from outstanding adult learners such as Karl Francis-Williams, who battled a life-threatening illness and then returned to learning, completing his GED.

Our Practitioner Training and Certification Program has received strong endorsements from the practitioners who have taken it. “PT is such a great resource and tool, especially when it comes to the collective knowledge that practitioners need about some of the barriers that adult learners face."

Community learning organizations here in Nova Scotia and elsewhere have acknowledged our support and contributions to the field of adult learning. “Our organization has relied heavily on LNS since its inception for grants, direct learner support, professional development, and the invaluable provision of information and support for the development and growth of our own organization." A practitioner from Washington DC commented that “LNS has one of the best collections of practical teaching videos I have ever seen."

It’s particularly gratifying when our major funder, the Department of Labour and Advanced Education tells us we do good work! Our solid reputation for excellence may reap rewards in the future, as the federal government has solicited a concept paper for work in the coming years.

A key component for ensuring quality is building the capacity of the literacy field. LNS does this through providing training, as well as producing and sharing resources and information. To truly meet the needs of Nova Scotians, we need to also build our own capacity. LNS has hired a Fundraising Coordinator to plan events, and staff and board have taken training to add to and improve their existing skills. We’ve also expanded into essential skills profiling and needs assessments with a project to pilot training in the fisheries sector.

Danny Cavanagh
Chair

Message from the Executive Director

At Literacy Nova Scotia, we take pride in servicing the adult literacy field. We ask, listen, and respond to their needs.

Mental health is a concern for many in the adult literacy field, both learners and practitioners. We’ve been gathering a lot of information about mental health, how it affects learning, what teaching strategies work best, best practices for learning organizations to foster a learning environment, and how to support practitioners in their own self care. We will be developing a module for the Practitioner Training Program as well as focusing the next PD Conference on this topic.

We are able to do what we do because of the good working relationship we have with the Department of Labour and Advanced Education. Our shared goals and values provide many opportunities to work together to build capacity within the community learning organizations funded under NSSAL, with such projects as the IT Refresh Fund. We are uniquely positioned to be the conduit of knowledge exchange and funding.

Jayne Hunter
Executive Director