Reading Begins at Birth is Lifting Up Parents as Our Community’s First Literacy Leaders

In July, members of the Reading Begins at Birth Action Team convened in person for a focused retreat designed to strengthen alignment and purpose and to advance a major project: creating Brown County’s first community-facing early literacy asset map.

The Reading Begins at Birth team is part of Achieve Brown County’s broader Reading for the Future Initiative, a county-wide effort to ensure that every child is reading at grade level by the end of third grade. This team’s focus is on the very beginning of that journey—from birth through age four—when foundational language and literacy skills are just being formed.

This team’s guiding belief is simple: parents are a child’s first and most important teacher. When parents read, talk, sing, write, and play with their children every day, they’re building essential brain connections that build the basic foundations of learning for years to come.

During the retreat, the group tackled three major components of the asset map project:

• Defining categories of resources and services to make the map easy to use and understand.
• Developing a list of guiding questions that will help families identify which resources are the best fit for their needs.
• Outlining a clear timeline of next steps with the goal of launching the map in Fall 2025.

What makes this project so important is that it centers families as active participants in their child’s learning—not just passive recipients of services. This team isn’t just compiling a list of programs; they’re building a tool rooted in equity, access, and community trust.

“The Reading Begins at Birth Team is doing something that’s both practical and visionary,” said Ashley Bethke, Director of Partnership Advancement of Achieve Brown County. “They’re creating a tool families can use tomorrow—and also helping shift how our community thinks about learning for our youngest community members.”