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Mary Salander
Executive Director
Mary Salander co-founded Everybody Wins! DC in 1995, when the program served just 100 students in a single Title I school. Today Everybody Wins! DC serves more than 3,000 students in 30 Title I public elementary schools. This is done mainly through two showcase programs, Power Lunch, in which adult mentors read with children during lunch once a week, and Readers Are Leaders, in which older students read with younger ones weekly during the lunch hour. Her hope is that someday, all children in the Washington Metropolitan Area will have a caring mentor to read with them.
Ms. Salander has a history of helping the underserved community. She spent more than a dozen years working with a local shelter, coordinating community service projects such as feeding the homeless and developing an after-school program with a reading room so that volunteers could come and read with children. She also coordinated opportunities for children to visit senior citizen facilities to share activities and spend time together. Her experiences at the shelter showed Ms. Salander how deep the need is for literacy programs for underserved youth and the value of positive role models in the lives of children who often do not have them.
Ms. Salander resides in Maryland. She is married and has two children and three grandchildren. She was raised in Oregon and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in psychology from American University in Washington, D.C.
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