Philadelphia as a Literacy-Rich Environment: Unlocking Potential and Creating Change

Launched in 2015, the William Penn Foundation’s Literacy-Rich Environments (LRE) Initiative activated a diverse array of learning partners across the City of Philadelphia to infuse literacy-rich opportunities and experiences in informal learning settings and everyday spaces. The reimagined settings enabled children to engage in literacy exploration throughout their days — waiting for the bus, visiting a museum or library, attending an afterschool program. In doing so, the LRE Initiative strove to promote equity of opportunity to experience literacy-skill building across the broad demographic of families and children in the city.

A Community of Practice among the LRE grantee partners worked on collaboratively identifying what it takes to create and scale specific literacy-rich environments. This brief includes an exploration of what this community discovered in working together by first defining a set of five environmental conditions that need to be in place across a city to enable and optimize literacy-rich environments in all the everyday places and spaces where children and their caregivers spend time. It concludes with a series of recommendations for what funders and other stakeholders can do to support the establishment and cultivation of literacy-rich environments across a city.