It says a lot about Dolly Parton that following her death Tuesday, her family requested that fans wanting to remember her not send flowers but instead please donate to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the free-books-for-kids program she founded in 1995. She started the organization as a tribute to her father, saying, “He was the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.”
And wow, what a program: Imagination Library, working with local partners in states and communities across the US (and in Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the UK), sends enrolled kids a free, age-appropriate book every month, at no cost to the families. Parents can enroll their kids from birth through age five, meaning that by the time they’re ready for kindergarten, the kiddos could have their own libraries of 60 books, minus whichever ones they chewed to pieces.
Parton began the program in Sevier County, Tennessee, to serve her home community, and the program went nationwide in 2000. Imagination Library now sends some three million books to kids every month, and estimates that one in six US children under the age of five gets a book every month from the program. If you want a big smile (perhaps misty eyes too), read this local TV story about Imagination Library’s ongoing impact in Knoxville. It’s kids, getting books addressed just to them, that they can keep. Spoiler alert: When kids “graduate” by turning five, the final book sent to them is Kindergarten, Here I Come! which is sent with a letter from Dolly.
The Imagination Library nonprofit takes care of all the infrastructure stuff like book selection, arranging wholesale orders from publishers, keeping the database of enrolled families, and coordinating the mailings. The local partner organizations — businesses, charities, school districts, and such — actually raise the money to buy the books and go out and get families signed up. And in multiple states, state governments have partnered to provide the program statewide, with a 50/50 funding match with local communities.
This is where we get to the not-smiling part of the story: In the last couple years, four states, Indiana, Missouri, Maine, and Washington, have ended or sharply cut back their funding for Imagination Library, citing budget constraints. Gosh, wouldn’t it be a nice tribute to Dolly Parton if those states were to restore that funding? And if folks in other states persuaded their legislators to join in?
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Now, we aren’t sure whether this even counts as a silver lining, but as far as we can tell, the states that chopped funding for Imagination Library appear to have done so primarily for the purpose of fiscal belt-tightening. That was definitely the case in Washington, which eliminated Imagination Library funding last year in response to a $12 billion state budget shortfall.
Local program affiliates were able to get private foundation funding to keep the program going in 36 of Washington’s 39 counties, but Spokane County is no longer participating, while King and Pierce Counties — that’s most of the Seattle metro area — have only partial coverage. Brooke Fisher Clark, the executive director of the Imagination Library of Washington, said the group will soon be able to announce new private funding to restore service in those three counties, so yay. Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal, however, plans to lobby the state Legislature to fully restore its share of the 50/50 funding, because “You’ll never have a better investment than a few million dollars a year to get books in the hands of kids.”
Hell yes. That would also clear Washington of the stigma of having a rightwing talk radio station griping about how “Washington Democrats built the program and then walked away.” You don’t get a lot of rightwing radio gabbers demanding better funding for childhood literacy programs.
Budget constraints were also the primary motivation for Indiana’s elimination of its half of the 50/50 funding scheme in 2025, although Gov. Mike Braun (R) said the state would seek funding from private philanthropies to cover the shortfall. Indiana first lady Maureen Braun led a drive to get that funding, and in March announced that the effort had reached 90 percent of its two-year fundraising goal. Hooray for private philanthropy and free enterprise; we don’t need government at all, do we?
And in May this year, the Missouri Lege cut its annual share of funding for Imagination Library by two-thirds, from $6 million to $2 million, along with making an assload of other cuts to wasteful luxuries like job training and incentives for teachers to take jobs in urban schools. It’s not clear how the local partners in the program will make up the shortfall; guess those private philanthropies need to get busy in Missouri, too.
Of course, both Missouri and Indiana have been big on the whole rightwing war on books and libraries, too. Missouri lawmakers were in the first wave of freakouts over “drag queen story hours” back in 2020, and in 2023 Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft imposed strict, dubiously constitutional restrictions on libraries offering books that Christian Nationalists consider “obscene” or “not age-appropriate,” meaning anything acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people.
On the bright side, last year a Missouri court struck down a 2022 state law that would have criminalized teachers and school librarians for providing “sexually explicit materials” (again, any mention of ghey or sex stuff) to students, so hooray for the First Amendment. But some school districts are holding off on returning materials purged by the law — like Art Speigelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus, with its eight swears and a drawing of his mother’s suicide in a bathtub, with two dots for her nipples — until the state Supremes decide the appeal of that case.
And in Indiana, a 2023 law allows criminal prosecution of teachers and librarians for sharing “obscene” materials, although there too the definition can also extend to anything that makes parents and local prosecutors worry about books turning children gay.
The books distributed by Imagination Library have so far not fallen afoul of any of those culture war crusades, fortunately, so the principal threat to its long-term funding may be plain old short-sighted austerity.
Hey, let’s not let that happen, huh?
[Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library / Newsweek / MyNorthwest / Missouri Independent / Indiana Capital Chronicle / NYT (gift link)]
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I am the director of a tiny public library in a tiny town; we got a state grant to join the DPIL and have now reached almost 200 kids with free monthly books! Today we got an influx of registrations (4) and our first outside donation ($30)! "Due to high traffic, our website is currently experiencing some technical delays." Please support your local program https://imaginationlibrary.com/usa/
Billions for torture gloves but we can't afford libraries for our kids.
American Exceptionalism, baby!