Experience Corps is a community-based volunteer program that engages people over 50 as tutors to help students become better readers by the end of third grade. The program helps students to succeed and the volunteer tutors to become involved in the community. With the Structured Session program, tutors follow a well-planned process, helping students gain confidence in what they are reading.
Experience Corps of Greater New Haven
Program Logistics
Experience Corps of Greater New Haven (Experience Corps) has partnered with the Agency on Aging of South-Central Connecticut (AOASCC) for the last 17 years. That mantle is now passing to IVCG. At the end of this school year and into the fall, Experience Corps will become a premier program of IVCG.
We currently tutor students in Grades 1 through 3 in the New Haven and Hamden communities. The program is a powerful tool for advancing educational achievement while also supporting the dignity, connection, and wellbeing of participating seniors.
Our volunteers’ job as tutors is to engage students and help them see that improving is a process, it can be fun, and they will get there. One of our mottos is ‘practice makes permanent.’
The volunteers love seeing the impact tutoring has made. Kids cannot find the magic in books if they feel frustrated. So many say they dislike reading, but it is really the struggle to get the words right … and they feel their friends and classmates are leaving them behind. Once they start to feel confident, their reading worlds and their imaginations expand. Recently one student who is in the program this year told her tutor that “now when she reads aloud in class, no one laughs at her anymore.” A wonderful testament to the program.
Thanks to stewardship from IVCG, tutoring will continue into the next school year, and with community support, for years into the future. We have the use of all the tools the AARP Foundation has to offer as well as on-going guidance and support from the Foundation’s amazing staff.