Give Your Child
a Strong Start with LINC
LINC hosts free community events and parent workshops, provides free books, and supports families as they teach their children the language and reading skills to excel in school and in life.
LINC Offers a Variety of Programs for Families with Children
0-5 years old
Reading Events
Events with songs, stories, and activities for families to attend with your child.
Reading Everywhere
Read-alouds held in playgrounds, clinics, laundromats, and other neighborhood spaces to make reading fun and visible across New York.
Reading Discoveries
Events offering reading tips and resources in all sorts of neighborhood settings, from community events to daycare centers to preschool fairs.
Virtual Reading Celebrations
These virtual programs combine exciting stories with reading tips, music, and crafts to bring the excitement of a reading party into our families’ homes.
Community Celebrations
Recurring events where many families come together to read, sing, and celebrate
our diverse backgrounds, and become changemakers in our communities.
Diversity Through Literacy
Diversity through Literacy is at the heart of LINC’s commitment to inclusivity and education. Diversity brings richness into our lives and diversity in little learners’ literature helps build understanding and unity. Culturally diverse books and interactive activities foster empathy, appreciation, and a sense of belonging. LINC’s Diversity through Literacy initiative embodies our belief that access to literature is a fundamental right and a powerful tool for social change. It’s a reflection of our ongoing work to create a more equitable and inclusive world, one page at a time.
Reading on the Rails
Every year, families from across New York City hop on public transportation with our staff to read aloud together on subways and ferries while all riding to meet up at the same location for a citywide celebration of stories. The Reading on the Rails initiative is a testament to our belief that literacy should be accessible to all, regardless of location or circumstance. Through this annual program, our communities celebrate that early literacy is a journey that opens doors to imagination wherever the rails may lead.
Family Engagement Workshops
Connect with other families and learn more about the early literacy needs of your growing child.
Baby Blocks (0-1 Years Old)
Choose from three different workshops:
Baby Talk: Become familiar with how to develop early language skills with your child.
Serve & Return: Understand what cues an infant is serving up to us, and how to build up language skills through how we return attention to them.
Little Babies, Big Feelings: Explore the big emotions children feel, using easy tips to support our little ones to understand and care for their emotions.
Stepping Stone Academy (2-3 Years Old)
Choose from three different workshops:
Why Our Toddlers Talk and How to Respond: Explore the tools that you can use to detect which type of communication your toddler is using and the most effective responses to further develop their language skills.
Building Vocabulary and Comprehension Through Emotional Learning: Build vocabulary through identifying our emotions and how to grow in our emotional intelligence as both adults and children.
Print Concepts: Learn how to identify print concepts and practice them with their child during their daily reading activities.
Learn ‘N Play (Ages 4 – 5)
Choose from three different workshops:
Reading Starts with Hearing: Explore how to build and teach your child the steps to listen, speak, and read, each day at home.
How to Build Phonemic Awareness: Learn how to start recognizing the familiar sounds that make up words, and begin a fun, daily practice that supports your child’s readiness to read.
Phonics Rich Homes: Discover how to create environments at home that are filled with opportunities to support your child’s ability to recognize letters as they get ready to read.
Very Involved Parents (VIP)
Caregivers, you are powerful! You are the heart of LINC’s work and have the ability to shape our children’s future.
After demonstrating their commitment to supporting their community’s youngest readers, a select number of LINC caregivers are invited to train as a Very Involved Parent (VIP). The VIP program is designed to provide personalized support to our parents who wish to take a greater role in the future of their communities.
Very Involved Parent (VIP) Academy
The Academy program trains parents to become literacy advocates in their neighborhoods. Graduates are equipped to deliver community reading programs, spread LINC’s mission, and promote positive reading habits with other families.
Very Involved Parent (VIP) Alumni Professional Development
Being a LINC VIP is a lifelong journey, and is filled with unique skill-building opportunities and exclusive training with our team, other education professionals, and community advocates.
Find the Right Program
for Your Family
Looking for a different program? We can help.
LINC Also Offers Programs to Support
Our Partners
LINC has two paid models for supporting organizations interested in
offering early literacy support for your families:
Fee for Service
LINC works with schools, libraries, and community-based organizations to provide a series of family workshops in which caregivers learn the skills to become passionate, engaged, and empowered advocates for their children.
Capacity Building
We design programs to help community-based organizations build capacity around early literacy family support, with a focus on caregivers of children 0-5.
A Word from Our Elected
“ LINC has a vision of empowering communities to support children on their way to becoming both proficient and lifelong readers. Not only does the future well-being of these individual children depend on their capacity to keep up in school, but our democracy depends on an educated and informed electorate. That begins with literacy.”
The Honorable Adriano Espaillat
Representative, NYS’s 13th Congressional District
“Serving families with children from 0-5 years old, LINC connects children to books and their parents to strategies for essential pre-reading experiences, introducing them to a network of resources for early education success. LINC’s approach means families learn to change their behaviors around literacy and incorporate reading into their daily lives. LINC generates lasting impact for both the children and caregivers who participate. These changes ripple outward, affecting siblings, adult peers, and even neighbors.”
The Honorable Ritchie Torres
Representative, NYS’s 15th Congressional District
“LINC has been an invaluable partner to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) as we endeavor to help families across the city build a strong foundation of early literacy while connecting them with wildlife and wild spaces.”
John Cavelli
Executive Vice President
“What a beautiful place to be reading…this is your city and we are here for you! I want to thank LINC for another annual Reading on the Rails. We are celebrating books, literacy and all the ways it helps our little ones get ahead!”
Mark Levine
Manhattan Borough President
Collective Impact
LINC joins hands with other early literacy organizations to increase our collective impact by working together.
We proudly participate in the following New York City Early Literacy Coalitions:
