$500 Cash Prize for Adult Basic Education Programs

MINNEAPOLIS - Sept. 8, 2021 - PRLog -- GogyUp Inc. is celebrating International Literacy Day (September 8th) by running a contest for Adult Basic Education (ABE) programs and offering a cash prize of $500 for the organization that has the highest participation.

The contest will generate the dataset needed to train our latest project, Smart Dictionary - i.e., a dictionary that will serve up the appropriate definition for a word's context when that word is selected in GogyUp's apps.

The contest begins on September 8th to celebrate International Literacy Day and will run through September 30th. ABE Programs can email abe@gogyup.com to be added to the contest. Individuals can register, choose their program affiliation, and begin the contest at gogyup.com/trainer. A leaderboard just for ABE programs will be shared every Friday during the contest on LinkedIn, Twitter (@GogyUp), Instagram (@Gogy.Up), and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/gogyup), with the final winner announced on October 1st. The program with the highest participation will receive $500 and the individual with the highest participation will receive a $25 Amazon gift card.

ABE programs are historically underfunded. 73% of programs have annual revenue of $200,000 or less (https://www.proliteracy.org/Portals/0/pdf/Membership/Stat...), rely on a majority of part-time or volunteer staff, and receive a fraction of the per-learner funding the K12 system receives. Nearly 1/2 of the Adult U.S. Population (102,579,805) is not considered proficient at reading (https://www.gogyup.com/blog/literacy-and-post-covid-recovery), yet "only 10% of adults have access to the instruction they need" and 50% of programs have student waiting lists, according to the advocacy group ProLiteracy (https://www.proliteracy.org/Portals/0/pdf/PL_AdultLitFacts_US_flyer.pdf).

GogyUp's mission is to empower every adult to understand what they need to know now and, over time, become literate to advance in a dynamic world. We offer our easy-to-implement, assistive-reading technology to ABE programs at no cost to enable these vital and severely under-resourced services to expand into distance learning in tandem with their existing instruction.