HELPING SCHENECTADY’S CHILDREN REACH THEIR POTENTIAL

Meet Daily Point of Light Award honoree Al Magid. Read his story, and nominate an outstanding volunteer or family as a Daily Point of Light.

At 87 years young, Al Magid is toying with the idea of retiring from all of his work in a few years. But until then, he’s still going strong with community involvement.

Over the years, Al’s wife Sally, a retired teacher, had long encouraged him to volunteer. When Al read a story in the local newspaper that detailed how poorly many Schenectady children did on literacy tests, the retired professor chose to take action. In December 2012, Al founded the Reading is Fun Program to assist Pre-K through Grade 3 students in the city’s elementary schools to attain critical grade-level literacy skills.

The program recruits, trains and supports reading partners to mentor the students weekly for 30-minute sessions, during which they read and discuss books, play games that focus on literacy and develop conversational skills. The children are also provided with a new book to bring home each week, helping them build up a home library of their own.

As the founder and executive director of the organization, Al mentored for two years. However, his role now is primarily of a larger scope, overseeing the organization’s tremendous accomplishments, of which there have been many. As a result of the program’s establishment back in 2012, over 8,000 books have been distributed to Schenectady’s children, 225 students have passed through the program and over 100 volunteers have worked with the program, completing more than 7,500 volunteer hours. In the next few years, Al plans to step back from the organization and let it continue to run successfully with someone else taking the helm.

Al and the team at the Reading Is Fun Program know that literacy is an essential building block of a brighter future. By helping the youth of Schenectady reach their potential, Al is preparing these children to become the best version of themselves that they can be. His journey is a powerful example of how volunteerism changes the lives of young people every day.

Tell us about your volunteer role with the Reading Is Fun Program.

I oversee everything that goes on in the program, partly because of the nature of the title and partly because that’s me. My personality is that I’m a fly on the wall. I’m a very curious person. I’m engaged in a wide range of interests. I average about 60 hours a month on the program, but probably longer than that. I work hard on it. I am also the chair of our leadership team, and in that role, I do a lot of leading, very democratically. For two years, I mentored myself. I do a lot of public speaking. I write letters and articles for the local newspaper and local media. In a sense, my name is synonymous with the program. I think the program needs a face, and I’m the face.

What inspired you to get started with this initiative?

I had long had an interest in volunteerism. It goes back to kindergarten, when I was a volunteer tutor to some of my classmates. I was a pretty proficient reader at 5 and a half, so I did volunteer work through tutoring. But in 2012, our local newspaper, The Daily Gazette, had a front-page article reporting on literacy data collected via testing by the New York State Education Department. My wife, Sally, had been a retired teacher for over 20 years. She had been urging me to volunteer. I immediately turned to Sally and said I had my project. It troubled me that the scores were so low. It led me to found the Reading is Fun program.

What are your long-term plans or goals for the organization?

I’m playing with the idea of retiring three years from now. That’ll make 15 years with the organization. It’s time for somebody else to step in, so my long-term plan is to not be involved, at least not in any official way. We’ve grown to a point now where, typically in a year, we’ll have 100 or more volunteers working with 250 or more children in all eleven elementary schools, and we continue to build on that.

What’s been the most rewarding part of your work?

Well, it’s going to sound terribly egoistic, and I don’t mean it in that way, but having started the program, I feel very, very good about it. As I said, I’ve long been interested in volunteerism. I considered other possibilities in my first 10 years from retirement, and they didn’t work out for me. I didn’t start them. This is important work. There are 25 million people in this country who are functionally illiterate. It profoundly upsets me to think that the country, with all its skills, could have 25 million people, most of them of school age, who can’t read.

What have you learned through your experiences as a volunteer?

As a volunteer myself, it’s a very tough job, largely because of the population we’re dealing with. We deal with people whose families don’t have English as a first language. They speak only Arabic, Spanish or Haitian Patois at home.

Why is it important for others to get involved with causes they care about?

I think it’s important that, if for no other reason, it militates against an understandable predisposition to be self-oriented. In our program, we are other-oriented and not self-oriented. I’m out of Schenectady, New York, where every child is everyone’s child. I believe that I’m highly motivated by the notion that your child is my child. Not my biological child. You can be sure that for the betterment of that child going into and through adulthood, society at large has to hold them to the highest standards and try to fulfill the expectations and attach to those standards. That’s what we’re about.

Any advice for people who want to start volunteering?

If such a group does not exist in your community, give serious thought to starting it up. Give serious thought to joining it and, from within, do good work and hopefully expand and enlarge, and make that group even more effective.

What do you want people to learn from your story?

Age-wise, you’re never too old. Most of our people are retirees. Some have a teaching background, but some have no background in education. We never use the words “succeeding” and “failing” in our program. We never fail. It’s not grade school. You don’t get an A, B, C, or D. If we fall on our faces, we get it wrong. We get up, we dust ourselves off. We said, “What went wrong?” And “Why is it worth fixing?” And then, ”Let’s try to fix it.”

Do you want to make a difference in your community like Al? Find local volunteer opportunities.