Storytellers
Literacy Mentor Program
The Storytellers Program pairs community members with students in 1st-3rd grade to create excitement around reading by forming supportive relationships to collectively help build a strong foundation in literacy and early reading skills.
Partners making it possible!
What is Literacy Mentoring?
Literacy Mentoring is the pairing of a community member with a student in 1st-3rd grade for the duration of the school year, with time spent reading and completing program-provided literacy activities. Mentors commit to meeting with their students weekly at their school. Plus, our program staff is on-site at the school at all times that mentors are visiting!
Research shows that reading with a child for 30 minutes a day astronomically aids in reading proficiency. The goal is to have every student in the program receive a total of 14 hours of one-on-one time with their BFK Literacy Mentors over the duration of their school year.
Our most common volunteer commitment is 60 minutes, once a week. During these 60 minutes, mentors will meet with two students for 30 minutes each.
Though if 60 minutes doesn't fit in your weekly schedule, we also have 30-minute options where volunteers meet with 1 student.
Interested in becoming a Mentor?
You can make a difference in a child's life with just 1 hour a week. Training, activities, and on-site support is provided, and no prior mentor experience is required!
Currently, our mentor slots are filled for the 2025-2026 school year. Applications open in April 2026 for the 2026-2027 school year.
Join our waitlist to be the first to hear when the application opens, and we will reach out if we have open slots until then!
If you aren't ready to apply, click below to request a staff member to reach out with more information about the opportunity.
Questions? Reach out to the Literacy Mentor Program staff at storytellers@booksforkeeps.org.
Program Results
We are excited to share results from our third year of the Storytellers Literacy Mentor Program. During the 2024-2025 school year, 142 volunteer mentors contributed over 4,000 one-on-one mentoring sessions for 109 students in 1st-3rd grade at Howard B. Stroud and Fowler Drive Elementary. Collectively, students and mentors read 2,773 books together this school year!
A huge congratulations to all of our 2024-2024 students, and thank you to our incredible volunteer mentors, financial supporters, and school staff involved in this progress!
Program highlights:
Our evaluator found a statistically significant and large-scale increase for on-level reading for matched and mentored vs. non-matched students—controlling for school, grade, and other characteristics:
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125% increase observed in on-level and above on the iReady assessment for students without mentors
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337% increase observed in on-level and above on the iReady assessment for mentor-matched students.
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For matched 1st graders, there was a 500% increase observed in on-level and above on the iReady assessment. This specific finding confirms that our shift to include 1st graders for an earlier intervention is supportive and will be continued.
Additional highlights:
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97% of the time, teachers felt confident that this program had a positive impact on students.
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92% of mentors enjoyed their visits and observed growth in their students’ literacy skills.
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92% of students overwhelmingly enjoyed their literacy activities.
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95% of books on the BFK Bookshelf received 4 or 5-starred reviews from students.
About the pilot program:
The BFK Literacy Mentor Program partners with Creature Comforts Brewing Company’s Get Comfortable program and Clarke County School District to engage the community in creating excitement around reading and forming supportive relationships to collectively help increase the 3rd-grade reading proficiency rate in Athens-Clarke County.
About the results:
Dr. Grace Bagwell-Adams of the University of Georgia and the Athens Wellbeing Project is leading a four-year RTI (Response to Intervention) evaluation to measure program impact on student reading performance compared to existing intervention efforts. Evaluators tracked the students matched with mentors at our school sites, as well as 287 non-matched students across our school sites and 2 control schools. Evaluators measured level change at the student, classroom, grade, and school levels and reported results controlling for school, ethnicity, race, and biological sex.
Do you know a future Mentor?
Help us provide 1:1 literacy mentorship to even more students in the 2024-25 school year by sharing about Storytellers with your personal and professional connections through social media, email, and other conversations. We encourage you to refer your friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors, (anyone who may be interested!) If you have volunteered as a mentor before, consider sharing what you enjoyed throughout your experience! This work would not be possible without the support of community members like you. Thank you!