The Good Fight

The team at volunteer group ReadAble shares the same sentiment as former UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova expressed in 2015 — “the future starts with the alphabet”.

- Team ReadAble

ReadAble’s vision is “Every child literate for life”. It translates to every child we work with having the ability to seek nourishment from language and text while being able to wield literacy to achieve their life goals. This vision came about naturally in our first few meetings during which we clarified that we wanted to address the host of problems that come along with childhood illiteracy. As beneficiaries (or victims?) of Singapore’s own content-heavy, tuition-fuelled education system ourselves, the irrationality of the system became clear to us when we met the kids in the Jalan Kukoh estate.

What has posed an unexpected problem is defining our objective in continuing to work with children who have achieved a satisfactory level of literacy. The answer is that we will continue to nurture their interest in the written word, connect it with the world around them and push them to further explore. No child’s interest should go unnurtured because of their family circumstances. Yes, volunteering is time-consuming. We find the time to do it because most of us are privileged and unencumbered by child-raising or other domestic demands. We are also driven by a passion for ReadAble’s vision, and passion is the great schedule-clearer.