If you’ve been paying attention to the various team members and consultants we’ve profiled on this site, you might get the feeling that it’s an organization comprised entirely of word nerds—people with several advanced degrees in applied linguistics, who probably spend their free time traveling to global Scrabble competitions—sometimes just as spectators… and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. SIL LEAD does tend to attract a certain kind of person, and even those of us who don’t hold doctorates in parsing phonemes and matriculating morphemes (or whatever it’s called) are still lovers of words…

“Reading is a bridge from misery to hope.”

This quote is emblazoned across the top of the Literacy & Development Through Partnership (LDP) home page, but it would be a mistake to take it as an invitation to view the literacy work of LDP in salvific, colonial terms. To say that here, again, is an organization stepping into someone else’s culture and offering to build a bridge from their misery to our hope.

LDP is not an outside organization…

Those words jumped to mind when we considered the IBT Torwali proposal for our 2019 Community Based Language Development grant program. This forward-thinking community initiative brings traditional folk tales in the Torwali language into the digital age by creating comics that can not only be shared via print media, but also easily distributed by cell phone. And that’s just the start…

What if the children in your community wanted to read, but there just weren’t enough reading materials available in the language they speak and understand—what would you do to change that? 

For Bi She (pictured here on the left, in the yellow shirt), the manager of one of our 2019 Community-Based Language Development (CBLD) projects, that was exactly the challenge she faced…

Do you love your language? Your community? Your world? Well, do we have an opportunity for you!

Our passion at SIL LEAD is to help local, community-based organizations use their own languages to improve their quality of life. Last year we piloted a new Community-Based Language Development grants program with several organizations, with amazing results!

This year we’ve opened up the process for a new batch of applicants, and from now until Christmas Day, 2019, all donations to the CBLD program (up to a total of $5,000) will be matched by one of our generous board members…