Community, Action, Language and Literacy Support
Answer the CALL
Writing and Literacy everywhere. It shapes every job you could work, every store you can buy from, every hobby you can enjoy and every policy that shapes your day-to-day life. Sometimes, navigating all all of these tasks, places, activities and frameworks can seem difficult, if not impossible. That's where CALL comes in, to offer support in discovering what you have to offer that you can lean on, and how you can break through challenges and reach your literacy goals!
CALL Support Specialist are specially trained to collaborate with you to build a bridge from your assets to your goals, and work beside you as you learn new skills and strategies to not only meet your goals in this moment, but be more equipped for similar literacy challenges in the future. Utilizing a Collaborative Teach-to-Transfer model, you and your organization will not only leave with growth on this project, but growth that sticks to support you in future projects, as well.
Wherever there are writers, learners, and seekers of justice we will Answer the CALL. We will be there doing what we do best- supporting writers and learners to leverage their assets and overcome challenges, creating real, tangible changes to your quality of life, your community, or your organization regardless of ability to pay, level of confidence, or experience. We are here to support YOU as YOUR literacy skills change the world.
Writing and Literacy everywhere. It shapes every job you could work, every store you can buy from, every hobby you can enjoy and every policy that shapes your day-to-day life. Sometimes, navigating all all of these tasks, places, activities and frameworks can seem difficult, if not impossible. That's where CALL comes in, to offer support in discovering what you have to offer that you can lean on, and how you can break through challenges and reach your literacy goals!
Our Mission
To tear down the paywall between our communities and top-tier writing and literacy support, grounded in justice.
Our Goal
To support individuals and organizations across Central Indiana and beyond through one-on-one collaboration, justice-oriented partnerships, and the establishment of CALL Community Writing and Literacy Centers for the benefit of all writers.
Do you have a Call to Action?
"CALLS to Action" are moments where writing and literacy can be crucial to creating positive change in your community. Have a CALL to Action? Contact us by clicking the buttons below!
What Can CALL
Offer You?
CALL has something for every writer, reader and learner! We supports independent writers on their projects, and consults with businesses and organizations of all types, needs and abilities. In fact, CALL supports over a dozen writers and business/organization leaders of all ages, abilities, and walks of life every single week!
If you or your organization has a task that includes reading, interpretation, creation or design, there is almost certainly an element of your work that CALL can support. From beginning to end of your project, and from before your business or organization is even a fully formed idea, until you're looking back on your project, business or organization that you've developed with the pride in the work that you've accomplished, CALL is here to support you as you reach your goals.
For your Business or Organization
Uncovering your "Unknown Unknowns" to Close the Gaps you Couldn't See In CALL's work, much of what we do doesn't address readily identified gaps or known issues. We do address those needs, of course. But much of what leads to the success of our clients comes from identifying, clarifying, and responding to what our clients could never have recognized was holding them back without our support. Writing, Literacy and Learning are all complex tasks with a lot of cultural misunderstandings baked into our everyday interaction with them, and when that complexity and those incorrect assumptions and misunderstandings are brought into your business or organization, it leads to miscommunications, missed opportunities, and wasted time and effort that could be used toward achieving your goals. From form design to customer responses to "between-the-lines" literacy and thinking to community engaged practices to crucial linguistic awareness, CALL can help you to uncover those unknown unknowns and guide your effective response to them. The specialized writing, language, learning and literacy skills developed through years of education and experience mean CALL is uniquely qualified for helping you to remove these barriers to reaching your goals.
Using Data to Drive Success, without Breaking the Bank or your Back All organizations need to be effective at collecting, analyzing, and using data to thrive, but many don't even know the opportunities they are missing out on. These "Unknown Unknowns" cause missed opportunities, miscommunications with the people you serve, and lead to overall less effective performance. There are many services and programs out there to assist, but they can be unwieldy, are often costly, require learning new systems and processes, and adding more to your already full plate. CALL offers years of experience in creating easy and efficient data collection practices that leverage the work you are already doing, giving you better data without the increased labor and time. Reach that next phase of your growth, without breaking the bank, or your back!
