Voices of Freedom - Interview with Laura Sumner-Coon

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

An Interview with Laura Sumner-Coon, Executive Director of Racine Literacy Council (RLC) It might seem counterintuitive for leaders of nonprofit organizations to try to work themselves out of their jobs. Yet our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom believes that should in fact be their goal. Laura Sumner-Coon, Executive Director of Racine Literacy Council (RLC), has spent her career starting and leading organizations that are driven to help individuals build better lives. As she shares on this episode, non-profits should not be afraid to work themselves out of existence. It’s an approach Sumner-Coon carries with her at RLC, an organization that supports the literacy needs of residents who seek to reach their full potential and become engaged citizens. Topics Discussed on this Episode: Laura’s experience working with non-profits and in education reform Why she started, and decided to shut down Racine SOAR, an organization that helped parents and schools navigate the area’s first parental choice program RLC’s importance to an industrial community like Racine The circumstances of those who use RLC’s services, how it helps them achieve their goals, and how they become more engaged citizens The extent of RLC’s reach beyond its brick-and-mortar building RLC’s 60th anniversary and its future plans Laura Sumner-Coon started out her career as a reporter and editor for various newspapers, including the former Milwaukee Journal and the Journal Times. She then held communication and development roles with the Racine Dominican Sisters and from there, began a career in education reform, including founding and leading a grassroots effort to establish the first parental choice program in Racine, Wisconsin. She has also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in the teacher preparation program.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. Ever since the country's founding, people throughout the world have been inspired by the American Dream. Regardless of one's background, whether it's building a company or discovering an invention

or just living a better life, it is really very possible because of the freedoms afforded under our Constitution. Yet there are numerous, sometimes difficult steps along the way, as we all know, to making dreams come true. And many of our fellow citizens face challenging circumstances. That's where the institutions of civil society play such a critical role. The most unassuming places, libraries, churches, local associations, really can open a world of opportunity to those that have few resources.

Racine Literacy Council is one of those organizations that has made a big impact on the community it serves. Laura Sumner-Coon is Executive Director of Racine Literacy Council and they're a Bradley Foundation grantee. She joins me to discuss its work. Welcome Laura, it is wonderful to have you. Thank you, it's wonderful to be here. I look forward to discuss its work. Welcome, Laura. It is wonderful to have you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.

I look forward to having our discussion. Absolutely. Well, let's jump in, Laura, and let's start with you. Let's talk a little bit about your background. You've done a lot of things. You've been in journalism. You've done faith-based work. You've done education work.

Talk to us about your career, and don't forget to talk about how you became interested in education reform. Sure. Actually, I don't think of myself as having a career. I've pretty much been driven by who I am and my love for education really stems from my own experience and my own education as a child. I grew up in Waukesha County in a small town of Big Bend. I went to a very tiny Catholic school where we had 17 people in our class.

It was so small, we had two grades learning at the same time, but I had some incredible teachers there. And I think the foundational educational lesson for me was to be a critical thinker and to be somebody who craves to know and to feed curiosity with exploration. And the sisters who taught me at that school certainly did that. And I think in my own experience as an instructor at Parkside in the past that feeding that curiosity and asking questions, thinking of the questions to ask, listening to answers is essential to learning anything. And they would spend a time, an hour every week, letting us learn about the events of the day, controversial subjects, many of them still very controversial

today. And they would say, if you have an idea about this, or you have a certain way of thinking about this, stand up next to your desk. And we would spend an hour listening to each other, just going up and down the rows, saying what we thought. And we couldn't say that's a horrible idea or I that's awful. You're we couldn't criticize. We had to think about it respectfully.

And if we had a counter to that idea, we would share it. To me, that's the heart of education. Finding information, trying to ferret out what is appropriate and what is true in the time that we're standing in and being able to have a respectful intellectual conversation about it so that we can all live in the world responsibly. And that's pretty much led my whole career. There's not enough of that going on these days, is there? In your view?

No, there's not enough going on. You know, my first professional career was as a journalist and I love my journalism background because it fits right into that philosophy, right? A curiosity to know, trying to ferret out the fit truth, listening to people with different perspectives, and being able to bring it to the public because the public has a right to know, because we all live in society together.

So from that grew a desire to really open education to other people in other ways. I'm a strong supporter of public schools, but I'm also a very strong supporter of choice. And I think as a kid of blue collar workers who didn't have much education, to be able to attend a private Catholic school was really important to my parents and certainly in my formation. And I don't think economics should bar somebody from doing that.

