Reach Out and Read – Milwaukee (ROR-M) Children’s earliest literacy begins at home with their families. The links between literacy and poverty are well documented. Reach Out and Read is a national program that improves language development in children. ROR-M directs this early literacy program in five central city sites for low-income children and has the endorsement of CHW and MCW. These sites include DHC; Martin Luther King Jr. Heritage Health Center (2 locations) and Sixteenth Street Community Health Center (2 locations). Literacy is a continuous developmental process that includes listening, speaking, reading and writing, and pediatricians are uniquely positioned to address early child’s literacy development because they are often the only practitioner regularly encountering parents, infants and children during the preschool years. The American Academy of Pediatrics has acknowledged the Reach Out and Read model as a standard for early literacy promotion and encourages every pediatricians’ practice to embrace it to help foster early literacy development. The goal of ROR-M is to assess and improve literacy development including health literacy in urban populations. In partnership with DHC, ROR-M developed a protocol: Is the Message Getting Through? to accomplish the following objectives: