About Us
The Ponoka & Rimbey Adult Learning Society (PRALS) is a small, nonprofit organization operated with the goal of helping adult learners access education in the Ponoka and Rimbey areas. To do this, we have two Adult Learning Centres -- one in each community -- where courses, tutoring, and other events are held.
Though we operate fairly independently day-to-day, we work under the guidelines of our two community partners, who each have their own missions which we work to fulfill.
One part of our funding comes from the Community Adult Learning Program (CALP), a directive of the Government of Alberta which aims to provide foundational learning programs to adult Albertans. CALP's programs primarily focus on literacy (reading/writing) and numeracy (math skills), with additional programming digital literacy (computer skills), ELL (English Language Learning, usually for newcomers to Canada), foundational life skills (problem-solving, decision-making, communication, etc) and community capacity-building (job search/prep help, resume writing, and community engagement). In short, CALP does a little bit of a lot of things!
The other portion of our funding comes from Campus Alberta Central (CAC), an organization jointly funded by Red Deer Polytechnic and Olds College, which exists to offer post-secondary opportunities to rural residents who may live too far from campus to access them. CAC provides us with our Learning Centre spaces, funding to coordinate sign-ups of rural residents into post-secondary programming, has a variety of online courses available for students who can't make it to campus, and has even built a classroom lab in our Ponoka location for local Health Care Aide and Practical Nursing courses.
Together, these two organizations provide our funding and allow us to do what we do -- helping adults through their life-long learning journeys, one step at a time.
What do Board Members do to guide us?
We are looking for community members of all ages who want to participate in leading our educational nonprofit towards a bright future. While CALP and CAC have provided us with our mandates on what to do, it's the job of our Board of Directors to help our Learning Centres decide how to actually do it.
That's where you come in. You may come from an educational background and want to provide input on how to make classes here more accessible. You may come from a background of working with people and have ideas on events and outreach. You may be an adult learner yourself, navigating foundational learning or post-secondary life and wanting to help make that easier for the next learner. Or maybe you just come from one of these community and have a passion for making your home a better place, and the lived experience to know what services might best help your neighbours in their everyday lives. In any case, you can use that experience for the good of all of the learners who come through our doors -- meeting with our Coordinators to provide input, review progress, and chart a path forward.
No matter where you're starting from, if you have a passion for adult learning and want to see it be the best it can be, we want to hear you.
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