Walking through the halls of Pleasant Grove United Methodist Church in Robeson County, you see drawings of cats with buttons and vowel worksheets on the walls. In the classrooms down the hall, local teachers are addressing summer learning loss by guiding children through literacy programming.
Last year was the church’s first year hosting a summer literacy camp through the Summer Literacy Initiative (SLI). Created by The Duke Endowment in 2012, SLI is a network of partners that provide evidence-informed summer reading camps for rising first through third graders with certified Science of Reading teachers. In the summer of 2026, SLI had sites across 35 rural communities in North Carolina.
“We connect church to community, and so I see this as an outreach and a ministry of the church, and it works in a church because the church is a connector in rural communities,” said Camille Roddy, the SLI coordinator for the Western North Carolina Conference of United Methodist Churches.
Serving a region that’s home to the Lumbee Tribe, the Public Schools of Robeson County have an estimated nearly 21,000 students. Pleasant Grove was one of three SLI sites in Robeson County this year and served 28 children…