The country-music star Dolly Parton is putting books into the hands of children nationwide
The magicians of the Big Cats & Magic Show onstage at the Dollywood theme
park’s Celebrity Theatre pull back a curtain covering a large cage and give the audience a surprise.
Inside the cage appears a grinning Dolly Parton, wearing a striped costume and crouching like a tiger. “I had to dress for the part!” she laughs.
A few minutes later, Ms. Parton tells the audience — gathered for the park’s annual KidsFest opening in June — some big news: Every county in Tennessee is now working with her Dollywood Foundation to get books in the hands of children through a program called the Imagination Library, and the effort is continuing to take hold in cities and towns across the country.
“The governor and everybody’s really been helpful and I have a wonderful team,” she says. “Everybody works real hard to make me look real good.”
Last year, more than 215,000 children in 550 communities in 42 states received a total of 1.9 million books through the program.
More than 3.2 million books are expected to be shipped this year, and the Dollywood Foundation hopes to expand the program soon into Canada.
The foundation’s goal is to make sure children receive one book a month from the day they are born until they reach age 5.
Ms. Parton was born 60 years ago to a poor family in the hills of Sevier County, Tenn., just a few miles from Pigeon Forge.
A songwriter, singer, and actor, she has sold an estimated 100 million records, starred in 9 to 5 and other popular movies, and received seven Grammys, 10 Country Music Association awards, and two Oscar nominations for best song in a film.
Last year, President Bush named Ms. Parton as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor for artistic excellence bestowed by the federal government.
She has also built her personal wealth through ownership of production companies and other businesses, including Dixie Stampede Dinner & Show theaters, which feature horses and music. Ms. Parton declines to say how much money she has or how much she donates to charity, but estimates suggest she is one of the most generous musicians in the United States.
Twenty years ago, she helped create Dollywood, now one of Tennessee’s top tourist attractions and a key component of the economy of the hardscrabble Smoky Mountains.
Ms. Parton created the Dollywood Foundation in 1988 to support children and education in the region and has awarded scholarships to high-school students, among other expenditures.
The organization, which is a charity, currently has $7.6-million in assets and over the years has received donations that include gifts from Ms. Parton, corporations, and unsolicited contributions from people who want to help.
Bible Stories
In 1996, the Dollywood Foundation undertook a new program, the Imagination Library, the success of which would leave even Ms. Parton a bit surprised.
“The idea goes back to my own childhood,” she said in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. “The only book I ever really remember at home was the Bible. I have wonderful memories of my Mama pulling out the Bible and reading me stories from it. Those stories took me to faraway places and really gave me the first opportunity to imagine a life outside of these mountains.”
To foster a love of reading among preschool children and their families in Sevier County and to prepare these children for school, the foundation began to mail new “age-appropriate” books each month to every child age 5 and younger whose family signed them up for the program. The first book in the series is one of Ms. Parton’s favorites: The Little Engine That Could. The last book, for children turning 5, is Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come.
“She wanted the books to go to all children, regardless of family income, so that no child should be left out or singled out,” said David Dotson, executive director of the Dollywood Foundation. “That’s because she felt often in her own life the stigma of being singled out as poor and rural and perceived to be backwards in all the things that sometimes come with that territory. She really wanted to work against anything that would tend to label kids.”
Ms. Parton, whose father could not read, said, “Daddy told me that out of all the things I have done, he was most proud of the Imagination Library, and that kids call me ‘the book lady.’ When your father tells you something like that, then you know you are on the right track.” Ms. Parton’s father died six years ago.
A few months before he died, Ms. Parton went to the National Press Club, in Washington, to announce her intention to expand the Imagination Library program to every county in Tennessee, to the other 49 states, and to other countries.
Penguin Group (USA) had agreed to provide the program’s books at low cost; the Dollywood Foundation had assembled a panel of education and reading experts to help choose the volumes to be mailed; and the foundation had created a database to keep track of all the information.
“I was asked to speak at the National Press Club and I was a little bit nervous about it,” she said. “They host world leaders and here I was, supposed to say something worthwhile to them.”
Ms. Parton explained that the Dollywood Foundation would pay for expansion of the Imagination Library to the children of Branson, Mo., and Myrtle Beach, S.C., where she has business enterprises, and that it would work with communities anywhere else in the country that wanted to participate.
“Sure enough, the people there [at the press club] gave me a warm reception,” she said. “Better yet, it created a splash and we were suddenly fielding calls from all across the United States. At that moment, I thought: This could be pretty darn big.”
A Politician’s Support
In 2002, Philip N. Bredesen, a Democratic candidate for governor of Tennessee, gave Ms. Parton’s efforts a lift.
During his campaign, he pledged to use state funds to help spread the Imagination Library program into every county in the state.