And I think one of the things that people forget is that those institutions of learning that are sponsored by religious organizations are very much supported by the public also through donation that offsets tuition, by nonprofit churches that are trying to be responsible in their teaching as well. And even online learning has a very important place in our world as we learn during COVID. So I'm a huge advocate for all kinds of sound education.

Anybody should be able to learn and that's kind of what led me here to the Racine Literacy Council. We are working mostly with adults who didn't have those opportunities or who didn't recognize those opportunities when they were younger. Well, let's go there. I mean, what, what kind of person, what, what needs would a person have to want to come to Racine Literacy Council? We really define literacy with a capital L, right? Literacy is defined by any knowledge that you really need in the world today to navigate your life. So you have to really think about it.

If you want to take a vacation, what steps do you have to have in order to do that? First of all, you have to have a little knowledge of the world around you and where you might want to visit. Second of all, in this day and age, you need to be able to use a computer. You need to be able to read. You need to be able to search things on a computer. You book your flights that way. You book your hotels that way. You book a rental car that way. And if you don't have those essential skills of reading and navigating your way through a computer, you're not fully engaged in the world.

How to follow your children's education. Just about every school talks about the parents gateway to knowing what their children are learning is through a computer app that they need to know how to use. So literacy stretches the gamut. So it might be a person who wants to come to us because they need computer skills to engage fully in the world. It might be somebody who comes to us because they do not read and write well. And they really need to know how to do that to do anything in our world.

It might be somebody who really wants to enter the trades, but of course, the last math class that they had was when they were a kid and they hardly remember anything and, and they want to beef up their math so they can pass an Accuplacer test that will get them into technical college, into a trade program. We have people who have come here from around the world in all different circumstances who need to learn to read and write and speak English,

and we serve them too. We serve families because in Racine, our educational attainment is pretty low. In our county about 10% of the citizens over 25 have not graduated from high school and about half of those people have less than a ninth grade education. So we can see how the dominoes fall, right? That if you are a parent that doesn't have and is ill-equipped to read and write well, to have very few math skills, who hasn't had a foundational high school education,

it is very difficult to help your children. And these are hardworking people who are working, oftentimes, what we consider essential jobs during COVID. You know, a lot of manual labor, a lot of factory jobs, a lot of hard physical, physically hard jobs, and they have families and then they go take care of their children after school. But they are driven and they come here at night to learn, and they want to learn so that they have a better opportunity for their whole family. So we decided to start a family literacy program and that's now including children.

And we do that at three sites in Racine County and we're trying to lift the whole family. So from every perspective, those are the people who come to us. Let's put this in context for our audience. We have listeners all over the country. They may not be familiar with Racine, Wisconsin. Racine is a relatively small city located along the shores of Lake Michigan. It's about 30 miles south of Milwaukee. And in many ways, it's typical of industrial towns across the country that have weathered and faced a lot of challenges. It was a big manufacturing town at one time.

It's less so now than it was. And again, similar to a lot of places all over the country. There've been a lot of demographic changes in the city of Racine. Talk to us more about why an organization such as yours is particularly important for a place like Racine. an organization such as yours is particularly important for a place like Racine. There are similar organizations all over Wisconsin, all over the country. In fact, we're celebrating our Seventh Birthday this year in 2025.

And we grew out of the passion of one woman who actually belonged to a Baptist church. She also belonged to a greater network of church women. This is back in 1965. She learned of Frank Laubach, who was a missionary and who had developed a way to teach people to read, write and speak English. His, at that time, he was noting that there were many people coming to the industrial areas of the United States for manufacturing jobs who had been denied education or never really had a sound education to learn.

And she was really driven by this. So she got her neighbors and friends to do this and to teach their neighbors. And so there are 70 literacy organizations in Wisconsin and there are 70 literacy organizations in Wisconsin, and there are many literacy organizations all over the country. Grew out of Frank Lawbox teaching an organization now called ProLiteracy. And many of us use our neighbors. We train volunteers who think they have knowledge to share with each other. We train them to teach their neighbors.

And it's magical in all of these places because what happens is you are sitting down one-on-one or with a small group of people and you're talking about life. You're talking about the reading, the writing, the knowledge that you need to navigate the world today. And you start to learn about the lives of the people around you. And then you start to fall in love with them.

