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The Senate and Assembly both added money in their one-house budgets released earlier this week for Adult Literacy Education. The Senate essentially restored the $1.5 million added last year and the Assembly added $3 million.
In order to keep pressure on the Senate and Assembly to continue to fight for this funding, we are asking programs to tweet a thank you to the Senate and Assembly as well as to our Senate and Assembly champions for their support. In the Senate, the champion is Jessica Ramos and in the Assembly, the champions are Yuh-Line Niou, Ron Kim and Pat Fahy. Following are sample tweets and twitter handles of the targets. Also tweet @NYSA_Majority and don't forget to mention NYCCAL @NYCCAL, and use our state hashtag #LiteracyLiftsNY. Thank you @NYSenate for supporting Adult Literacy Education (ALE) in your one-house. We still need your support to help the 3.5 million New Yorkers (1/4 of our state's adult population) that need adult education. #LiteracyLiftsNY @NYCCAL Thank you <@insertmembername> for championing Adult Literacy Education (ALE) in your one-house budget and fighting for the 3.5 million New Yorkers (1/4 of our state's adult population) that need adult education. #LiteracyLiftsNY @NYCCAL Fill in with below names: @jessicaramos @rontkim @Patriciafahy109 @yuhline Feel free to come up with your own tweets as well.  It's that time of year again to join together for a #LiteracyLiftsNY Day in Albany on Monday, March 4th! We know the beginning of the year is hectic but our decision makers need to hear from YOU and your students! Each year we talk to many elected officials who understand that Adult Literacy is underfunded and the difficulties this causes our community and we need to keep making sure they hear our message! Assembly-member Ron Kim is co-hosting the day with us and will join us and other invited elected officials for a Rally so join us to make sure the other legislators hear our message! Throughout the day we will also meet with legislators about the NYCCAL priorities and make sure they see our faces and understand #LiteracyLifts!
We will be sending out more information in the coming weeks but we wanted to make sure everyone put the date on the calendar so we can maximize participation from programs. It may be too early to let us know the exact number of students and staff that may be able to attend from your program but if you can ballpark, that would be great. If you plan to attend with students please contact Ariel Savransky savranskya@UJAFEDNY.ORG and she will tell you the next steps. If you cannot travel to Albany you can still join in our social media campaign on March 4. Here is a link to how to join: bit.ly/NYCCALSoMeState We anticipate that we will have a bus as we did last year but we are exploring alternative options (smaller vans leaving from different areas of the city) depending on which programs participate. We will update you all as the timing gets closer. Thank you and here’s to getting the $15.3 million this year!  On June 14, the City Council voted to adopt the City’s FY2019 budget, which includes $12m for adult literacy. $8 million will be on the administration’s side, and $4 million will come from the Council. The City Council has actually already made its decisions on the $4m (see document pages 13-14).
It is our understanding that the Administration’s portion is not baselined, but will be targeted to DYCD literacy programs. Note there is no written confirmation of this, and so we will be in touch with DYCD & the Mayor’s Office to encourage the full amount of resources be devoted to that purpose. Thank you for all your hard work and thank you to all the City Council Members who showed us so much support:
 We're at the final push to get $12 million for Adult Education restored and baselined in the New York City Budget. The action for the next four Wednesdays is to post on Twitter and Instagram and make calls to your City Council Members. Make sure to include the hashtag #LiteracyLiftsNYC and mention @NYCCAL in your posts on social media. Below are some materials to help. Lesson Ideas/Materials  Tuesday, April 10th, 10am
Tuesday, April 17th at 10:30 am
Monday, April 23rd at 10:30 am
Wednesday, May 2nd at 10:30 am
Register your group HERE if you plan to attend a rally with an adult education class or program  Nice work NYCCAL! Today we had a successful kick off to our adult literacy tour of the boroughs. Participating in this morning’s rally in Queens were: Chinese American Planning Council, La Guardia CIET, Queens Community House, Make the Road New York, Sunnyside Community Services, the YMCA, and Jacob Riis Neighborhood Settlement. With well over 100 students and supporters in attendance, and five media outlets on hand, including NY1, this was a strong start to our efforts to raise the profile of the issue for the Mayor and City Council.
In fact, just this afternoon the City Council released their response to the Mayor’s Preliminary Budget, and in it they called for the Mayor to baseline his portion ($6m) of the $12m investment from FY2018. You can view their full response here. As an FYI, the Council also called for a new $3m citywide citizenship fund to be administered by MOIA. The funding would be used to support citizenship application fees for households with limited incomes, as well as provide financial literacy classes. A roundup of some of the press we received for our rally in Queens this week: Queens Chronicle, NTD TV, China Press, Times Ledger, & World Journal.
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