Aligning your Language and Mission with the Hidden Knowledge you Never Knew you Needed Language is the water we swim in. Most people think they know a decent bit about it. We speak and write tens of thousands of words a day, after all. Unfortunately, it is exactly this familiarity that leads to misconceptions about language that can be incredibly detrimental to a business or organization's mission, without them ever realizing it. CALL offers decades of experience and expertise in the ways that language connects to the world around you, especially attitudes and behaviors- including the attitudes behaviors of your customers, clients, patrons, or whomever you seek to communicate with. Working with CALL means optimizing your communication, and ensuring that you are meeting your audience in ways that will create tangibly improved results for your patrons, clients, employees, and anyone else that you work with.
Plan, Achieve and Share your Success, without the Headache All businesses and organizations require goals, and all businesses and organizations require various kinds of reporting on their successes, challenges and setbacks. What many miss, however, is the connection between some specific writing and literacy practices that can design clear and useful goals that drive a mission, the specific types of actions required of them to both achieve and collect the information required to demonstrate success, and the creation of those reports. Many organizations spend hours and hours of time and labor creating these documents year after year. That is time, energy, and likely income lost that could be spent benefitting your community. CALL has helped businesses and organizations to cut that time drastically by helping you to embed those things directly into your day-to-day. Need data? Build it directly into your interest forms, customer-facing practices, and follow-up. Need the data stored effectively? Automate the archival process. Need end-of-year reports? We have a foolproof process for designing and creating them to save you hours of your time and craft compelling narratives for your customers, employees, and funders to communicate your successes and drive growth for your business or organization.
Designing Effective Training and Continuing Education Curriculum to Maximize Your Potential Want to make sure you, your employees, your partners, and your patrons/clients have the knowledge they need? What you need is a curriculum and a way to effectively execute it. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses and organizations of all sizes and levels of experience get a LOT wrong when it comes to designing effective ways to teach their people. This leads to knowledge gaps, inefficiencies, and even turnover that keeps you from doing the work that you actually want to and need to do. CALL has worked with many businesses and organizations to design curriculum for cooking classes, community education initiatives, basic workplace training, management training, communication and language use training, effective research, historical and contextual education, and dozens of different language, writing and literacy needs. Our strategies are supported by educational best practices, create the best chance for your learning to transfer into real-life situations, seamlessly build in data to improve and build in the tools for ongoing independent learning.
Questions about how CALL help your business or organization grow and thrive? Schedule a FREE One-Time Consultation to learn more about how we can work together!
For Adult Writers, from Amateur to Professional
Resumes, CVs, Cover Letters, and Other Professional Documents Every year CALL reviews dozens upon dozens of resumes, cover letters, query letters, CVs, and all other manner of professional documents. These documents aren't trivial. They can lead to tangible changes in quality of life for you and your family. For instance, the number one thing that you can do to help your children succeed in their education? Increase your household income and free up more time to spend with them. Let CALL help you to put your best foot forward and have the best chance to land that new career!
Creative Writing- Novels, Memoirs, Short Fiction, Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, You Name It From the moment that you decide you'd like to get writing to the final stages of editing, the writing process can be grueling. And while many of our cultural depictions of writers are of a lone person isolating themselves in the woods to craft the Greatest Novel Ever in one draft, this is simply not how writing works. Every writer to ever successfully put pen to paper has had many, many people working with them along the way, dozens of readers, massive amounts of input, all from the very beginning. Most professional writers go through dozens of rewrites and drafts looking for, crafting and refining their story. And CALL is exactly the kind of tool that writers of all abilities need to make that process work its very best. With a combination of experience and expertise, compassion and an asset-forward approach to working with writers, CALL offers a unique opportunity for writers to get top-notch support without spending their life savings to get it.
Articles, Letters to the Editor, Contacting Congresspeople, and Other Self- Advocacy Communication with the public, with your community, and with elected officials can be intimidating. You want to get things just right and make a persuasive argument, but also sound accessible and grounded at the same time. The goal, after all, is to be a catalyst for some kind of action that provides a benefit to your and/or your neighbors' quality of life, and that is profoundly important. CALL has experience helping writers to craft engaging writing that moves people. From assisting on published articles by professional journalists to helping apply for public assistance, CALL is happy to support you in advocating for yourself and your community.
