The “Por un Chile que Lee” Network reaches 120 organizations and gets ready to incorporate

Launched in December 2022, the initiative addresses literacy gaps in Chile. Currently, organizations from all over the country are part of the network that held its fourth meeting on Tuesday at the La Moneda Cultural Center in the city of Santiago, at which time various institutions shared their experiences and addressed the challenges that the network will face in the future.

With the presence of more than 90 people from 40 organizations that are part of the alliance, the fourth meeting of the Red Por un Chile que Lee [Chile Literacy Network]. The initiative seeks to contribute with proposals to deal with students’ literacy gaps in Chile and is getting ready to incorporate with the aim of becoming a formal organization.

In addition to giving an account of the efforts of the seven working groups that make up the network, the meeting’s focus was to reflect on and define the future challenges that this alliance must address and how to make concrete impacts on the reading levels for the children of Chile. It was held at the La Moneda Cultural Center in Santiago de Chile. Some of the working groups are already coming up with testing instruments for measuring and evaluating different aspects of students’ reading levels at early stages.

One of the network’s initiatives is creating a reading instruction manual for pedagogical institutions and developing instruments to measure reading fluency with the intention of piloting it with students. Another initiative was the massive “1000 photos, 1000 readings to share” campaign. 

Carolina Andueza, President of the Executive Committee of the Chile Literacy Network and  Executive Director of the CMPC Foundation, highlighted the importance of the network and these meetings to define the roadmap and the resources they will use. “The truth is that there is a historical literacy debt owed to the children and teens of Chile, but the situation is even more critical after the pandemic. We want to incorporate so that we can use this legal entity to access funds, memberships and financing to be able to plan for our long-term sustainability and promote new initiatives, seminars, manuals. The idea is to be able to share all the knowledge that has been gained within each of these organizations and transform it into collective knowledge for the country.” Currently the Chile Literacy Network is composed of more than 120 organizations from all over the nation.

For her part, the coordinator of the education department of the Olivo Foundation, an organization that accompanies the implementation of projects to promote learning opportunities, Constanza Severín, who is also part of the financing and partnerships group of the Chile Literacy Network said, “The way this network was formed in particular has been very broad and democratic. Roundtables have been set up around topics and goals of each of the organizations, which has meant creating new work groups. This means there are many different motivations because many institutions from different fields are gathered together around a clear central goal. That’s why it’s been sustained over time.”

The meeting also included the “Reading Experiences” and “Tables Talk” panels. In the first one, the AraucaníAprende, Belén Educa, Alma and La Fuente foundations all shared their experiences in this area. The next conversation saw different network participants discussing the future challenges facing the organization, e.g., establishing a mechanism to figure out which children have the most urgent cases of reading problems, strengthening public-private work, positioning the Chile Literacy Network as a national standard in reading and launch the classroom initiatives that are designed by the network.  

The objective of the network and these meetings is to continue with the work of generating synergies and initiatives to ensure that children understand what they read and enjoy doing it. The work day was held at the La Moneda Cultural Center, after having held three previous meetings on the premises of the Center for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE) of the University of Chile, the Catholic University and in the University of the Andes in Santiago de Chile.