What About Cottage?

What is Cottage Education?

Cottage Education is a 501(c)(3) corporation, organized under the laws of Florida on June 28, 1990. It is a volunteer based organization providing free education to under educated adults. It presently operates in Lake County, Florida. It has been designated as a Point of Light (797) by President Bush, awarded the Distinguished Service Award for Central Florida by the Florida Literacy Coalition and has received commendations from various levels of government.

What Needs Does Cottage Education Address?

Adult education through GED preparation, with the principal objective being to empower the students to enter available formal programs from which they have previously been foreclosed because of a lack of self confidence as well as language and math skills.

To protect the privacy and dignity of the students, all training is considered GED preparatory, although the actual curriculum contains literacy, adult basic education, English as a second language course work as well as actual GED preparation.

What Makes Cottage Education Unique?

By limiting the scope of its educational efforts to adult basic skills, CEC is able to avoid many of the costs associated with other training efforts and therefore to be very cost effective. This allows the training to be offered free to the students. Cottage Education makes extensive use of unpaid volunteers who do not have to be certified teachers; they only require Lau Bach training. Training materials, testing and administration are highly structured and computerized. Branches can be established, requiring only a fax machine and tutor, since all materials are maintained at the center and are sent by fax as needed. This provides a unique application of distance education technology in which the least expensive communications systems are used. The program is closely integrated with other public and private sector educational resources for which it provides a new source of clients.

How is Cottage Education Financed?

Cottage Education is financed principally through donations. CEC encourages recipient organizations to make donations if they have a budget for training, although no branch will be rejected for failure to make donations.

It is anticipated that in some instances, contracts will be signed with recipient organizations instead of receiving donations. This is particularly true of governmental agencies, as in the case of prison branches. The public and business community support the centers because of the economic and developmental impact on the community.

Cottage Education intends to insure that all centers are accountable to their communities for all money received by the organization by maintaining an internal auditing program in addition to annual audits by an independent Certified Public Accountant. Each center manager will be responsible for regular reporting to headquarters.

Is Cottage Education Replicable in Other Locations?

The program has been designed from inception as a prototype capable of being replicated in any community. Operating manuals are being developed for each phase of operations based on the experience in Lake County, Florida, but because of the narrow focus of the educational objectives of the program, urban/rural or regional differences should not have much impact. The program has been successfully adapted to branches as diverse as the business workplace and prisons.

The next planned phase is to open a center which is geographically distinct without using any of the personnel from the present operation. Funding is currently being sought as seed capital for the first generation replication.

How is Cottage Education Organized?

What is the Function of the Headquarters?

Headquarters will serve as a clearing house of information for the centers and the various types of branches. It develops testing and education materials, provides guidance in all phases of center and branch operations, including fund raising, volunteer recruitment and retention, public relations, computer and communication operations, and relationships with specific types of client branch organizations.

Headquarters will also serve as national coordinator for interface with other educational and training organizations, national foundations and governmental agencies, and the national press.

Headquarters will also be responsible for insuring accountability for learning and skills acquisition as well as for financial responsibility. Its internal auditing staff will serve both the community centers and their branches to provide national, center and branch effectiveness reporting.

What is the Function of the Community Centers?

Community centers will have a complete on-line library of all testing and educational materials used by Cottage Education. They will be managed by a full time certified instructor assisted by a part time secretary/bookkeeper and part time volunteers. They will be open 12 hours per day, seven days per week as is the prototype in order to supply the branches and provide convenient access to students who use the center.

The center will maintain contact with the communities' other educational resources, obtain donations from community organizations, keep the local press informed of activities, recruit and retain volunteers, and recruit branches and students. It will be responsible for reporting its activities, including branch activities to Headquarters.

What is the Function of the Branches?

Branches are the electronic extension of the centers. They provide all of the testing and educational opportunities of the centers without the overhead. Because they operate limited hours and require only a fax machine and a volunteer coordinator, many organizations can afford to sponsor a branch. Materials are specially adapted to the needs of particular types of branches. Presently those special adaptations include workplace and prison branches.

How Are Training and Testing Materials Developed?

There is a wealth of adult literacy and educational materials that have been developed and tested through research. Cottage Education draws from these sources in developing the structured materials it uses. The curriculum will continue to evolve through input from the field and from professional educators, although the Board is confident that the materials being used now work very well. The critical requirement is for a well organized delivery system for these materials. Since the materials will exist principally in electronic form when new centers are opened, any revisions that seem desirable can be updated throughout the system. The nature of the materials eliminates the controversies that make textbook selection such a local issue in public schools. There is no reason to provide for local variations in the curriculum and therefore centers and branches need not be concerned with curriculum development other than providing feedback.

Is it Realistic to Recruit Volunteers as Successfully Elsewhere, Since They are So Vital to the Lake County Prototype?

Because volunteers have such meaningful roles without having unreasonable demands placed on them, CEC has enjoyed outstanding response. However, it does not rely on exceptionally charismatic leadership (since it does not enjoy that advantage). It is the structure of the jobs given to volunteers that encourages such enthusiastic response. The recruiting pool is very broad with tutors ranging from PhD's in Education to formerly illiterate graduates of the program. Each tutor receives regular personal feedback that their work is meaningful directly from the students. Each one is scheduled only as much as they feel comfortable, so no undue burdens are placed on anyone. Volunteers also perform many other roles in the organization. The most important factor is that all volunteer roles are structured so that they are meaningful, the tasks are clear and do not exceed the ability of the volunteer. They get a great deal of satisfaction from being a meaningful part of an organization that has a significant mission and is performing that mission well.

The experience of the founding Board of Directors with various volunteer organizations in various regions of the country indicates that Lake County is not uniquely blessed with community volunteers. There is an enormous and untapped pool of Americans everywhere who seek opportunities to truly be of service to their fellow humans. Often they are discouraged from service in other organizations because paid staff have all the important roles. Cottage Education is and intends to remain an unpaid volunteer organization. Paid staff will only be used in those roles which would place unreasonable demands on volunteers. With adequate organization, there are few such roles.

Has Cottage Education Encountered or Expect to Encounter Resistance from Other Education Providers?

Cottage Education does not compete for resources with other education providers and enjoys a very symbiotic relationship with them. The objective of the program is to instill a joy of learning in its students and prepare them to be able to take advantage of education and training opportunities in their communities and places of employment. The students it attracts are those who have nowhere else to go. There is no reason to expect any resistance from anyone who understands the Cottage Education Program.

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