Dear Colleagues and Friends;

My last day at NIFL will be October 1, 2004. I started working at NIFL eleven 
years ago with much enthusiasm and hope, and I end it with great pride in our 
many achievements and some anguish over the uncertainties and challenges that 
remain.
With Andy Hartman’s leadership and a dedicated team of professionals—my 
colleagues Sondra Stein, Alice Johnson, Carolyn Staley, and my very dear 
friend Susan Green, we enthusiastically embraced the literacy field’s vision 
reflected in Literacy Act of 1991 and created NIFL’s major projects—EFF, 
Bridges to Practice, NIFL policy efforts and LINCS—which we thought were 
fundamental for our field. In our effort, we had the backing and support of 
the adult literacy advocates and many practitioners. The outcomes indicated we 
were right in our assessments of the needs as well as our approach of 
involving practitioners in the field in developing these projects. LINCS was 
created with great input and support from practitioners nationwide, who took 
ownership in what needed to be done and made it an integral part of their 
work.
LINCS, as a national network of literacy practitioners, professional 
developers, and trainers, as well as a communication tool and an information 
retrieval teaching and learning resource on the Internet, has been serving the 
literacy community in numerous ways. One of my very dear colleagues, David 
Rosen, told me last week that he cannot imagine the literacy field without 
LINCS nor the direct impact LINCS has had on his own work. Today, LINCS 
includes over 200 people working in different capacities to make the system 
useful for the field. It includes more than 45 state agencies partnering with 
LINCS through Regional Technology Centers, 11 high-quality special collections 
with over 70 literacy field experts working to select high-quality resources 
for them, a national library team of catalogers who are using LINCS standards 
and criteria to populate the LINCS databases, 14 discussion lists with several 
thousand participants, and a technical team of qualified professionals who !
have been serving NIFL and LINCS for the past several years. Moreover, the 
newly relaunched America’s Literacy Directory (ALD), an addition to LINCS, is 
another foundational infrastructure that is the only comprehensive national 
ABE and literacy directory providing access to programs for learners, 
volunteers, and potential funders.
I know there is a lot more to be done to enrich the goal of a fully literate 
society, and we as a field still have a long way to go to ensure that we are 
providing quality services for our learners. However, over the past few years 
our achievements have been undermined and the direction and worth of adult 
education questioned. I strongly believe that despite these attempts, as 
educators and practitioners, we must take pride in the systems we have built 
and continue our work toward enhancing the quality of the literacy outcomes 
and practices.

Leaving NIFL was a very difficult choice, and I leave with wonderful memories 
of our work together. I am also very grateful for the opportunity that was 
given to me and thank you all for being a part of this great endeavor. LINCS 
belongs to the literacy community and all who have helped build it and the 
many who benefit by it.

Jaleh Behroozi Soroui National LINCS Director National Institute for Literacy 
1775 I street, Suite 730 Washington DC, 20006 Phone: 202/233-2039 FAX: 
202/233-2050
www.nifl.gov/lincs




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