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Hello All,

While driving to Oxford a few weeks back, I was listening to NPR and the commentator was discussing potential candidates for the presidency. The announcer mentioned some obscure name that I can't recall but what I do remember stuck. He said the presidential candidate had sound ideas on how to fix this nation, but wasn't taken serious because he hadn't engaged the press and was somewhat obscure.

It hit me because it reminded me of my campaign. Certainly, I had good intentions on going to schools and helping students become actively engaged in reading; moreover help them to understand what Fuji later had to understand - that you can't simply dream a dream, you have to own a dream. But how was this supposed to come across to the American Public? Certainly that old adage: "If you build it they will come" hadn't applied to our website because too few traffic was entering to learn about our literacy cause.

So I've hired the services of Scott Lorenz to help publicize our cause to the American public. More on that later.

I'd still welcome your ideas on how we can get more traffic to our website because when Internet users do get to my website they are buying into my team's cause including purchasing THE DAY I HIT A HOME RUN AT GREAT AMERICAN BALL PARK. Tim Fauley is right now working through Google's Ad Words to try to find the right combination of words to get book buyers to our site.

My goal is to keep the blog page updated every two to three days. I'd update it more frequently if I had more users responding back to me. It's hard for me to become engaged when all I seem to be doing is createing what I feel sometimes is a diary; rather than building a repoirt with you - my audience.

This blog has been created for a free exchange of ideas.

Hello Friends,

A special thank you goes out to Stephanie Tandoc and family for their generous contribution that will reserve 50 books for our initial 50,000 book drive. As a reminder to all, donations are tax deductible.

On Saturday, our team mailed out 90 letters to CEOs of billion dollar corporations with the hope of having them believe that our cause is their cause. Illiteracy is a social disease and like the homeless is in general stigmatized. Illiteracy is believed to be faceless like poverty. What this means is that we know poverty and illiteracy exist, but don't believe it affects us or our way of living. Consider this, over half of our student population struggle in reading and are equally likely to fail in other subjects such as math and science. In less than 20 years there won't be many manufacturing facilities left in the United States because once the baby boom generation retires there aren't enough younger skilled laborers to replace them. I've seen this firsthand in that out of 82 temps. only three were eventually hired in a manufacturing plant I once worked at in 2005.

Struggling readers fall into a pool of nonskilled day laborers. If factories continue leaving the United States, then with them they'll take higher paid blue collar positions, which lesser educated workers once found employment in. The only careers left for nonskilled day laborers are retail positions, migrant positions and/or construction type positions, which have a tendency of paying minimum wage and are considered terminal positions without the chance for advancement.

Statistics prove that our jails have become overpopulated as a result of the recent rise in illiteracy, and our economy and tax dollars continue to erode from the aftermath of this social disease. America's future prosperity is before us now, and if we can't find a way to reverse illiteracy from within and teach immigrants coming into our country our language and culture, then we will become a second tiered nation. Monetary donations from industries' leaders and support from its skilled labor pool--not our government or our current teaching staff--hold the cure to our current crisis.