Paldies visiem!

Particularly Kristin, Ints un Pierre. Your support helped us have a very rewarding and useful trip and conference in Seattle.

For those who don’t know- our organization (Pro Futuro Latvia) sent two participants to the International Dyslexia Association conference in Seattle at the end of October.

When we got off the plane after a long journey, we were met by Ints Luters and shepherded to our hotel (paldies again!). Edžus (dels un boy with dyslexia) spent two days in Eugene and then came back for youth activities.

The conference itself was great. From a very pragmatic perspective we confirmed two projects with partners who were also there. We are helping Liepajas ped. augst. to bring a teacher of teachers of reading to Latvia in the autumn of 2009 as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Susan Lowell (North Carolina) already has multiple connections to Latvia. She taught teachers at the Kipsala International school a few years ago and the institution she does Masters teaching for (Buffalo State College) has a Latvian/American/Swede/Canadian (Voldemars Innus) as its VP for IT.

I also talked the German dyslexia association into joining us for a youth project (Northern Summer on the Water) for the summer of 2009. Not difficult, since their youth were with us once and loved it.

Also, new projects are on the way. We also made great contacts with larger organizations (Singapore and KUwait) who have promised to share fundraising knowledge with us.

I guess the big news is that we (Pro Futuro) are now Global Partners of International Dyslexia association. This status came with some vetting and certifies basically that we are a real organization and that we believe in evidence based reading instruction.

Of course I learned a jaw-droppingly large amount. Much of my “free”-time in the past two years has been taken up reading about reading and at the conference I got to meet lots of the rock-stars of this world of academic work. We have some new and great contacts in this academic world to help us drive deeper into the LV academic world and perhaps reform LV teaching about teaching.

If anyone is interested in more about us, I have prepared a short vision/mission document that I would be happy to forward. Email me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)