Love Your City Program is expanding literacy opportunities

By Ruby Fleetwood, sophomore sociology major

Boy with a Ball’s Love Your City program is helping families in Norcross, Georgia access the tools and relationships they need to thrive, starting with building relationships.

At the heart of Love Your City are Walkthroughs, door-to-door visits in underserved neighborhoods to meet families, hear their stories, and understand the challenges they face. From these relationships, small groups are formed, focused on trust and support. In Norcross, one major challenge that emerged was literacy. In response, the tutoring center became the first small group in that community.

Love Your City offers tutoring, literacy-focused summer camps, English classes for parents, and weekly outreach through volunteers.

While the Norcross chapter began in 2017, Love Your City had already been active for years in other parts of the world. In Norcross, tutoring wasn’t based in a center, it started with volunteers working one-on-one with students outside apartment doors and on stairwells. As participation grew, it became a mobile tutoring center, with tables and chairs brought to green spaces every Saturday.

Today, Love Your City runs 12 small groups across two communities, meeting families where they are. While Walkthroughs remain the cornerstone of the program, the Read Write to Lead summer camp has become an essential part of supporting kids and young people during the summer months.

“The program quite literally brings people, community, and resources to people’s doorsteps,” said Maria Bortolucci-Lao, program director for Love Your City. “Love Your City also equips people to reach their dreams and pour the impact they receive out into others around them.”

To support their work, The Deal Center awarded Boy with a Ball our Community Coalition Grant. The grant has enabled the nonprofit to grow its reach, deepen community relationships, and strengthen its existing programs.

 “We saw that small groups like the tutoring center and English Classes for the parents in the community were effective and were growing,” Bortolucci-Lao said. “As we looked into funding from the Deal Center, we saw that their mission and values aligned with what we were fighting towards for these communities”

As the program expands, its long-term impact becomes clear.

“What I love the most about Love Your City is that it's the most countercultural and yet effective way to actually transform an entire city,” Bortolucci-Lao said. “You might begin to see the change in one or two months of engaging them, but after a couple of years of walking with them, you see them accomplishing amazing things… A movement like this becomes exponential because those impacted turn to impact others.”