An Experience Corps member tutors students at Highland Elementary School in Baltimore. Photo by Michael Ciseselski/Civic Ventures.

Baltimore’s intergenerational alliance of young people and older adults won a long-awaited victory this week when Mayor Sheila Dixon added $250,000 for the successful reading program to next year’s city budget.

Last month, 85 members of Experience Corps went to the Baltimore City Council to ask for funds to expand the successful program in which 373 senior volunteers help students in 20 Baltimore area schools learn to read. More than a dozen people described Experience Corps’ positive impacts on children, as well as the satisfaction it affords the adults who mentor them.

The city’s support for Experience Corps is about the same as last year, but for the first time the funding is included in the city’s permanent budget, rather than a youth supplement, providing a firmer base of support for future years.

“Experience Corps is not just a kids’ program,” said Sylvia McGill of the Greater Homewood Community Corp., the nonprofit group that runs Experience Corps in Baltimore. “It is truly a multigenerational program.

“The unique gift of Experience Corps is that by benefiting the children, the adults benefit themselves as well. And the students, by receiving what the adults are anxious to give them, also benefit. It is truly a new senior program for a new generation of seniors who choose to remain active and involved in the community around them.”

The $250,000 in funding is part of $2 million in additional money that the mayor is allocating to youth programs during 2008-09.

“Experience Corps is well understood to be cost effective and well documented to increase student achievement and reduce behavior problems,” said Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke.

That cost-effectiveness was documented in research that shows that in five years, Baltimore students in six schools in a pilot program who were matched with older adult mentors had higher test scores, better health and improved self-esteem.

Nationally, Experience Corps has 2,000 adult tutors working with approximately 20,000 students in 20 communities.

Greater Homewood and the Baltimore program with the John Hopkins Center on Aging and Health, which together created the Baltimore Experience Corps model, were recognized this month with a Bridge Builders Award from Partners for Livable Communities. The award honors adults and institutions that build bridges of understanding and cooperation to create beneficial partnerships for the betterment of communities.

Bob McNulty, president of Partners for Livable Communities, said, “This creative partnership does not involve the most natural of partners, with a local community group collaborating with researchers from one of the world’s most renowned universities. But Baltimore’s ‘town-gown’ alliance has provided a new model for how committed groups can come together to improve the quality of life for all citizens, both young and old.”