Boston: Artists / Children's Book Illustrators: Help Solve the Literacy Crisis

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We are looking for some very special people who have the passion, time, and especially, the illustration skills needed to help us populate our proprietary reading materials child-friendly, colorful, happy, creative and otherwise wonderful drawings that potentially millions of children will see on their path to learning how to read.

Have you ever wanted to do something AMAZING to change the world but didn't know where to start?

Here is an opportunity to help underprivileged children, to help under-served children, to help ALL children displaced from school due to COVID-19, and even to help many adults who can't read.

We are looking for three, very special people, who have the skills, expertise, experience, passion, and time to be part of something amazing that is about to fundamentally change the lives of millions of children. Right now, millions of children have no hope; but soon, they will have the opportunity to learn how to read, which, in turn, will open a window to education and to a world of potential for them that, not only, has never been opened before, but that has never even been seriously contemplated as a potential reality.

What we are talking about is an adaptive learning, gamified smartphone app, called FUNetix, that can literally, teach a child how to read, in the comfort of their home, in an average of just 12 hours of total use time!

We are the American Youth Literacy Foundation, and we have been teaching children how to read for nearly 12 years! We have been developing this app for about two years, and this year we will launch this incredible smartphone app in the App Store and on Google Play by Thanksgiving, 2020, to help save millions of children from a lifetime of illiteracy!

Already, there are millions of children who are struggling to learn how to read. Already, there are millions more who have given up on reading and are destined to go through life either completely illiterate, or with semi-literate skills at best. And now with the displacement of tens of millions of children from school, for an indeterminate amount of time , the loss of reading capacity of the next generation presents a new, crisis moment in American education  and a very real threat to the future success of millions of young students.

We are partnered with an engineering team that was one of the five $1 million finalists in the XPrize for Global Learning competition (the winners of which were announced this past May), which was a worldwide competition for app "design and development" teams from around the world to design, build and deliver a tablet-based app to children in remote villages in Africa which could teach them how to read and do basic math (children of all ages, most of whom had never been to school before in their lives).

The curriculum that our app is based on is a patented reading decoding system, and is so effective at teaching children how to read, that it usually only takes 4-6 hours for them to understand the basic learning tools, and another 4-6 hours for them to reach a 2nd grade reading level. Compare this to so many of our students who have been in the public school system for 6 years and still can't spell the word "the." Compare this to millions of students who have dropped out of school, primarily because they can't read (more than 10 million per decade).

More than 20 million children in grades 3-12 in America's public schools today can't read!

Our organization is an 11 year old, nationwide, charitable 501 c 3 non-profit. We started out as a tutoring program and we still provide one-on-one tutoring. But our focus has always been on finding a scalable solution to the literacy crisis in America.

With the rise of the smartphone and the amazing penetration of this powerful tool (currently estimated at 80%), even into the most impoverished communities, we feel that the answer we have been searching for IS in the form of an app. So for the past several years we have been working to convert our amazing reading curriculum, that teaches children how to read in an average of just 12 hours, into an app that teaches children how to read in about the same time. And this is where you come in.

The App is comprised of approximately 2,000 unique screens, each of which is fully narrated. After the child learns the fundamentals of letters and sounds and how to blend sound symbols to form words and sentences (using a super-child-friendly, phonetic code called 21E), we transition them to English, where we utilize our patented diacritic decoding system to introduce them to the irregular letter patterns found in English spelling. From there, we continue to increase students' awareness of the various letter patterns and combinations, while simultaneously introducing them to more and more complex sentences, stories and interactive, fiction and non-fiction content.

As students progress in their reading capability, we begin to introduce primers, books, stories, games, puzzles and other content that will be embedded within the learning modules AND that children will have access to in our "Wonderful Content Library" that is unlocked after they have finished the 12-hour structured curriculum.

There's much more to tell. You can read more about our story and about us on our website at www.FUNetix.org and at www.YouthLit.org .

We are looking for some very special people who have the passion, time, and especially, the illustration skills needed to help us populate our proprietary reading materials child-friendly, colorful, happy, creative and otherwise wonderful drawings that potentially millions of children will see on their path to learning how to read.

If you wish to be considered for this opportunity to be one of volunteer children’s book illustrators, please send us a sample of your artwork by replying to this listing.

When you reply you will receive an auto-reply email containing an attached pdf. Follow the instructions on the pdf to illustrate ONLY ONE of the two story samples. (Each sample contains 2 screens, so you will be illustrating 2 screens from the same story.) Send your samples to info@FUNetix.org and we will respond to you if we choose your illustration.

EVEN IF we don’t choose you to illustrate one of the sample stories, we may still contact you to illustrate one of our many other stories or books.

We are looking for intelligent, creative, enthusiastic, cheerful, optimistic individuals who can present a "look and feel" to children ages 5-9 that is happy, not scary; uplifting, not sad; bright and colorful, not dark or ominous; cute or whimsical, or otherwise conveying a positive outlook on the world.

Thank you! We hope this opportunity finds you at the right place and the right time to make a difference and an impact, in an amazing way, for millions of children who are waiting for someone, or something, to lead them out of a life of impoverishment and into a future of unlimited possibility and potential through literacy.

We look forward to seeing your work. All ages are welcome to contribute!

Mr. R. Kali Woodward

Founding, Executive Director