Volunteer Spotlight: Eboney Luckey

At the heart of Eboney Luckey’s weekly volunteerism at Hope Haven is her belief that everyone should be offered a chance at recovery and rehabilitation. And what better way to provide a fresh start than to tutor adults who are trying to obtain their GEDs. Every Monday evening you’ll find Eboney arriving early to this GED/ABE Tutoring project so she can photocopy study sheets and worksheets for a group of enthusiastic students.

Eboney is a stay-at-home mom and a native of Charlotte who originally found out about Hands On Charlotte from her daughter’s middle school in 2007. Having always tutored in some form—from the neighborhood community center to helping classmates in the school library during lunch—Eboney has a passion for teaching and learning. Her background is in information technology and telecommunications, and she uses this expertise in her extensive preparation before every project. Each student is on a different level in his or her GED preparations, and Eboney has developed countless practice sheets for the students to use in their studying.

Eboney chooses to volunteer through Hands On Charlotte because of its organized approach to volunteering and the variety of projects through which she can help. She wants others to be aware that everyone can do something and make an impact on the world around them. Hands On Charlotte’s goal is to help people do just that.

“Education is a right, and everyone should have access to learn the basic skills,” Eboney said.

It is with this conviction that Eboney continues to “do something” quite extraordinary.


--Sarah Langford

Pop quiz (and it's easy yes/no questions!)

Can you read?


Can you do basic (no more than algebra) math?


Can you describe a platypus?


If you answered yes to any of these questions, you're perfectly qualified to tutor in one of Hand On Charlotte's adult literacy/GED tutoring labs.


Each week, HOC provides volunteers for labs at two Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) campuses, Central and Harris (by the airport). Six projects are offered at various times during the day and evening Tuesdays through Thursdays.

I've been a tutor since I joined HOC in 2000 and have co-led the Thursday night project at CPCC's Harris Campus since 2003 (I think!). It's been the most rewarding of all my HOC experiences by far. I've been a bookworm since I was a kid; I can't imagine not being able to read, to be transported through the power of words to another time, place, perspective, experience. To be able to help other people become confident in their ability to transform the characters on a page to images in their minds is the greatest privilege!

Right now, we need a lot more volunteers who are interested in literacy to join us at the Harris Campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6 p.m. until 7:30 p.m. to experience this great privilege. A typical night finds the lab full of 10 to 15 students, eager for some personal attention and instruction. That same night finds the lab near-vacant of volunteers to help them. Sometimes, we have as few as three tutors; other times, we have seven or eight. Either way, tutors have to juggle at least two and sometimes three or four students, and no one gets a quality experience in this situation.

I think volunteers shy away from tutoring older students and adults out of fear. Perhaps they don't realize that most of our students range from reading at the third-grade level to finishing their GED and are afraid they won't know or remember what to teach or how to help them. (Here are a couple of hints: the textbooks used in both the literacy and GED programs are super-easy to understand and it's OK to send a student to the restroom for five minutes while you brush up on your long division skills!)


Perhaps they're nervous about the kinds of students they'll encounter. I've met the most amazing folks: a woman in her mid-50s who came "to school" after the women in her church laughed at her when they realized she couldn't read; some of the Lost Boys who braved the killing fields of Rwanda to come to the U.S.; a sharecropper's son from South Carolina in his late 70s who came to the lab faithfully every day after work and spent three-and-a-half hours learning the alphabet.


And (here's where that platypus comes in) sisters from Somalia who worked as hotel maids by day and studied English by night. It's hard enough to explain a platypus to someone whose native tongue is English; try explaining it to someone who's just learning our language! But I promise you, this is the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a tutor!


If you can describe a platypus, tell a noun from a verb and/or add a (short!) column of numbers, please consider trying one of the adult tutoring projects! I can't speak for the others, but on Thursday nights at the Harris Campus, we've got a dedicated corps of regular tutors who welcome you to join us! More importantly, we've got an enthusiastic corps of regular students who will be more grateful for your presence and brains than I can express to you on this blog.


Tutoring is not just about volunteers teaching the students; there's plenty of learning happening both ways. But you'll have to come find that out on your own. See you Thursday!


Sara Collins is the co-leader at the CPCC GED tutoring program.