Ruth Johnson Colvin, Founder of Literacy Volunteers, Dies at 107

Ruth Johnson Colvin, who founded what became one of the world’s largest organizations of volunteers tutoring basic language skills to functionally illiterate peoples in America and other lands, opening doors to citizenship and better lives, died on Sunday at her home in Syracuse, N.Y. She was 107.

Her death was confirmed her daughter, Lindy Webb.

In 1961, Ms. Colvin, a middle-aged, college-educated Syracuse homemaker and mother of two, was appalled to discover that the recent census had counted 11,055 residents of Onondaga County, N.Y., who could not read or write. She had no experience teaching, but felt passionately that she had to do something about it.

A year later, after consulting reading specialists and service agencies, she set up an office in her basement, began recruiting volunteers from churches to be tutors, wrote training manuals and set up a small group to reach out to residents, many of them immigrants, to teach them basic English, offering pathways to jobs, education and rising standards of living.

It was slow going at first. By 1967, the group, Literacy Volunteers, was chartered by New York State as a nonprofit with 77 tutors, 100 students and Ms. Colvin as its first president. In succeeding decades under her guidance, the organization won federal and private grants, created programs in many states, won national recognition and changed its name to the Literacy Volunteers of America.

After a 2002 merger with Laubach Literacy International, the organization became ProLiteracy, with hundreds of programs and 100,000 tutors in 42 states and 60 other countries, offering lessons in scores of languages at homes, workplaces, prisons and other sites. For 60 years, Ms. Colvin remained a teacher and administrator, traveling widely and writing 12 books on her work.

She was showered with honorary doctorates and received the President’s Volunteer Service Award from President Ronald Reagan in 1987, inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993, and received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President George W. Bush in a 2006 White House ceremony.