All adults in Greater Boston who want and need more basic education are our constituents. The 1,904 adult learners we served last year represent many racial and ethnic groups: African Americans 11%; Asians 6%; Deaf 3%; Latinos 40%; other ethnic groups (Haitian, Cape Verdean, African, East and West European, Caribbean) 35%; Whites, 5%. Unifying these diverse groups is their economic class: all of them, whether they work or not, have low incomes. Literacy is a class issue. Thus, our focus is on low-income neighborhoods.

Other statistics regarding our adult learner population are:

-72% are women

-over 90% are parents, and most of them have school age children

-88% are immigrants or refugees and 12% are native born

-most are 24-45 years old

-all lack basic educational skills, or functional English competency, or both

-52 are deaf; ten are dyslexic; many others have undiagnosed learning disabilities

-principal foreign languages: Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cambodian, ASL, Serbian, Cape Verdean, Ethiopian, Somali, Russian, Arabic.

Kellie, a BALF scholar who earned a 3.8 average in her first semester, said, "Adult literacy taught me how important it is to encourage my children's literacy development. It gets parents comfortable with reading to their children and teaches you how to make it an important part of your family life. I

know that education is the key to a better future…I decided not to stop after earning my GED, but to enter college."

Kellie's words reveal the transformation we hope all learners will experience as they discover they are effective learners and can achieve their goals.