Our Mission Statement
Empowering young people with skills, confidence, and resilience through kindness, knowledge, and literacy.
If you’ve survived homelessness, war, famine, hunger…
If you’ve struggled with exceptionalities, racialization, marginalization…
You’re resourceful and you’re powerful!
You just need skills and someone to believe in you.
You need to be seen for
THE HERO that YOU already ARE.
Our programs provide a key—not just for literacy—but, for life.
And we do this through empathy…
The Excellence in Literacy Foundation (the ELF) delivers intensive literacy and life-skills programming to children and youth in the Ottawa area. Our heroic participants overcome barriers every day.
We have developed materials and methods that work. We share these with our partners across Canada. We also support them in their efforts by providing small grants.
The ELF’s programs are a socially and fiscally responsible solution to the pervasive issues of illiteracy, poverty, and systemic disempowerment.
You can develop human rights initiatives; employability workshops; and environmental stewardship programming. You can spend millions of dollars on these very worthwhile activities—but—if your population isn’t effectively, powerfully, and expansively literate, you have not made the most of your time and resources.
****Photos created by: Bobbie Dhar, www.lndphotos.com****
As a policy, the ELF will not publish identifying photographs of our vulnerable program participants. We are grateful that the children of our founders agreed to be photographed for our website, social media pages, and ads. They’re also wonderful office volunteers who love to help us organize workbooks and program supplies!