In 2019, the Office of Outreach and Engagement awarded seven incentive grants to connect NC State faculty to applied scholarship opportunities in communities. The Outreach and Engagement Incentive Grants Program serves to address significant community challenges by aligning interdisciplinary faculty, their expertise, their students, and their research. Here, we profile one of the 2019 Incentive Grant Awardees.

Dr. Crystal Chen Lee has always had a passion for literacy education. As an assistant professor of English education, she believes that literacy has the power to advance issues of equity, diversity, access, and social justice for all children and youth. She founded the Literacy and Community Initiative (LCI) back in 2017, but it wasn’t until the grant funding in 2019 that LCI began to sustain its mission.

LCI is an interdisciplinary collaboration among the department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences (TELS) in the College of Education, the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, and three youth-serving organizations including Bull City YouthBuild, Juntos NC, and their most recent partnership, CORRAL Riding Academy. 

Dr. Lee didn’t achieve the program’s success alone—back in 2018, she joined forces with Dr. Jose Picart, a professor of counselor education and Deputy Director of the Friday Institute. One of Dr. Picart’s goals with the grant is investigating how participation in the LCI curriculum can contribute to the social and emotional development of youth. Together, Drs. Lee and Picart collaborated and aligned their interests and resources to advance the impact of LCI. 

“We were thrilled to receive the Outreach and Engagement grant because outreach and engagement is the core of what we do,” Dr. Lee shared. Drs. Lee and Picart used the funds to hire “excellent” graduate research assistants who’ve taught the writing curriculum to students and conducted research on the students’ writing process experiences. This “supports our students’ work and sustains collaborative university-community partnership,” Dr. Lee added. 

Since receiving the grant, LCI has sustained its partnerships and built on its new partnership with CORRAL, a non-profit organization that pairs rescued horses with adolescent girls in high-risk situations to provide healing and transformational life change. Additionally, the grant has allowed LCI to develop writing programs in these community organizations for youth to write and advocate for their communities. The girls at CORRAL recently published their own book called “A Leg Up,” and the third cohort of YouthBuild students just published their third book called “See Unbroken Pieces Through the Shadows.”

“The grant allowed us to run year-long programming with our community partner organizations, amplify students’ voices through publishing their writing, and advocate for marginalized youth through sharing their work,” Dr. Lee said. The grant also provides professional development for undergraduate and graduate students who teach the LCI curriculum. “These outcomes were achieved not just through our programming, but also through publishing two student-authored books and two peer-reviewed journal articles in English Teaching: Practice and Critique and Reading Research Quarterly.” 

In addition to the books and articles, LCI’s work was presented at the National Council of Teachers of English annual conference in Baltimore, MD back in November 2019. 

“The grant allowed us to run year-long programming with our community partner organizations, amplify students’ voices through publishing their writing, and advocate for marginalized youth through sharing their work.”

Dr. Crystal Chen Lee

Most recently, COVID-19 has interrupted LCI’s in-person work at the community sites. “We stand alongside our vulnerable communities during this time and are offering as much support as we can that would meet their current needs,” Dr. Lee shared. The pandemic has made LCI start to think of new ways to teach remotely and alter the current teachings. Most importantly, the community-engaged work with the youth has not stopped.

Thank you to Dr. Crystal Chen Lee and Dr. Jose Picart for their collaborative contributions to this article.