Critical Thinking and Literacy, Research, and Interpreting Challenging Documents Most studies show that between 60 and 80% of adults in the US are not practiced in many of the skills necessary to navigate the complex landscape of communication that drives our world. This is, of course, not a result of individual failings, but larger forces that have de-incentivized these skills. However, there is also a deep and prevalent knowledge that these are the exact same skills that can lead to effectively navigating public life and engaging in effective decision-making across a range of situations. CALL offers support for readers and learners as they learn and develop these skills. There is a massive range of skills and strategies that you can use to build your "toolkit" for reading between the lines, finding appropriate and necessary contexts in culture and social trends and history, and in understanding the ways that language is used in different circumstances that can lead to miscommunications and ultimately acting counter to your own values, if you're not careful. Let CALL support you as you build up your toolkit and practice using it to read between the lines with confidence.
Public Workshops and Lectures on Writing and Literacy Subjects with Community Consequences Not only does CALL provide one-on-one support for writers, learners and readers, but we also engage with options designed for large and small groups of writers within our community. All of the subjects that we work with writers on? We've done them in workshop and lecture form, too. Want to create a DnD campaign with your kids or your friends? Done it! Want to understand how Food Deserts are connected to writing, language and literacy? We've got you covered! Want to help your friends with their writing? Of course. Want to write a letter to your congressperson? Say less. We challenge you to come up with a writing, literacy or language topic we haven't delivered yet, because if we haven't, we want to design it and deliver it brand new to your community!
Questions about how CALL can support you as a writer? Book a one-on-one appointment with a Writing and Literacy Support Specialist and experience it for yourself!
For Students, from Elementary to Post-Doc
Reading, Note-taking and Learning Strategies to Unlock your Full Potential Most people think of reading as one activity that we do one way. But that's simply not true! Depending on what subject you're reading and what you need to gather from it, your reading strategy can completely change how successful your reading can be. More importantly, different types of strategies are crucial for the success of non-neurotypical learners, students with learning disabilities, and more. The same can be said for note-taking, writing, and any other kind of learning or literacy that you undertake. Besides helping you to read, write and learn more effectively, it can even save you tons of time by eliminating rereading and wasted effort!
Interpreting Prompts and Rubrics, Drafting and Revision to Crush your Writing Assignments One of the most difficult tasks in any writing assignment for school, work, or other situations is to figure out what is being asked of you. In school, especially, this requires some crucial skills that many educators- as amazing as they are- are not equipped to teach. In addition, school writing doesn't always give us the best impression of what writing is and how to be successful with it beyond specific school situations due to the many constraints placed on educators form K-12. But as scholars of writing and learning, CALL offers unique experience and insight into these hidden world of writing that most don't have access to, and we are happy to share our tools with you!
Compelling Scholarships Essays, Applications, Cover Letters and More to Unlock your Future Applying for colleges, universities, internships, study abroad programs and exchange programs, and more are some of the most stressful and high stakes kinds of writing that students will face. While they're not graded, the life-changing impact of a successful application to the program of your dreams can be difficult to quantify. Just like any other kind of writing, there are rules to being successful that, unfortunately, no one tells you- specific moves and directions that are more likely to lead you to that beautiful success. CALL Writing and Literacy Support Specialists have supported writers through hundreds of successful projects just like yours before, and are happy to support you in reaching for your goals.
Compelling Scholarship Essays, Applications, Cover Letters and More to Unlock your Future Applying for colleges, universities, internships, study abroad programs and exchange programs, and more are some of the most stressful and high stakes kinds of writing that students will face. While they're not graded, the life-changing impact of a successful application to the program of your dreams can be difficult to quantify. Just like any other kind of writing, there are rules to being successful that, unfortunately, no one tells you- specific moves and directions that are more likely to lead you to that beautiful success. CALL Writing and Literacy Support Specialists have supported writers through hundreds of successful projects just like yours before, and are happy to support you in reaching for your goals.
Crafting Job Applications, Resumes/CVs, Cover Letters and More to Move Your Career Forward One of the most impactful things that you can do for your and your family's quality of life is increase the income and flexibility in your job or career. Over and over, studies demonstrate that children's achievement is more related to their parents' income, stability and involvement than any other factors, and the happiness of adults correlates strongly with income and career satisfaction. Your job isn't everything, of course- but it enables you to invest in those things that really do matter- family, friends, hobbies, rest, exercise and your health, and your community. CALL wants to be there to support you as you achieve your job, career, and income goals and build the life that you deserve.
Questions about how CALL can support you as a writer? Book a one-on-one appointment with a Writing and Literacy Support Specialist and experience it for yourself!