PLC activities include delivering online and in-person tutor training workshops, supporting Pacific Northwest literacy programs, providing GED test vouchers to low-income students, sponsoring an annual volunteer tutor conference, and publishing an online newsletter and announcements of interest to the adult literacy community.
Time is running out to register for this five-workshop series or one or more workshops within the series. Julie Hiefield and Susan Farra from Language and Literacy Fund will be our instructors, with support from Portland Literacy Council team members. These courses will give you tools to work with low-literacy adults who have strong vocabulary but struggle to read and write. To learn more and register for these workshops, click here.
Note: Scholarships are available thanks to a generous donation from the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus & Mary. Contact lwigle@portlandliteracy.org for more details.
PLC’s 2025 Community Impact Report is now available. This report describes the inspiring work of PLC and the many volunteers supporting adult learners over the last year.
Break the cycle of poverty:
Reach a child in need — Teach an adult to read.
We are very pleased to welcome Courtenay Carr Heuer as Portland Literacy Council’s new Executive Director.
Courtenay officially began her transition into the role on May 27. Lorie Wigle, our current Executive Director, will support the transition over the coming weeks. We are thankful to have had Lorie’s extraordinary leadership over the past three years, and we are so pleased that she will remain actively involved with the organization moving forward.
Courtenay cares deeply about adult literacy and brings energy and experience from within the nonprofit world. As a mother committed to her children’s education, she previously co-founded and served as Executive Director for Scientific Adventures for Girls (SAfG), an organization focused on inspiring and empowering girls from an early age to explore STEM and pursue related opportunities with confidence.
As part of her work with SAfG she also served as Lead for the California Girls STEM Collaborative, where she helped “Connect, Create, and Collaborate to Transform STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) for all Youth.” In addition to her nonprofit leadership experience, Courtenay worked early in her career with the Intercultural Institute of California, supporting English and job-training programs for immigrants in the United States. She is currently a volunteer ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) tutor at PCC Southeast, and she will also begin as a Citizenship teacher with SOAR in their summer program. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in Commercial Diplomacy from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
We are thrilled to extend our heartfelt congratulations to Melinda Word (formerly Malinda Stewart) on this wonderful achievement. Thanks to the generous donations in support of our GED Voucher Program, we are able to partner with organizations such as Portland Community College to help adults complete their GEDs and fund GED testing—opening doors to new opportunities and brighter futures.
On our For Tutors page, check out the Resources for Tutoring Online drop-down for a wealth of tools and ideas for Online Tutoring. Here’s a sampling:
