Literacy, Learning Groups Mark 80 Years Of Service

Two of New Haven’s anchoring organizations that promote and support literacy and learning — from birth to high school and beyond — marked anniversaries Thursday evening with separate Lawn Club fundraisers, toasts, and appreciations of how single individuals with a calling can indeed change the world

A sold-out-crowd, including a classroom full of current and former New Haven Public School teachers, gathered to hail the 60th anniversary of The New Haven Scholarship Fund (NHSF). Since its founding, the fund has distributed scholarships of on-average $2,000 each, cumulatively $10 million to about 10,000 students. This year alone, the group awarded $360,000 to 240 New Haven high school graduates, grants that are often critical for expenses like textbooks that fall between the cracks of other financial aid.

The all-volunteer group’s president, Jeffrey Alpert, cited the group’s founder, Hillhouse math teacher Jean Lovell, who saw what could make the difference between the city’s high school kids thriving in college or dropping out. The group’s support goes to any qualifying city high school grad to support post-secondary education, including vocational training, and at schools either in the state or outside. The evening’s special honorees were longtime board members Peter Stolzman and James Barber.

“You can only read another person’s books so long, before you give up,” Barber recalled. And then on the eve of dropping out of college he received a grant from Lovell and the NHSF to finish his degree at Southern, where he has been a teacher and now long-time administrator.

Across the lobby of the Lawn Club in another spacious ballroom, Read To Grow was celebrating 20 years of promoting language skills at the very start of life — initially through providing the families of newborns with books.

At the center of attention was founding board member Roxanne Coady (also founder of R.J. Julia’s bookstore in Madison), who recently stepped down as the board chair.

She and her colleague Lisa Maass remembered delivering their first books. The day was Jan. 1, 1999, said Maass. They went over to Yale New Haven Hospital and, er, delivered books to parents of all 17 kids who were born on that day.

Now the organization reaches 180,000 kids a year, and not only newborns, through dozens of partnering organizations that include books and other literacy materials services to families in need, such as food deliveries.

Of Coady, Maas said this: ​“My wish for Roxanne is that when some parents are tucking their kids into bed tonight, the book they’ll have read is because of her.”

To contact or to donate or become involved with these organizations: Read To Grow, and New Haven Scholarship Fund.