Mr. Bredesen won the election and persuaded the legislature to spend $2-million to start the effort. The state then created a charity to help funnel state funds to local efforts and to raise money from private sources. The legislature has provided nearly $2.7-million for the program for the 2007 fiscal year.
“It’s such a great idea and it’s a homegrown idea: It’s Dolly’s,” said Gov. Bredesen of the Imagination Library in remarks at Dollywood two years ago, according to a transcript posted by Dollymania.net, an online magazine that focuses on Ms. Parton’s activities.
“We’ll have something that will last,” said Mr. Bredesen. “It’s not just here while this particular governor is here.” Officials of the governor’s foundation say 10 other states have inquired about the Tennessee effort and that Mr. Bredesen may hold a conference this fall to share Tennessee’s experience.
“I think the Imagination Library has taken off because everybody else sees what we saw in the first place,” said Ms. Parton in an interview. “Kids are hungry for the imagination that books can inspire, and they are hungry for love and attention. So when you combine all of that together — well, who wouldn’t want to do that for their children?”
She added, “People come up to me all of the time and tell me how this [program] is so powerful, yet so simple. So maybe that’s the recipe for success: I guess I’m just a powerfully simple person with powerfully simple ideas!”
In June, just before Ms. Parton’s magic-act appearance at the Dollywood theater, the Imagination Library began sending books to children in Sumner County, the last of Tennessee’s 95 counties to participate in the program.
Across the country, Imagination Library programs can take root in any community — a county, town, school district, or even a ZIP Code — whose leaders take on the responsibility to register children to get the books, to put the children’s names in a database, to pay for the books and mailings, and to make long-term plans to sustain the program in future years.
These “local champions,” as the Dollywood Foundation calls them, in turn work with sponsors — such as United Ways, educational foundations, churches, civic groups, local governments, school districts, businesses, chambers of commerce, and private citizens — to raise the $27-per-child cost required each year to pay for the Imagination Library program.
The Dollywood Foundation negotiates the costs of buying and mailing the books; pays those expenses each month until it is reimbursed; and develops promotional and fund-raising materials for local efforts.
“The foundation manages the entire system and absorbs the overhead,” said Mr. Dotson, “so the only thing a community is paying for is the actual cost of the books that we have negotiated with the publisher and the mail service, which are all way below market prices.”
Ron Townsend, president of Oak Ridge Associated Universities, which has sponsored the program in East Tennessee’s Anderson County since 2001, so far providing 50,000 books to 3,400 children, said the Dollywood Foundation’s management of the Imagination Library is remarkably efficient.
“Every dollar we invest goes to a book for a child,” said Mr. Townsend. “It is a spectacular program that addresses both a national and regional challenge to improve literacy. It is the single best investment we make in our corporate-citizenship kinds of activities. I talk about it to everybody we meet with, and our board of directors just absolutely embraces it as a stellar investment.”
Tonja O’Dell, a kindergarten teacher at Pigeon Forge Primary School, said the program helps children prepare for school. “It’s awesome because parents actually sit down and read the books with their preschoolers,” said Ms. O’Dell. “That family time is really good.”
The foundation runs the Imagination Library with just six staff members, counting Mr. Dotson. “We always want to remain small,” said Mr. Dotson, “and [we] are able to with careful planning, use of technology, and great contractual relationships with the mail house, publisher, and marketing firm.”
Ms. Parton makes clear that the foundation will never forget to thank local charities and others for their help in carrying out the Imagination Library program. Every couple of years, she said, “we invite the folks who are making this happen in their community to come together at Dollywood for some food and fellowship. When I look at all of their smiling faces and feel all of that energy, it always helps me realize there is more good than bad in the world.”
Anonymous Giving
Ms. Parton says she intends never to forget where she came from. “I will always do things for children and for my home in Sevier County,” she said.
Ms. Parton is in the early stages of planning a new television show for young people, probably originating from Dollywood, that would “help children learn and be fun” while serving as a vehicle to promote her foundation’s work. “We would definitely play up the Imagination Library,” she said in an interview at Dollywood.
Mr. Dotson said that Ms. Parton “has generated many millions of dollars for the organization through her personal contributions, benefit concerts, and other activities.”
Ms. Parton, who chairs the Dollywood Foundation, will not say how much money overall she has provided to charitable causes.
Her longtime music producer Steve Buckingham recently told Biography, a program on the A&E Television Network, that she does not seek publicity for her personal giving and that the public will never know the extent of her efforts to help people.
Asked for details about her charitable contributions, Ms. Parton said, jokingly, “That’s a great question but it’s none of your business! I have often said that I count my blessings a whole lot more than I count my money; the same is true for the contributions I make.”
She continued: “There are things I like to do anonymously and there’s a bunch I like to do through the Dollywood Foundation. But no matter what, it’s not about me. Long ago I figured out that the reason God didn’t allow me to have kids was so all children could be mine.”