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3 tips on nominations for the Dollar General Afterschool Literacy Award

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3 tips on nominations for the Dollar General Afterschool Literacy Award

After two years of reading nominations for the Dollar General Afterschool Literacy Award, the staff at the Afterschool Alliance has learned a lot about the work accomplished by the afterschool field. We’ve seen students becoming reporters and editors in a Dane County, Wisconsin, afterschool program that focuses on publishing student-run newspapers for the area. We’ve discovered an afterschool program in Atlanta, Georgia, that works with the area’s immigrant and refugee population, providing one-on-one support and a literacy curriculum designed for English language learners to ensure that students are academically prepared to enter high school.

We’ve also learned the qualities shared by strong nomination forms, and the mistakes commonly made by nominators. For these reasons, as well as to help answer frequently asked questions about the Dollar General Afterschool Literacy Award (still accepting nominations!), we hosted a webinar on Nov. 10. In the webinar, we shared insights on the award process, answered audience questions, and offered tips to filling out the nomination form. 

The call for nominations doesn’t close until Dec. 16, so you still have time to nominate a program!  Here are three tips to consider from the webinar before getting started:

1. Be an advocate for your program.

How can you differentiate your program from the other programs that are being nominated? Think about how your program is helping meet the needs of your students, parents and/or community. Is there something about the community the program serves that should be highlighted? Is there strong data that demonstrates the positive impact of the program? There are a number of open-ended questions in the nomination form; use each question as an opportunity to highlight for reviewers the role that the program is playing to help its students. Be an advocate for your program and make the strongest case possible to help reviewers recognize its value.

2. Think about relevancy.

When answering questions in the nomination form, don’t forget to think about how your answers relate back to the award’s theme of literacy, as well as the specific area of focus, which this year is afterschool and summer learning programs that are providing literacy support to English language learner students.  

3. Draft, edit and review…and then review again.

Download the nomination form first in order to review the questions and draft your answers first before filling out the nomination form online. We suggest doing this for a few reasons. The first is that you can’t save your answers and go back to them at a later time through the online submission form that we use. The second is that it’s always helpful to see if your answers fit together in a cohesive narrative about the nominated program and fully answer questions about the program. The third reason, which may seem minor but is an important one, is to catch spelling and grammatical errors.

The webinar included a few other tips, but if you missed it, don’t worry! You can tune into a recording of the webinar anytime, as well as download helpful resources about the award, including questions included in the nomination form and a Q&A sheet addressing commonly asked questions.

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