SBC Foundation

Follow the Reader: A Girl Scout Family Reading Project consists of three booklets developed for Daisy, Brownie, and Junior Girl Scouts and their families. These booklets meet the important need for bilingual Girl Scout materials to focus on a family's involvement in teaching their children to read. This series of Spanish and English resources also offers families the opportunity to read together in the language in which they feel most comfortable.

The activities in each of the booklets are based on the objectives of the White House literacy initiative No Child Left Behind, which focuses on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. One of the main goals of these resources is to build reading skills at a young age within the family structure. By working on the Follow the Reader project with their families, girls can become inspired and excited about reading, and develop a lifelong habit of reading for enjoyment and for information.

The SBC Foundation is the charitable giving arm of SBC Communications Inc. The SBC Foundation supports efforts that enrich and strengthen diverse communities nationwide, particularly those with an emphasis on education and technology and those that benefit underserved populations. SBC Foundation-backed programs are designed to increase access to information technologies, broaden technology training and professional skills development, and effectively integrate new technologies to enhance education and economic development. The Foundation Center has consistently ranked the SBC Foundation among the nation's top six corporate foundations. In 2002, the SBC Foundation launched SBC Excelerator, a multimillion dollar competitive grants program that funds nonprofit organizations in their efforts to digitally connect communities.

SBC Communications Inc. is a Fortune 50 company whose subsidiaries, operating under the SBC brand, provide a full range of voice, data, networking, e-business, directory publishing and advertising, and related services to businesses, consumers, and other telecommunications providers. SBC holds a 60 percent ownership interest in Cingular Wireless, which serves more than 24 million wireless customers. SBC companies provide high-speed DSL Internet access lines to more American consumers than any other provider and are among the nation's leading providers of Internet services. SBC companies also now offer satellite TV service.