Our Mission
Literacy is where we start, not where we stop.
A youth-development organization using literacy, education, mentorship and leadership to expand opportunity.
Mission
To instill a lifelong love of reading, strengthen critical-thinking and leadership skills, and help young people recognize education as a powerful pathway to opportunity.
Literacy is more than the ability to read. It gives a young person access to knowledge, imagination, confidence, educational achievement and greater economic opportunity.
Vision
To change the narrative surrounding literacy in underserved communities.
We want a young person to be able to say it in their own words:
“Reading gives me knowledge. Knowledge gives me choices. My choices can determine my future.”
The logic of the work
Read. Think. Lead. Choose.
- 01
READ
Books within reach.
- 02
THINK
Questions worth asking.
- 03
LEAD
A voice that carries.
- 04
CHOOSE
A future with options.
- Readers become thinkers.
- Thinkers become leaders.
- Leaders create choices.
- Choices create futures.
Why literacy
Because it is the one door that opens every other one.
Simply giving a young person a book is valuable. Our model goes further. We want young people to associate reading with leadership, achievement, creativity, personal responsibility and possibility.
Rather than approaching literacy solely as an academic requirement, Readers Are Leaders presents reading as a tool a young person can use to understand themselves, expand their worldview, develop critical thinking, and envision opportunities beyond the circumstances immediately surrounding them.
That makes literacy part of a broader prevention and youth-development strategy — one that encourages education, leadership, constructive decision-making and opportunity.
Reading creates choices.
Leadership
Who is behind this
Alah Adams
Founder & Executive Director
Readers Are Leaders, Inc. was founded and is directed by Alah Adams, who authored the organization’s Literacy, Leadership & Community Book Initiative and leads its development.
In developmentA full biography, board of directors and governance documentation will be published here as the organization formalizes them. We would rather leave this space visibly incomplete than fill it with claims we cannot document.
Where the organization stands
Readers Are Leaders received its IRS determination as a 501(c)(3) public charity with an effective exemption date of March 3, 2025. Its first structured program — a 12-month literacy, leadership and community book initiative — has been designed, costed and submitted for funding. Programming begins as that funding is secured.
We are a young organization, and we say so plainly. What we are not is unprepared: the model, the targets, the budget and the measurement framework all exist, and all of them are on this site.
We’re not simply giving young people books.
We’re helping them discover what those books can unlock.