May 15, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
By recruiting, training, and placing volunteers, the Literacy Network of Greater Los Angeles helped other organizations do their best work teaching adults to read and write. But when the economy declined in late 2007, so did contributions to the network—a result, says its former leader, Barbara Bushnell, of the group’s focus on building up other charities rather than providing direct services.
Gifts plummeted from about $750,000 in 2007 to less than $50,000 in 2009. More than half of the group’s 23 board members jumped ship.
But instead of just shutting the doors, Ms. Bushnell and the remaining trustees vowed to stay in business long enough to find a way to transfer programs to another organization.
They began by negotiating with a local group, Jewish Vocational Services, which was finding that many of its job-training clients also needed better reading and writing skills.
During a fund-raising luncheon in late 2009, the network’s board chairman told donors about the plans to hand over programs and then to close the organization. The event raised $25,000, money that was needed to wind down operations.
In the meantime, the vocational group paid the network $10,000 for its assets, which included a literacy curriculum, a listing of literacy services in the area, and a donor database with about 5,000 names.
A ‘Mourning Period’
The Literacy Network is now considered a project of Jewish Vocational Services, with its own oversight committee, which includes five of the network’s former board members. But instead of simply carrying on the network’s programs, Jewish Vocational Services made some changes, incorporating literacy training into its other services.
For Ms. Bushnell, it was a bit of a letdown that the programs are not operating the way they once did. She says she is disappointed, too, that only one of the network’s four employees was able to go to work for the vocational organization.
“From an emotional perspective, there’s a bit of what we in the Literacy Network called the mourning period,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any way to avoid it—when there’s no money and an organization has to close, sometimes even the best-faith effort to have the mission or programs live on just doesn’t happen.”
