Improving Australian Literacy Levels though Corporate Community Engagement

Slator P¹*

1. Unilever Australasia Cambridge, St Epping, NSW, Australia

By 2010 Unilever Australasia will have improved the literacy skills of 20,000 Australian and New Zealand children through Reading for Life, an innovative program which connects businesses, their employees and schools.

Reading for Life brings together trained volunteers from local business and schools to give children struggling to read one-to one help for 45 minutes every week over 15 weeks. The goal of the program is to enhance child’s reading skills, self esteem and motivation.

Driven by the passion of Unilever employees to really make a difference around literacy, the company has set this challenge to be achieved through a collaborative partnership with Learning Links (their community partner who built Reading for Life) their employees, Education authorities across the country and the Australian and New Zealand business community.

In this paper Peter Slator will share the challenges, learnings and outcomes to date from this massive community engagement program.

For Unilever, engaging with communities is not a feel good exercise – it is a business imperative. When the outcome is improving literacy levels of our children, it becomes a three way win – good for the community, good for business, good for the future!

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