PORTLAND, Ore. — Pacific Power’s charitable arm, the PacifiCorp Foundation for Learning, pledged $50,000 over the next two years to SMART – Start Making A Reader Today – to help children improve their reading skills. With this new pledge, PacifiCorp joins seven businesses that have made major multiyear financial pledges to create the SMART Business Challenge, which matches all business gifts to SMART dollar for dollar.

As Oregon’s leading nonprofit, early-literacy program, SMART mobilizes thousands of caring, adult volunteers to read for a half hour each week with children in kindergarten through third grade. During the upcoming school year, SMART will serve an estimated 12,000 children in 280 public elementary schools throughout Oregon.

“PacifiCorp’s Foundation has done wonders for SMART over the years,” said Amy Brown, SMART’s director of charitable giving. “Since 1993, the Foundation has invested more than $366,000 in our proven program in North Portland, Medford, Coos Bay, Lakeview, Metolius and Warm Springs.”

More than 35 Pacific Power employees are SMART volunteers, and another 100 Pacific Power employees have donated their time in the past.

“Our studies have shown that few factors determine a child’s success in school as much as the ability to begin school ready to learn,” said Isaac Regenstreif, executive director of the PacifiCorp Foundation for Learning. “SMART has proven to be a natural complement to our efforts.”

The PacifiCorp Foundation has a long history supporting learning, investing $1 million in early childhood literacy initiatives. In Oregon, the foundation launched the Project Optimize literacy program to help teachers successfully reach children who arrive at kindergarten needing an extra boost to become readers. Project Optimize complements SMART in providing reading support. An evaluation by Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory found that early literacy programs work: 78 percent of the children participating in Project Optimize were reading at benchmark by the end of kindergarten, as opposed to 57 percent of the children in the comparison group.

Media inquiries: newsdesk@pacificorp.com