Protecting Every Child’s Right to Read

Mighty Engine is a leader in helping clients develop, execute and promote public outreach and engagement campaigns designed to support the academic promise of all children and every family’s desire for an equal shot at life success. 

Throughout our work in education, we’ve always prioritized hearing from, honoring and respecting family and student voices, reinforcing  their testimonials and stories with compelling statistics based on evidence-based research. 

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Just a few of the major projects we’ve worked on in this area:

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• As the lead creative strategy consultant for the Read by 4th coalition—the nation’s most comprehensive early literacy effort—we’ve worked on a series of campaigns focused on delivering—in simple, easily-digested ways—everyday playful family activities that can spur on reading interest and confidence among young children.

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• We were the lead agency and prime architects of the Come Aboard the Reading Promise campaign, which focused on creating family-focused messaging designed specifically to be placed throughout Philadelphia’s public transit system to encourage the kinds of adult-child interactions and conversations that have been shown to support early literacy.

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• The success of this work led the William Penn Foundation to ask us to shepherd a community design process that led to Right2ReadPhilly—an early-literacy campaign that reached more than 100,000 families during its summer 2024 pilot.  

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With Sara Novic, a best-selling novelist and an instructor in deaf studies, we developed Simple Signs, First Words in American Sign Language. Confirming our hunches of the benefits of Simple Signs, the American Academy of Pediatrics now promotes early exposure to sign language as a means to improve development for all children.

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With Sharif El-Mekki, the CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, we brought back the Freedom Schools Alphabet Song based in Black pedagogy. Just in time as the Philly schools make a historic shift back to the science-of-reading, phonics-based teaching approach.
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We also helped the Literacy Design Collaborative, a New York-based national educational organization which grew out of the Gates Foundation’s national education reform efforts, to rethink and re-energize their organizational branding and messaging as they shift their program delivery model.Literacy Design Collaborative, a New York-based national educational organization which grew out of the Gates Foundation’s national education reform efforts, to rethink and re-energize their organizational branding and messaging as they shift their program delivery model.