Kevin Starr California Literacy Fund :: California State Library Foundation

Announcing the Kevin Starr California Literacy Fund

California State Library Foundation: 1.20.2017 by admin

The Kevin Starr California Literacy Fund

California Library Literacy Services (CLLS) is a state-funded program that was first implemented in 1984 and is administered by the California State Library. Many of our CLLS programs want to either add a Family Literacy Service program to their existing services, or expand an existing program.  Your donation to the Kevin Starr California Literacy Fund will make this expansion possible and give the gift of literacy to Californians most in need.

More about the Programs:

The California Library Literacy Services Program (CLLS)

English-speaking adults who struggle with basic reading and writing skills are the primary target of CLLS. Adult Learners are provided one-on-one or small group instruction by trained volunteer tutors based on each individual’s pace and goals.  Services are provided confidentially in the non-threatening library environment – crucial qualities in supporting adults who may lack the time or skills to attend traditional classroom-based programs.

Family Literacy Services

Approximately one third of CLLS programs currently provide Family Literacy Services. These services offer CLLS adult learners with children under age 5 additional instruction  in reading, selecting age appropriate children’s books, and using activities to promote the enjoyment of reading.

These more focused efforts ensure that children of low literate adults are better prepared to start school, reducing the risk of having their own struggles with literacy. With the Family Literacy Services program, children of adult learners also receive books to build home libraries, because having books in the home is an important precursor to academic achievement.

You can donate to the Kevin Starr California Literacy Fund here using the Foundation’s secure payment vendor. See “Kevin Starr Literacy Fund” under “Donations.” Or, you can send your donation to:

California State Library Foundation

1225 Eighth Street, Suite 345

Sacramento, CA  95814

Or, call us at 916-447-6331 and we can take your donation over the phone, M-F 9:30 – 4:30.

Please note the names of all contributors will be given to the family and mentioned in a future issue of the Foundation Bulletin. If you would like to remain anonymous, please give us a call or send an email to admin@csfldn.org.

The California State Library Foundation is a nonprofit corporation under the Internal Revenue Service Code 501(c)(3).

Kevin Starr, Author of California Histories and Former State Librarian, Dies at 76

Kevin Starr, author of California histories and former state librarian, dies at 76

L A Times: 1.15.2017 by David Zahniser and Matt Hamilton

Kevin Starr

Kevin Starr entered this world in 1940 in a rare fraternity — a fourth-generation Californian whose family's roots dated back to the Gold Rush era.

After a rough-and-tumble childhood in San Francisco, he found himself a graduate student at Harvard University, where he perused Widener Library's vast collection for  books about California. He realized something was missing.

“I thought, ‘There's all kinds of wonderful books on California, but they don't seem to have the point of view we're encouraged to look at — the social drama of the imagination,’” Starr told The Times.

Filling this gap would become his life's work, making him the state's foremost historian and one of its most revered public intellectuals. For half a century, he chronicled the greed, cruelty, enlightenment, innovation, vanity and sacrifice that took California from a place of Native American hamlets through Spanish colonization, entry into the United States and growth into a diverse powerhouse of technology, culture and trade.

Starr, a professor at USC and the former California state librarian, died of a heart attack Saturday at a hospital in San Francisco, according to his wife of 53 years, Sheila Starr. He was 76.

Starr captured the state’s rise in influence, and its singular hold on the public imagination, in “Americans and the California Dream,” a sweeping book series that moves from the Gold Rush into the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression and other distinct chapters of California’s past.

Throughout his work, Starr celebrated the state’s creativity and its openness to new ideas. And he demonstrated a familiarity with a vast range of topics central to the state’s development and its image of itself: architecture, agriculture, literature, water infrastructure and the entertainment industry, among others.

“He was the greatest historian Los Angeles and California ever had and ever will have,” said former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who hosts a book club that counted Starr as one of its original members.  READ MORE @