Malvern Family Resource Centre example essay topic

Malvern Family Resource Centre is located in northeast Scarborough servicing the twelve neighborhoods of Malvern. In February of 1983, the Malvern Resource Centre was opened. The Malvern Resource Centre has overcome many obstacles to get where they are today. Only one year after being opened, the resource centre's funding ended and was run by volunteers of the community center.

Since the beginning of the resource centre's history, the people of Malvern have helped to keep this community center alive, by volunteering their personal time to help the center function appropriately. After two years of fighting strong, The Malvern Family Resource Centre began to receive funding again, from the United Way. By 1993, the community center was moved into its own space. The Malvern Resource center is committed to meeting the needs and diversity of the Malvern Community through advocacy and delivery of accessible, effective programs and activities. The main goal of the Malvern Family Resource Centre (MFRC) is to offer the greater community of Malvern, services that are free of charge. They offer assistance with legal aid, an ID clinic and counseling.

MFRC provides social, recreational, and educational programs and services within a supportive and safe environment. MFRC also tries to involve and encourage community participation through outreach efforts. They also provide current and appropriate community resource information and referral service. Literacy in Canada has become a major problem in past few years. Ontario has started provincial testing for each grade to help to cut the numbers down but many of the children have a literacy problem before they take the test and this does not offer much help to them. The results for these tests are very low in specific areas in Ontario specifically Scarborough.

Teachers are trying to prepare the children before they take the test but there is only so much of guidance one teacher can provide for each student in a class of 30 students. The MFRC helps to reduce this problem by offering tutoring, ESL classes and reading sessions 5 days a week. Students from any school in or out of the neighborhood are welcome to drop in and receive the help they need, whether it is a calculus question or a question on Shakespeare. The MFRC has many tutors at the center daily always willing to help. The dictionary defines literacy as "the ability to read and write". Many children in Canada are unable to read and write, and these are not only children who have come from a third world country for a second chance at life and to gain freedom, these are children who have lived in Canada all their life but neglected to ever ask for help or never received help when they started reading.

Research has found that a strong predictor of literacy development is phonological awareness. "Phonological awareness refers to the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structure of an utterance (e. g., into words, syllables, or sounds) as distinct from its meaning. Children need to develop this awareness to make sense of an alphabetic script, such as English, when learning to read and spell". (Stackhouse, 1997, p. 157) Perhaps the stronger predictors of literacy development are later developing phonological awareness skills like sound segmentation and manipulation. When children demonstrate difficulty with phonological awareness, as do many children with spoken language problems, they are at higher risk of difficulty in literacy related skills like reading and spelling. Some clues that a child may have literacy difficulty in reading and / or spelling are: .

The child is not progressing from reading words as visual wholes to breaking the words down into their sounds... The child fails to segment the word into syllables and syllables into sounds. Spelling attempts may seem bizarre... The child has difficulty in rhyme detection and particularly, rhyme production... The child has difficulty with sound blending.

The Malvern Family Resource Centre have many sponsors that make it a viable agency but is mostly funded by The United Way of Greater Toronto, The City Of Toronto (Parks and Recreation, Children Services, Breaking the Cycle of Violence) and Human Resources Development of Canada. The goals of MFRC are to continuously administrate a Family Resource Centre, to recruit, train and effectively involve volunteers to support ongoing activities and functions at the center, and to operate a financially viable Centre that is accountable to the funders and the community at large. Other goals MRF C strives for are providing social, recreational and educational programs and services within a supportive and safe environment which promotes the well being of the community, to encourage and actively participate in networking and partnership initiatives, and to operate a financially viable Centre that is accountable to the funders and the community at large. The MFRC strives to help children with literacy problems, and offer particular programs directed at specific cultures to help children feel more comfortable in the environment. The main goal of this organization is to assist the youth in Malvern through educational and social services and off the greater community services that are free of charge i.e. legal aid, ID clinic and counseling. The Malvern Family Resource Centre consists of a 10 person staff and has on average four to ten volunteers a day.

All together MFRC has over 200 volunteers. Volunteers are provided with equal time to help out at the resource center according to their school and work schedule. Many activities take part each day and no volunteer is gone unnoticed or unappreciated. The community center is open 5 days a week and counselors are always willing to discuss anything that is going on in their lives. Youth related assemblies on anti-violence, cultural shows, and seasonal assemblies, are just some examples of the activities that are run at the resource center. The MFRC also offers workshops / programs on childcare, parenting, parent / child drop-ins and discussions for people of the Malvern community.

Other activities are focused on reading and writing such as plays, poetry nights, and plays take place so children are able further their experience of different forms of writing and expressing their feelings. The Malvern Resource center is run according on the nature of activity and the student's schedule. It is mainly based on interest i.e. ECC- early childhood education; the volunteer is placed in child related programs. The Malvern Family Resource Centre assists to cut down the amount of literacy in Scarborough, by offering programs and tutorials for children, free of charge, whenever they need the help. Many of the tutors speak more than one language and this benefits children because it also cuts down on the communication barrier that sometimes exists, between tutors and children. The resource center helps to distinguish the specific problem by having the children read different books and articles and then based on the difficulty they find with each level, each tutor is able to evaluate and then assist the child with one- on- one help.

The Malvern Family Resource Centre also takes occasional trips to the library with students, so they are able to identify some other sources that can help them overcome their problem. These trips are planned well in advance to give the children time to discuss it with their parents, and sometimes to gain a little anticipation from the children. Fliers, posters and volunteers go around the Malvern neighborhood, with information and notices, so people in the neighborhood are able to locate the resource center and so people can gain knowledge of the programs that are offered at the centre.