We have tutors and students who have worked together for a very long time, and that's the essential fabric to a strong community. So I do think the byproduct of all of these literacy councils is growing a stronger community. Interesting. Let's step back for a little bit. You founded an organization called Racine SOAR a number of years ago. What did that organization do? How is that one different than this one?

Oh, it had a different mission. I moved into SOAR with a small group of people. We decided to start that nonprofit organization. Previously to that, I had been involved in starting a small Catholic middle school with a number of really frontier thinkers at the time who said there should be a private school that has opportunities for children who live in poverty. And we ran that school until the bubble burst in 2009 and we were forced to close because

at that time raising money from philanthropers and individual people in corporations was the only way that school survived. And Racine is a very small city and it didn't have the bandwidth to be able to support that by itself. After having that experience and that school was phenomenal. In fact, yesterday I was just with a young woman who had been a student in the school, now a mom herself with children, and she was volunteering with me. Anyhow, that school was about a third white, a third Hispanic, a third African American. It reflected very much the neighborhood of Racine. And after having that experience and seeing what it did for the families in that school,

I thought we can't give that up. And so did some of our supporters. So we started scholarship opportunity and access in Racine or SOAR of Racine. And we, uh, it was initially a scholarship organization. I was raising scholarships for students to attend, uh, other private schools in our community of their choice that their parents wish them to go to. It had a different philosophy. I wasn't just another scholarship organization. In order to participate, the schools that were looking to serve those students, but didn't have the ability

or the financial ability to do so, also didn't necessarily have the experience of working with those students. And so what they had to commit to in order to have students from SOAR was to do some professional development with us to understand the needs of the students that they were looking to serve and how they could best serve them with dignity and respect and growing their potential and their ability and also working with families. And in order to become a SOAR participating school, they had to be willing to have us work with families and form kind of a tripod of support for the students, with the teachers and the administration of the school, the parents, and us. And we met quarterly with the parents to find out what's going on. And what happens a lot in those instances is that teachers will tell you everything that's wrong with your kid in school,

but they don't listen to the parents about what are the gifts that child has. And there's so much more to life than reading and writing and math. And oftentimes those passions that we have for art, for sports, for music, or something else, social studies, fuels the other part of learning that we need to survive. And so we felt that was very important. We could only handle a number, a small number of students, because once we gave them a scholarship, we had to carry them through their education. So we had 10 scholarships in the short time that we were

around and we carried people through graduation in high school in many of those instances successfully. And we really worked to increase the understanding with 10 schools that were part of that network about what kind of wraparound services are necessary when you're working with families who are disadvantaged in many different ways, and how to forge those family relationships. And during that time, there became an opportunity for Racine to push to be included in the parental school choice program. And I was a very big advocate of that because our little organization, we could carry 10 children, right? And there are thousands in Racine who wanted other opportunities.

But when you were running the middle school, you weren't receiving any funds from the state. Is that correct? No, no. It was all private. So this is preschool choice. So in the state of Wisconsin, there's a long established school choice program, There's a long established school choice program whereby charter schools and choice schools, often religious schools, receive money from the state. Less than the public schools get, but still money.

But when you started, none of that happened. So all the fundraising had to be you. Right. And we were raising about $800,000 a year, which is a lot of money in Racine to come from the pockets of everyday people and some of the few nonprofit organization funders that knew of us. And in Racine, we're between Chicago and Milwaukee. There are a lot of needs in Chicago and Milwaukee, and we don't often get recognized.

And then we have many cities around the country that are just like us, where there aren't deep philanthropic pockets to help us out, but we have all the problems, all the same issues, all the same needs that a city like Milwaukee or Chicago would have. And so when that became a possibility, our mission shifted a little bit. a possibility. Our mission shifted a little bit, it soared. To be able to educate the schools about what was available if we were to have school choice here. That in fact, it required a lot in order to participate. You had to have sound financial bookkeeping practices. You had to have educated people who were teaching. They had to be able to, you had to be a credentialed school. You had to have educated people who were teaching. They had to be able to, you had to be a credentialed school. You had to have people who had back at least bachelor's

degrees teaching. And there were many regulations that somebody entering the choice program would need to have. And many of these schools were small. They didn't have the administrative power to be able to do that. So the need that I saw was for us to be supportive of learning all those requirements, learning the sound financial systems needed to participate in the program, learning how to attract the best talent, learning to teach them about wraparound services. And so we shifted our attention to that kind of administrative support and professional development during that time. And I took thousands of choice applications from parents the first couple years, because we were doing it for those schools.

