2021, Coordinator’s Report

Covid-19 continues to impact our work and ability for our tutors and students to meet face to face. As we write this report all of Sydney is in yet another lockdown. We have continued to stay in touch with each of our tutors who in turn are using often creative ways to stay connected with their student where practicable. We know that many are able to do lessons via phone, WhatsApp and Zoom to continue planned activities or just chat. Many  of  our  learners  are  juggling  demanding  jobs  often  in  health vulnerable areas, working from home and managing their own families often with home schooling added to the mix, so their available time is even more limited.  After 15 weeks of lockdown, we are looking forward to more options being available for everyone in our community who has been vaccinated in the next weeks.

We have regular contact with community groups including Parents Next and TAFE who have referred to us possible interested students.

Tutor training:

Eight people completed our Oct/Nov course in 2020 and another seven tutors in our March/April 2021 course. Four of those were not available to tutor at the end of their course due to competing job or family situations. We did match the other eleven with a student. As at the end of June 2020 we had twenty-six tutor and student pairs working together. They come from a range of countries: Afghanistan, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Korea, Poland, Portugal, Thailand, Tibet, with multiple students from most of those.

Several of us attended the annual Literacy Network lunch at Dee Why RSL in December 2020, but as numbers were limited it wasn’t the crowd we usually are able to meet up and celebrate with.

We did manage a very successful tutor get-together in May 2021 with twenty five people attending. Dhondup who is the Multicultural Services Officer at the Northern Beaches Community, spoke at length helping us to learn more about the work that is done for the Tibetan community in our area. Tutors Basia and Sue spoke about the work they are doing with their students from Brazil and Tibet. They offered useful hints and resources.

Everyone was very excited about being together and the exuberant conversations being held in the break were terrific. A big thank you to the committee who again catered for the event in a delicious and substantive way.

Website:

Thank you to Sue for maintaining the website. We still have people finding us online and we refer many prospective tutors to it.

Other:

Thank you to the tutors who regularly sent reports and return resources. The office is easy to access; people are welcome to use it for lessons and visit any time. We also thank Patti  for taking on the task of reviewing our resources and updating our lists of resources currently on loan.

Scroll to Top