FEATURED MEMBER - TERE BRITTON

Coordinator of the SAG Foundation BookPALS program in the Coachella Valley; recently accepted appointment as MEMBERSHIP CHAIR for PSWIFT.

Tere Britton became a member of PSWIFT in 2006.  She found her job as Coachella Valley coordinator for BookPALS after seeing it listed on the PSWIFT website in 2007.
A member of PSWIFT since 2006, Tere had been working for Sage Entertainment in Burbank scouting development projects for her partner, Anne Peralta.  Before that Tere had spent nearly 20 years with NBC in various roles from the movies-for-television department to labor relations.
BookPALS (Performing Artists for Literacy in Schools) has been a project of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation. Since she began the program here in one school in Indio, Tere now has placed more than 60 readers in 10 schools from Indio to Desert Hot Springs.
Many of the readers are SAG members or other performers who read aloud once a week to nearly 1,600 children in the 1st through 5th grade.
The Palm Springs Unified School District this year recognized Tere’s work by presenting her with the Shiny Apple Award, given to people making significant contributions to the success of students.
She is also involved in the Coachella Valley Literacy Network, a group organized by the University of California, Riverside, Palm Desert Graduate Center, finding strategies to improve literacy in the valley.
Through Tere’s efforts, BookPALS has been able to distribute more than 3,000 donated books to students and libraries throughout the valley.  Both Borders and Barnes & Noble have held books drives for her.
She said she is most proud of the young students at Marywood-Palm Valley School who have gone into their own libraries to donate books to the children in the BookPALS program.
Tere recently has agreed to take on the role of membership chair for PSWIFT.