Be the Change: One letter at a time

People said, "Don't do volunteering for the wrong reasons." 
I didn't listen. 
And that ended up changing my life forever. What started as an extracurricular activity to impress colleges ended up becoming a school wide campaign that I run as part of my role of being a Junior City Councillor.

So here is what I did and what you can do to make a difference. #BeTheChange

15 Daily Literacy Examples

In one of my last posts, I talked about the importance of literacy. So here are 15 everyday tasks that require reading and writing:

1. Reading a text or email

1. Checking bank statements

2. Reading the menu at a café

3. Following a recipe

4. Reading subtitles while watching a movie (we've all done it)

5. Writing notes to study for a test (We should be doing this one)

The Importance of Literacy

Think about what brought you here today—to this post, this page.
You probably opened a search engine, typed in a few words, and clicked a title that caught your eye.

But let’s go a little deeper.
To type those words, you needed to know them. To choose this post, you needed to read the title. And to get this far, you’ve needed to read every line.

You needed to read.

Reading has been embedded in human life for centuries. Today, over 4,000 languages exist in written form. But writing isn’t just a modern development—ancient civilizations also created scripts to communicate, preserve, and innovate.

• The Ancient Egyptians developed hieroglyphics around 3100 BCE.

• The Indus Valley Civilization developed the Indus script around 2600 BCE.

• The Chinese Civilization introduced the Oracle Bone Script by 1200 BCE.

These are just a few examples. Many of these scripts evolved over time—for instance, the Oracle Bone Script influenced the Chinese characters still used today.

Written language often emerged out of necessity. Classical Latin, primarily a written form, was used in Roman literature, law, and oratory. Meanwhile, Vulgar Latin—the everyday spoken version—eventually evolved into the Romance languages we know today: Spanish, French, Italian, and more.

This shows how deeply literacy has shaped civilizations.
So why would that change now, 2000+ years later?
Why should we stop caring about literacy today?

There’s no reason.

Reading and writing have become so normalized in our world that we often forget how powerful they truly are. But as action-education.org points out, 773 million adults cannot read. To put that into perspective: there are around 5.26 billion adults in the world. That means 14% of adults today are illiterate.

Now, think back to how you got here. How much reading did that require?

To make use of education, you need to study. And to study, you need to read.

Most jobs require reading and writing just to apply. Many require degrees—which in turn require years of schooling. How can someone get a degree if they couldn’t finish school because they couldn’t read in the first place? And even if they could, how would they afford it?

So the cycle continues.

Literacy affects the poverty cycle.
Literacy affects employment.
Literacy affects the world.

Literacy is more than just words on a page. Literacy is power.

So the next time you ask why you have to learn a language at school, when you complain about that essay you need to write, or when you're told to read a book for class—
remember this:

Literacy is a gift that 14% of people in the world don’t have.