Last spring, Sue Saunders was writing a grant proposal for the elementary school where she runs an after-school literacy program, when a conversation with her daughter Laura, a postdoc studying cancer biology at the J. David Gladstone Institutes, gave her an idea.
Every month, Laura and a few fellow postdocs had been visiting Junipero Serra Elementary School in Bernal Heights, a low-income San Francisco neighborhood, to read aloud to second graders. If a few of these researchers exchanged letters with her mainly bilingual students, Sue and Laura agreed, then Sue might increase her chances of getting the grant money by broadening the after-school offerings.
Laura approached her colleagues personally, through E-mails, and by distributing fliers. She hardly imagined that 35 postdocs, graduate students, and technicians would sign on, and that nearly 40 second through fifth graders would scramble for the chance to write. Laura began running the program with Gladstone's ...
