This Northeast Lit-Tech mini-grant project was first written and awarded to a former employee of the Providence Public Library Literacy Department. When that employee unexpectedly left her position, the work on the mini-grant was in its infant stage of development. Basing our work on the original framework and ideas, we adapted the project to suit our current students' abilities and interests.

Originally, the purpose of the project was to, "establish a series of lesson plans designed to help students engage in political advocacy on issues of importance on the local and state levels. In addition, the project will establish Web links to other sites (for example, political offices/records) as well as a list of web resources on issues of political advocacy at the local and state levels. The project works well within the established framework of activities and writing of our program and extends the student experience with the topic and with Web resources. The Web site will also serve as a basis for future instruction in our program tailored to the specific needs of the individual students at each learning site."

With the original purpose in mind, we revised the project idea from discussing what bills are and how the government operates into an abbreviated lesson on how to pinpoint a relevant issue and have government officials take note of it.

Since the original grant was not ours, the process of completing the project was a difficult and time-consuming one. We did not like sections of the plan that were written for the proposal; both the content and suggested exercises were not particularly interesting to prospective students. It was directed towards students, as opposed to practitioners, and had a time span of ten weeks. Although a lesson on advocacy was certainly valuable, we thought ten weeks was too long to spend on one topic, especially since our classes run for ten weeks. We felt that students would become bored over time by spending their entire session in one area. Since ours is a student-centered family literacy program, it is in our best interest to request input from the learners on what they want to learn. The entire ten weeks spent on something designed by the instructor did not suit the goals of the program. As a result, we chose to devote three and a half weeks to this more student-oriented advocacy project. The project is geared towards practitioners and is meant for high intermediate or advanced students, though practitioners could adapt it to suit learners' needs at more basic levels.

As coordinators of our respective programs, neither one of us currently teaches in our own classrooms. Ideally, we would have liked to have our teachers field-test this project before submitting it. This ideal could not be reached, though, given time constraints and other factors. Though these lessons have not yet been used by our teachers, they did read our proposal and agreed that the suggestions within would be interesting and valuable to students. We also drew upon our own experiences as former ESOL classroom teachers while creating this project.

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