Tough times. Here's how you can help:

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Life is limited when you can't read medical label warnings, correspondence from your childrens' teachers, instructions on a new appliance, complete a job application, read a street sign, directions, or apply for a driver's license. Yet many adults find themselves in exactly that position, particularly here in Essex County, where one in every four adults is considered functionally illiterate in English, according to U.S. Department of Education data.

When you help an adult, you help her or his entire family. At Literacy Volunteers of America, Essex & Passaic Counties, we have a long list of U.S. citizens and immigrants, among them refugees and asylum seekers, waiting for help in learning to speak, understand, read, and write in English. But we need volunteers to teach them. Here's how you can help:

Become a volunteer literacy tutor by attending our tutor training course at the Hilton Branch of the Maplewood Memorial Library, 1688 Springfield Avenue, Maplewood, NJ 07040, Mondays & Thursdays, 1:00-4:00 pm, April 3-20, 2017.

Volunteers work once per week for two hours and earn a certificate as tutors of Basic Literacy and English for Speakers of Other Languages from Literacy Volunteers of America (LVA), one of the largest non-profit adult literacy organizations in the country. And more than that, they help improve the lives of adults and their family members.

For more information, please contact LVA at 973-566-6200, ext 217, via email rbenali@lvaep.org, or register throughg our website www.lvaep.org