ScotiaRise bankrolls Hoot Reading’s lessons for young newcomers

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This article was published 02/12/2022 (1277 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With the assistance of ScotiaBank’s $500 million, 10-year program to promote economic resilience in disadvantaged communities, Winnipeg’s Hoot Reading plans to help immigrant families get acclimatized in this country quicker.

Hoot Reading, with the support of the non-profit Talent Lift, will be providing about 3,000 reading lessons to about 200 children of immigrant families.

Hoot Reading has been growing its one-on-one online tutoring business for several years with a catalog of more than 2,000 licensed titles and more than 900 teachers who deliver lessons to students across Canada and the U.S.

One of the focus areas of ScotiaBank’s program — called ScotiaRise — is assisting new Canadians to find meaningful employment which then contributes to the prosperity and social fabric of their communities.

Carly Shuler, co-founder and CEO of Hoot Reading, said they are very proud to be able to be part of a project backed by an entity like ScotiaBank.

“It’s a big piece of work and obviously it will be very impactful with a community that is very important to us,” she said.

Hoot Reading will deliver the lessons and Talent Lift, a non-profit international recruitment agency helping employers source and relocate talent from within refugee populations and helping them obtain visas — will identify the families and children to participate.

Melanie Rodriguez, Hoot Reading’s director of marketing and impact, said that Talent Lift will also make sure that the families who participate have the devices needed to be part of the lessons.

“When we built out partnership one of the the things we did was to make sure there was a budget specifically for technology,” Rodriguez said. “They are able to identify if someone needs an additional device.”

Maria Saros, vice-president and global head of social impact at Scotiabank, said in a statement, “Through ScotiaRise, we are proud to support Hoot Reading and Talent Lift to improve equitable access to experienced teachers, help youth feel at home faster, and improve literacy for new Canadians.”

While it may seem self-evident that reading skills help young children succeed at school and in life, Hoot Reading has invested in research that shows very specifically how that is the case.

Rodriguez said, “Our research shows that students who participate in 15 lessons see measurable and meaningful reading gains.”

The program will have some flexibility but the goal is to give every participant 15 lessons, thus achieving the threshold whereby a meaningful impact will be delivered.

Hoot Reading has grown steadily since forming in 2018. It has attracted important strategic investors — it received one of the first investments from the venture capital fund from toy maker Spin Master in 2019 — and grew significantly through the pandemic.

Although its services require its pupils to have a tablet or some kind of computer — Shuler said lessons are not as impactful over smartphones — the pandemic made it such that devices are nearly ubiquitous.

“One of the silver linings of the pandemic that has happened with children of school age is that almost every child has access to a device from their school if they don’t already have one at the home,” she said.

Shuler could not say specifically what the financial impact would be for Hoot Reading to participate in this project but its normal rate is about $20 per 20-minute lesson.

She said a project like this will have an important impact on a group that needs it most.

“We are on a mission to change children’s lives through literacy,” said Shuler. “We truly are a double bottom-line company. Our financial and social impact outcomes are very closely aligned.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca