Victoria Novak and I snake through deep hallways of what used to be a mall. The 80s kind, except that now, where Sam Goody and Chess King probably once drew teenage foot traffic, this mall is a space for voter registration offices, college satellite locations, and, back here to the right of the mall’s crossroads, the offices of the Greenville Literacy Association.
Novak is the executive director of GLA. She’s giving me a tour of the rooms the agency uses for tests of literacy, to conduct education programs, to collect books for its major annual sale, and, where we’re eventually headed, to teach entrepreneurship.
“Textile workers could not read the new equipment,” Novak says, explaining GLA’s origins. “They started a Saturday program on television for adults so they could read the equipment in the workplace. And so, our mission is to increase the literacy and employability of adult learners. [That] hasn't changed over a 60 year period.”
Sixty-one years after GLA first opened, the nature of work itself has changed -- textile mills are long gone and hospitality and high-tech manufacturing are the economic engines of the age -- but the strangling grip of illiteracy is just as strong. Almost one in four adults in South Carolina read below third-grade level and half of adults in Greenville County read below eighth-grade level, according to the Appalachian Learning Initiative.
That puts quite a damper on earning potential. A 2019 report in Education Week found that in the U.S., “36 million adults lack the basic literacy skills needed to land family-supporting jobs.”
So how does that kind of statistic square with the old adage that small business is “the backbone of the American economy,” as even the New York Fed calls it?
That’s essentially what GLA is addressing with it’s newest program, BUILD.
BUILD stands for Business Concepts, Understanding Ownership, Integrate Financial Skills, Launch with Marketing, and Deliver & Demonstrate. The pilot program launched in February. It’s a 12-week course designed to do two main things, Novak says -- teach residents the fundamentals of crafting, starting, scaling, and sustainably operating a business and offer a low-barrier way for people to learn all that.
There are members of this premier BUILD course who began by learning to better read through GLA, but you don’t have to be someone lacking in literacy to enroll in BUILD. The first group of students is actually a pretty broad sampling of the community, from Kristiane Evans, who holds a master’s degree, to Carolynne Vaughn, who was barely able to communicate even as a young teenager.
Evans is here to learn how to expand a business she started a year ago.
“I run an educational consultancy, it's called Upstate English for All,” she says. “We teach English, Spanish, and citizenship classes, and we also have a scholarship program with an outreach to refugees and asylees living in the Upstate.”
I ask her if the work has gotten tougher to do amid an increase in immigration enforcement. Evans says that it has.
And she says she’s here to learn about resources available to for-profit companies (hers is an LLC) as she tries to navigate life after being “an educator at a state institution that closed a program.”
Evans had never learned much about the practicalities of running a business in her years in academia. So far, what she’s found most valuable is the fact that people -- not videos or chatbots -- teach this course.
“ Having guest speakers come in, who've been through the process and just being able to make that human connection” are major benefits so far, Evans says. “When you're starting a new business and you don't necessarily have the tools, there are so many resources you can get from internet searches or using AI, but here you get the human connection.”
Carmen Terry feels largely the same.
“To have someone actually teach you what you really need to know, and you're just not poking around saying, ‘Well, maybe if I look at this or maybe I look at that,’” she says, is a game changer. “You have teachers to actually tell you, ‘Look, this is what you need to know.’”
Terry works in janitorial and at a nearby dollar store. She would rather not. She says she’s always wanted to start a business and has finally found a way to learn about the process.
Her business?
“It’s a clothing store/restaurant together.,” she says. A place where you can put in an order for some burgers or shrimp -- “comfort food,” she says -- while you shop.
“You know how you go out shopping,” she says, “when you leave you have to go to a restaurant, because normally their kids are hungry, you're hungry. So why not be able to shop and get your food at the same time?
What Terry’s learned already is the value of taking small steps.
“The first thing I'm going to do is the clothing part of it, to get that up and running,” she says. “To raise the money. And then I'm going to move on to the cooking part.”
And Terry already sees herself giving back in the way GLA has helped her.
“Once I get my business started, maybe I can help somebody else,” she says. “I [can] hire somebody that's trying to do what I do to show them the steps they need to take and get them started.”
There’s a pause. “But not telling them too much of what I do,” she laughs.
And then there is Carolynne Vaughn, who is expanding her cleaning --residential and commercial -- work into a business.
What separates her idea is that it’s a cleaning business aimed at helping people who have been incarcerated.
“I come from a background where I didn't have a choice,” Vaughn says. “My mother left me at her sister's house. When she finally came back, I went into a prison.”
Vaughn’s actually referring to foster care, not formal prison. But she says it was close enough.
Vaughn’s childhood was one of abuse and neglect. So was much of her adulthood. Eventually, she did spend some time in jail (she did not say what for), and that gave her an urge to help people whom she says society frequently overlooks.
And were her story to stop there, it would be one thing. But Vaughn is also an aspiring artist, which is another business pursuit that BUILD is helping her figure out. She shows me a portrait she’s especially proud of -- a young woman with a dragon on her shoulder.
“ She's my best creation I've ever created,” she says. “And I finished her with the dragon because I am the dragon. She's my protector.”
Vaughn says that her purpose, through her art, and through her business as an artist, is to help elevate the voiceless.
“I want to help other people just like me,” she says. “There's thousands of other people just like me who've been through the same thing, who's been through abuse, who's been through neglect, who don't have the voice. I want to be that person that can give them the voice back to them.”
