Bethesda: Are you good at fundraising? Children's Literacy, a Smartphone App and You

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Do you want to help us fundraise for a really good cause?

You can stop the literacy crisis cold in its tracks and help millions of kids learn how to read.

YOU might be the catalyst that helps change the future of millions of children.

Your idea, or your social media message, or your hard work might make the difference.

We are the American Youth Literacy Foundation, an 11 year old 501 c3 charitable non-profit, and we are building an app for the App Store and Google Play that will be FREE to all children, and that will teach any child how to read in about 12 hours of instruction time without the help of any adult!

There's a long story behind this app but we won't bore you with all the details.

Here's a really simplified synopsis of how we became the first organization (for profit or non-profit) to find a scaleable solution to the literacy crisis in America!

About four years ago, the Barbara Bush Foundation and Dollar General sponsored the $7million XPrize for Adult Literacy to bring in teams from around the world to develop an app-based solution to the adult literacy crisis in America. (https://www.xprize.org/prizes/adult-literacy)

A year or so before that, XPrize and Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX fame), sponsored the XPrize for Global Learning (https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning) a similar effort to incent more than 100 teams from around the world to spend millions of their own dollars to develop a tablet-based app that would teach children in remote villages in Africa how to read and do basic math, children who had never set foot in a school in their lives. Google contributed 1,500 tablets to this experiment and the results were astounding!

We are partnering with one of the $1 million dollar finalists in the African competition to build the app that will fundamentally solve the literacy crisis in America within the next few years!

Technology advances have lead the world to look for a solution to illiteracy, low literacy and access to education that is app-based, digital, and scaleable!

At the American Youth Literacy Foundation (dba Youth Lit and YouthLit.org), our mission for the past 11 years, has been to solve the children's literacy crisis. For the past 11 years we have run a nationwide, after-school tutoring program, training tutors in cities around the country to work with students in their respective communities.

What makes our program unique and special is that our curriculum is patented, is ground-breaking; and in the past year we have created a prototype of an adaptive learning, smartphone app,that will bring literacy to the tens of millions of children who are slipping through the cracks in today's public schools.

This is an app that will take a child from the ABC's to a 2nd grade reading level in about 12 hours of total instruction time; and we are giving away, to millions of parents and children, for free, in the App Store and Google Play by Thanksgiving of 2020, one year from now.

But we need your help to create a successful fundraising campaign that will meet our essential funding requirements (currently we need another $150,000 to finish the app).

We know that thousands of people want our app to succeed and to fundamentally reverse the literacy crisis in America. But to make that happen, we need working capital to build, market and distribute this amazing product by Thanksgiving of 2020. And to hit that deadline, we need to finish raising our target amount of $200,000 now!

If you are familiar with fundraising, putting on events, crowdsourcing, developing sponsorships, securing philanthropic donations, writing grants or simply contacting potential donors, then we need your ideas, energy and help.

We have already secured a significant portion of our fundraising goal, through friends, family and matching donations, but we have much further to go. We have a short window of time to raise the money to meet our deadlines and milestones in order to get this app finished in 2020 and out to the children who need it most.

This is going to change the world, and if you've ever wanted to be a part of something that could change the lives of millions of children, and bring hope and opportunity to millions of people, then please contact us.

We are about to experience an epochal shift in the way reading is taught and the amount of children who will now have access to literacy and, ultimately, higher education! If you've ever wanted to do something AMAZING to change the world, but didn't know how, please consider joining our effort.

Thank you! We want to hear your ideas and suggestions, and we truly look forward to speaking with you : )