Dolly Parton’s beloved free-book program is getting a major expansion after her death
Nearly a month after country icon Dolly Parton passed away, her legacy not only lives on, but continues to grow.
Beyond her legendary catalog of hit songs (and the social issues they highlighted), Parton was perhaps best known for her philanthropy. In 1988, she founded her pro-education non-profit the Dollywood Foundation, and in 1995, she launched its most famous program, the Imagination Library.
The Imagination Library offers a free book every month to children under age 5. In the 31 years since its founding, the program has provided more than 330 million books to upwards of 3 million children internationally. What started as an effort to provide books to children in her childhood community of Sevier County, Tennessee, has since grown to serve all 50 states and countries including Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
It’s in the U.K. that the latest major expansion to the Imagination Library is coming, as London doubles the size of its program in the wake of Parton’s passing.
The Imagination Library previously served just five of London’s 32 boroughs. Moving forward, it will serve 10 boroughs, making an additional 157,000 children eligible for access to monthly books.
Jeff Conyers, president of the Dollywood Foundation, told the BBC that Parton would have been “incredibly proud” to see the program grow even after her death.
“Dolly always wanted the Imagination Library to be something that lived on for generations into the future,” Conyers said. “She was constantly pushing us about how we get the Imagination Library to more and more children and more and more families.”
The Imagination Library works by partnering with local organizations. The new expansion in London is sponsored by the Postcode Lottery, a charity lottery that operates throughout the U.K. Clara Govier, the managing director of the Postcode Lottery, said that Parton “understood the extraordinary power of something very simple: a child, a grown-up and a book.”
The state of children’s literacy
The Imagination Library has never been more important, as child literacy rates reach new lows in the United States.
The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that 33% of eighth-graders have “below basic” reading skills, the largest proportion in the test’s three decades of being administered. The NAEP found that 40% of fourth-graders had “below basic” reading skills as well, the greatest amount in the past 20 years.
Meanwhile, the organizers of the Imagination Library’s London expansion cited concerning statistics around childhood literacy in the U.K. That includes the results of a survey of 1,000 teachers, who reported that nearly a third of pre-school-age students are unable to properly use books, instead tapping or swiping on the pages as though they were touchscreens.
The Imagination Library is working to change children’s relationship to reading. According to the program’s own research, parents reported that their children became more interested in reading due to receiving books every month, while some studies showed that participating children had more advanced literary skills than their classmates who didn’t enroll in the program.