And after that, you meet with many, many, many wonderful, beautiful families who say, I just want my child to have this opportunity. I didn't have this opportunity. I'll never forget one February because that's when school choice applications opened in Wisconsin. There was a snowstorm and I had an office in a small building in Racine that didn't, it wasn't handicapped accessible because typically it was just me meeting there. And schools were closed but the deadline was coming up and there were these two parents

that were intent on applying for school choice for their children. And the mother was in a wheelchair. And I didn't expect them, they just showed up at the door and the man had carried his wife's wheelchair with her in it all the way up the stairs to be able to meet with us. And they just wanted that opportunity. Everyone should have that opportunity

for wherever they want to go. And I work with many retired public school teachers who volunteer to help us who are incredible. It doesn't have to be a dichotomy, right? There is not a one size fits all for education. It's a very individual process. And that's the case here for us too. We listen to the needs of the individual that walks in front of us and says, what is it that you really want to learn? You're here to learn, but you're here to learn for something. Oh, it might be that they have a business idea. It might be that they want to be a welder.

It might be that they want to be able to understand what their children's needs are. Essential to know if you're teaching somebody. And so I feel that that was a very strong need in our community at the time. And as that program grew and the schools grew comfortable and knowledgeable and stronger with now having support to educate the children who were coming to them in those private schools, they had the administrative bandwidth to carry on by themselves. I feel that every nonprofit organization should be trying to work themselves out of a job. So actually I went to our top funders and I said, they know now they're doing great work.

They don't really need us. I don't feel like we should, like many organizations do, have a little bit of mission drift and get carried away, let's plan to close. And that's what we did in 2017. Which is virtually unheard of in the nonprofit world. Congratulations. It should be the goal.

It should be the goal. You know, if I'm going to be a good steward of money from people who invest in what we're doing. I shouldn't try to find programs that renaming a program or creating a program so that somebody funds us and we keep the stream of income coming. That's not the goal. The goal is the mission. If you can find a way to network with other people to create a solution to that mission,

we should be doing that. So we're very much create, I'm very much a collaborator. Clearly, you're being somewhat modest too, and you won't ever say it, but school choice in the city of Racine probably would not have happened but for the efforts of you and your organization. You've made a difference in a lot of kids' lives, and thank you for that. Well, thank you. Well, let's go back to RLC. Again, consistent with what you just said, I think you believe that enabling people to become more engaged citizens by investing in their community and

really gaining an understanding of the foundational principles of this country is important. And it's been a focus of RLC. Why do you think having informed citizens is important? Goes back to that seventh grade lesson every week, right? Um, that I had. Unless you know what's happening in the world around you, how can you help shape your community and you you help shape your community? And you want to shape your community, otherwise you're just a victim of it, right? You can take the stance of that the community happens around me and I

just have to live in it and adjust to whatever happens. Or you can help shape the way the world is. And I think everyone would say they would like that opportunity to shape the world around them. And for me everyone would say they would like that opportunity to shape the world around them. And for me, that's what a just world is. It has to have the voice of everybody. It has to have the inclusion of everybody. I'm very much grounded in sociology in the sense that we all have the social, economic, and other capital in our lives only through our own experiences and what has come our way and what has been open to us. We see the world only through experience. And so if you've been denied experiences or you

don't know what is in your community and that's anybody, then you're only seeing a sliver of the possibility. You're only seeing a sliver of what reality is. And right now, I can't tell you how important that is to me. I am very much grounded in my own Catholic social teaching, which says everyone has dignity. Everybody deserves to fill their potential. And we really have an obligation to walk with each other. And so that's where we are. And so for me, even as torn as our country has been in the last couple of years with politics, I think there is across the board necessary teaching about what the Constitution is, how

our government works, and how you can play a part in it. Because without that, we stand to lose what we have in the richness of the Constitution. And so being able to read and write, being able to think critically, being able to have a voice and speak the language and the land that you live in, being able to learn about possibilities and being able to have sparks of ingenuity of your own that you know you have in your heart doesn't happen without those community conversations. So many, many gifted people who maybe don't have a way to express what their ideas and their ideas may be transformative for a whole community and we need to unleash them.

You can think about that in any inventor, right? Any entrepreneur who has got something that the rest of us need, we have to help give them the platform to be able to tell us about it and benefit from it. So for all those reasons, right? We're in this together. Yes. You've talked about the importance of community and maybe we've lost some of that. Maybe it's technology. People get buried in their phones. But there's more work to be done there. Now I think your organization is more than just teaching people to read better and to

adjust to the needs of this world. Your organization is a place where people socialize. They celebrate. They come together. It's more than just your core mission. And does that get at this need to have a stronger community? Oh yeah, it sure does. And in a very micro and macro way, right?

So when we train tutors, people come to us with tons of experience. They're adults who have lived their lives. They have knowledge galore, whether they're a learner or whether they're a tutor. And so when we talk about sitting down with another adult to teach them, either if they're looking for a GED or they're looking to beef up their math skills,

they come to you as a person with experiences and other ideas. And to be able to sit down and talk about that to make learning relevant is really, really important. And then that's where the heart of those community discussions come. Because then the learner comes saying, oh, you recognize I'm not a blank slate.

I don't know nothing. I come to you with a life perspective and my dreams and my hopes, and I want to share them with you. And that happens here. We get a level of understanding among people that is just phenomenal. I think it's so important and they teach each other. And even especially in this new family literacy program that we have, we are building that kind of family relationship within the family.

So parents come with their children once a week for two hours. And the first half hour, we do a literacy building activity. That's fun, but it also engages them in discussion. Like, you know, we'll play scat-togories of your favorite pastimes or fruits or movies or and then why and how. And so you start to see that happen not only within the family that's gathered there to learn together, but we also say to our volunteer tutors in that program, sit at the table with them and share also. And then pretty soon we're all learning together, we're all laughing together, we understand

things together, and it is a microcosm of what our community should be for CERN. Laura, you mentioned earlier that this is the 60th anniversary of Racine Literacy Council. What are the plans to celebrate the big event and what are the future plans for your fantastic organization? Yeah, well you know, probably like a literacy council, what are the plans to celebrate the big event and what are the future plans for your fantastic organization? Yeah, well, you know, probably like a lot of nonprofit organizations, you know, a lot of us are focused on survival and doing what we have to do to get there. And so sometimes we're probably not as attentive to our history as we should be.

So we did a lot of digging around to find records because, you know, we, maybe all of us in nonprofit aren't very good record keepers of our own history. Um, and to discover people like Margaret McIntosh, who actually was the woman who started, uh, the literacy council. So I engaged, uh, we have a youth apprentice involved in our family and literacy program who's in the interbaccalaureate program at Case High School here in Racine. She loved what she was doing so much, she went back to her classmates to tell them,

and there is a global scholars part of their international baccalaureate that they need. And she got her teachers and her whole class involved. And there's a small group of 10 of those students who are looking at building a timeline of our history from every decade, essential people for us. So we're going to lift those people up. We have a celebration at Festival Hall, March 8th from 5 to 9 PM. We'll have a meal. We'll have a birthday party.

There will be birthday games. We have a lot of stuff that nonprofits do, like silent auctions and 50-50 raffles and all that kind of thing, and asking people for support. It's a free event, but we ask people to make a firm commitment to attend because we want to make, we feed them. And we want to make sure that they're coming to us knowing what our mission is and that either they want to support us somehow or they want to be a tutor or they deserve to be recognized as a student or a tutor or board member in the past or present. And so we plan to do all of those things and it's a great celebration but it's a great reminder of where we came from and kind of where we should launch forward. In the future more of the same?

to launch forward. In the future, more of the same? We started family literacy last year in two sites. We served 21 people. We've already, or 21 families, 65 people. We've already surpassed that so far this year. And we're looking at now moving that program in the schools as well as schools are finding out about us and inviting us to be part of that.

So we're looking at eight sites next year and so we're growing a lot. We're growing our programming a lot and then because we're responding to the need for it and so more of that. Fantastic. Sadly Laura, our time is drawing to a close. Thanks so much for spending some time with us today. And thanks so much for all of the great work you have done over lots of different chapters in your own life and in your own career. You've made a difference. Racine is a stronger community because of what you've done. We have a stronger civil society in this state and in your community as a result of

the work that you've quietly done. For that, we say thank you. Thank you so much Rick. I appreciate it. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. You