Registration & Scholarships

Each scholarship has a value of approximately $500, and covers:

• Full tuition for one person covering both days of the conference; 
• Lunch* on both conference days; and
• An invitation to the Conference VIP Reception on the evening before the conference officially begins.

*Please note that at the Embassy Suites San Marcos, breakfast is included with each hotel overnight stay. 

To be eligible, your program should:

• Be based in Texas,
• Be a 501(c)(3), and
• Not receive federal funding.

We understand, and we’re sympathetic. The conference scholarships are made possible by the grant funding that Literacy Texas receives from the Texas Workforce Commission, for Professional Development Support for Nonprofit Adult Literacy Organizations.

The goal of the grant is to provide quality training and professional development to 501(c)(3) adult and family literacy programs, so programs that don’t fall into that category aren’t eligible for this opportunity. 

YES. If the services your program provides are not supported by federal funding, that program is eligible, even if other programs in the larger organization do receive that funding. 

Yes, absolutely! The scholarships are intended to help make the conference as affordable as possible, and there is no limit on how many years eligible programs can apply. If a scholarship will help you attend, and your program is eligible, we welcome your application.

Literacy Texas will communicate with the program representative who filled out the scholarship application form, and let them know:

• Whether their application has been successful;
• How many scholarships their program has received; and
• The steps to register for the conference using the scholarship(s).

It’s our goal to communicate with applicants as soon as possible; we know you need this information to make plans. Please check your spam if you don’t hear from us in the timeframe outlined in the application.

Scholarship applications are approved in two rounds. In 2024, Round 1 closed March 22, and applications received in Round 1 are given priority.

Round 2 applications are approved on a rolling basis, usually weekly, in the months leading up to the conference, until all scholarships have been allocated.

NO, you will need to register separately.

The program representative who submitted the application will hear back from Literacy Texas about how many scholarships their program has received. They’ll pay a $75 deposit for each scholarship and receive scholarship codes for the program to use.

Once the codes have been received, the program representative will distribute them to the people attending the conference so that each person can register online.

Just having your code is not enough! You must use the code in our conference registration portal to complete your registration.

The $75 deposit will be collected for each scholarship awarded directly after they are approved.

Deposits are fully refundable if the scholarship recipient attends the conference, or cancels their attendance by letting Literacy Texas know by close of business on July 17, 2024, approx. ten business days before the conference begins (and ideally earlier). Refunds will be processed by our online payment system in the weeks after the conference and it’s our goal to have all eligible refunds completed by mid-August.

We will form a waitlist of any scholarship requests that were not initially successful. If any scholarships are returned or not needed, we will contact programs on the waitlist to redistribute scholarships.

We ask scholarship recipients to use or return them as soon as possible, so we can communicate with waitlisted applicants well before the conference.

If you are are one-person program, please go ahead and apply for yourself. Our goal is to group applications easily by program so we can distribute them as fairly as we can. Programs with one staff person are just as welcome to apply as larger programs.

If you are a volunteer at an organization, please talk to the coordinator, manager, or director of your program before you apply for a scholarship. It’s our goal to avoid multiple applications from the same program – and we definitely don’t want scholarship applications to be submitted without the coordinators’ knowledge. 

Yes! An application is not binding. We’re happy to hear from you even if you’re still deciding, though please be aware that deposits will be payable directly after scholarships are approved.

If you decide not to attend, we ask that you get in touch with us as soon as possible, so we can re-allocate to another program any scholarships you received, refund any deposit(s) no longer needed, and/or take you off the waitlist.

We’ll also get in touch with scholarship recipients after some weeks – after a certain period of time, unused scholarships will expire and be reallocated to someone else.

Directors and managers can distribute at their discretion any scholarships awarded to their program. That said, the primary goal of the scholarships is to help provide staff at community-based and other non-federally funded programs with quality professional development that they might not otherwise be able to afford.

It’s our hope that staff from programs across the state will return from the conference to their workplaces and share what they learned with the rest of the team, and with volunteers, increasing the impact of the conference while keeping costs low for each program.

The free regional symposia we put on throughout the year have volunteers as the primary audience, have no associated costs, and minimal travel, and there is no limit on how many volunteers from any one program can attend the symposia.

Yes, but you MUST let us know of the change. Once a scholarship is used during the online registration process, it will be linked to the specific person who registered. We will record their name, food preferences, contact information, and other details, and will use that to send conference reminders and updates; create our check-in lists, menus, and printed name-tags; allocate professional development credit; and more.

If the person who registered is no longer going to attend, and someone else from the program will attend in their place, we need to hear from you ASAP so we can update our records. We’ve had more than one instance of someone arriving at the conference and we have no record of them – because they took someone’s place but didn’t tell us. That causes a lot of extra work and delay which can be avoided with some prior communication. Thank you in advance!

Sorry, no. The scholarships are for adult or family literacy only and the program is focused on adult and family literacy needs. We hope you’ll still consider attending if the program is of interest! Registration rates and info can be found at the top of this page.

Unfortunately not. The scholarships are funded by the Texas Workforce Commission and are restricted to Texas programs. You are still welcome at the conference, however! Registration rates are on this page and the early bird rate is good through early July.