| Neighborhood House Adult Education Program Named “Best of the Best”
Awarded PEGASUS Award for Program Excellence by the Minnesota Department of Education and
the Literacy Action Network
 Once every five years, a great honor is bestowed upon a community-based adult education program, when the Minnesota Department of Education and the Literacy Action Network name the best program in the state as the PEGASUS Award winner. We’re proud to announce that this year, the Neighborhood House Adult Education program has earned the trophy! PEGASUS stands for Program of Excellence: Guaranteeing Adult Students Unlimited Success, and the award recognizes superior quality in Adult Basic Education (ABE) programs and excellent student achievement. The two-foot tall, eighty-pound, bronze Pegasus statue will be on display in the Wellstone Center lobby for one year. Our Adult Education program teaches the literacy and life skills necessary for gaining economic self-sufficiency and creating future opportunities for adult learners and their families, helping participants go from survive to thrive. “Winning the PEGASUS Award is exciting because this means that for the next five years, Neighborhood House will be recognized as the best Adult Basic Education program in Minnesota,” said Anna Martin, Neighborhood House Grants and Evaluation Manager.
How did Neighborhood House achieve this significant award? To determine the “best of the best,” the PEGASUS Review team, comprised of eight field experts, visited the top three organizations in the state, asking them to showcase their ABE programs. “We decided the best way to demonstrate how Adult Education actually works, was to allow the Review Team to participate in it,” explained Martin. Each member of the Review Team was assigned the identity of a student who might participate in our Adult Education program, and staff then led the team in role playing through the process of welcoming new students, by evaluating their skill levels, assessing their needs, and sitting through some mock classes. By actually experiencing the program, the Review Team could explore the perspectives of our multi-cultural, multi-lingual participants, and our culturally-sensitive staff. The Review Team then met with Neighborhood House staff, volunteers, community partners and participants for a question and answer session.  The feedback Neighborhood House received after this site visit was overwhelmingly positive. The reviewers loved the holistic nature of our services and appreciated how the Adult Education program works within the context of our other services in basic needs and youth leadership. After visiting the Wellstone Center, the Review Team voted unanimously to award Neighborhood House the PEGASUS Award for Program Excellence. Kara Schommer, Adult Education and College Access Manager, thanked “everyone who helped prepare for the site visit, participated in the site visit, supported us and rooted for us as we waited two months to find out the results.” Congratulations to the Adult Education Program at Neighborhood House!
| | Read more in the Hamline University ATLAS (ABE Teaching & Learning Advancement System) Programs September Newsletter!
ATLAS newsletter-Sep11.pdf
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