Our Story
We are a collective of progressive educators on a mission: sharing and scaling the program we’ve built for (and with!) our students over the last decade, to inspire relevant reading experiences, heartfelt conversations, and instructional breakthroughs in classrooms across the nation.
We wrote Reading with Relevance because we couldn’t find the tool we needed to effectively teach our students. Most of the young people in our classrooms not only came to us two to four years below their grade level, but also with very real social and emotional struggles that sometimes felt more important than school. We came to believe that meeting students’ social and emotional needs was the key to unlocking their academic potential.
Reading with Relevance leverages student interest in highly engaging social and emotional learning activities to develop crucial academic skills: reading fluency, comprehension, and critical thinking. We turn barriers to learning into the very tools that accelerate literacy.
Our Mission
Building
youth capacity for self-empowerment.
Exploring
and reclaiming our histories.
Developing
the skills for self-reflection and empathy.
Engaging
our capacities for love and learning.
Our Impact and Outcomes
Learn about the power of our Reading with Relevance book selections. Janijah reflects on the impact that We Beat the Street made on her thoughts about her future; in her words, "It motivates me more to know if they can do it, I can do it, too."