To millions of adults, Dolly Parton is a superstar. To millions of preschoolers, she is ‘The Book Lady’. The country music legend is behind a book donation project called Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (DPIL), which has distributed more than 190 million books to children all over the world since 1995.
The gift of literacy: Dolly Parton's Imagination Library sends books to preschoolers around the world.
Today, the program has 60,000 new enrolments a month. There are more than 25,000 children enrolled in Australia and more than 200,000 books will have been sent to them by year’s end.
To spark a love of reading, each child enrolled in the DPIL receives 60 books, one every month, from birth until they turn five, personally addressed to them and delivered by post.
An independent book selection committee selects age-appropriate books for each age group, ranging from newborn board books to graduation books in preparation for school.
The committee comprises academics, authors, speech pathologists, early childhood educators, kindergarten teachers, librarians, and First Nations people, ensuring a wealth of diversity.
Literacy in the spotlight: Dolly Parton launched the foundation in honour of her late father, who could not read.
Study tracks program's success
Claire Galea, a PhD candidate in Macquarie University’s School of Psychological Sciences, is the first academic to study the effect the global program has had on children in the NSW town of Tamworth, where more than 2,600 children are enrolled in the program, established there in 2019.
Galea, who is also a statistician and impact analyst with United Way Australia, an organisation that connects community, business, government and philanthropy, wants to know about the impact of shared book reading on a child’s development. Her research is part of a new international survey.
Already, Galea has observed a rich love of reading developing across the Tamworth community where there has been a 98 per cent uptake of the program.
“Tamworth parents and teachers are telling us how the library encourages friendships,” she says. “When children from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds meet for the first time at preschool, they can bond over the books they have enjoyed at home. That level playing field encourages imaginative play, as children act out the books together.”
Ten per cent of books are by Indigenous authors or artists. There is a large Indigenous representation in Tamworth, with 13 per cent of the population identifying as Indigenous. The books have been a source of connection between Indigenous and non-Indigenous families.
Dolly Parton’s dream for the program is that it bolsters a love of reading and nurtures the parent-child bond.
The daddy of all ideas
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was launched in her hometown of Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1995. Parton’s father couldn’t read or write, and the singer has said he wanted his daughter to use her fame to improve literacy.
Tennessee pledged statewide coverage in 2004. After the United States, the program launched in Canada in 2006, the United Kingdom in 2007, Australia in 2013, and the Republic of Ireland in 2019.
The NSW government is on board with its Brighter Beginnings initiative, this year funding more than 15,000 children into the DPIL in 25 NSW local government areas with the lowest socio-economic status.
United Way Australia’s CEO Clayton Noble debunks the myth that babies aged under one are too young to engage in shared reading. “A baby’s brain doubles in the first year,” he says. “The best time to read to a child if you want to build a healthy brain is always when the brain is developing.”
- Food for thought: Study finds link between depression and unhealthy diets
- Under-25s ready to embrace climate-conscious eating
Brighter beginnings
Noble adds that leaving it to teachers to prepare a child to read might be leaving it too late. “Ninety per cent of a child’s brain develops by the age of five.”
Dolly Parton, one of five recipients of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy this year, knows a thing or two about storytelling. She has written more than 3000 songs. Galea says what she loves most particularly is how Parton is such a champion for anyone who has had a hard time and needs inspiration.
“Her famous song, The Coat of Many Colors, tells the story of a coat, made by her mother from scraps of material because the family was so poor. While sewing it, her mother tells her the Bible story of Joseph, making Dolly feel ‘as rich as she could be’; the story helped her to be strong when kids made fun of her at school.”
A force for good: DPIL gives away more than one million free books to children around the world each month.
One of the books in the library that has always resonated with Parton is Watty Piper’s The Little Engine That Could. In launching the 90th anniversary edition of the book in 2019 she said: “My memories take me way back to a little cabin in East Tennessee. This was not a place where dreams easily came true. Too often, there was talk about all of the things we couldn’t do rather than all of the things we could do.
“On many occasions, when my dream seemed far away, my Mama would tell me the story of the Little Engine to comfort and encourage me. While I listened to her, I would close my eyes and think of myself as the Little Engine and just start saying over and over again, ‘I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.’ It gave me strength, it gave me hope, and it gave me the courage to keep chasing my dreams.”
It takes a village
Imagination Library programs are funded by local entities including state and local government bodies and community service organisations. Local businesses also contribute as do philanthropic organisations through private ancillary funds and foundations.
Tamworth Regional Council was the first council in Australia to adopt a whole of community approach, enrolling all children born from 2019 onwards and integrating the program broadly into community literacy programs, such as Baby Book Time at the library.
Interestingly, says Galea, while the DPIL program aspires to foster closer engagement within families, it has brought together the broader community.
US-based Australian country music duo O’Shea set the wheels in motion for Tamworth. They learned of the program when their child was in an intensive care unit in a Nashville hospital.
They asked United Way Australia how they could help promote the initiative in Australia, particularly where a whole of community approach could be adopted, as was pioneered in the US. Discussions around where to start led to Tamworth (where Dolly Parton last performed in 2014), a sister town to the country music capital, Nashville.
Top of the class: Macquarie University's Claire Galea at the Good Earth Book Shop, Wentworth Falls. Credit: Maja Baska
Parton’s Dollywood Foundation provides the support infrastructure that manages the global database to enable children to be added to the Imagination Library program. United Way Australia liaises with global publisher Penguin Random House to source the books in a cost-effective way.
Other local relationships with publishers have also been formed by United Way to reflect the Australian environment.
Why there’s wellness in words
Galea says she is keen to continue to highlight evidence of how the program enhances the home literacy environment, positive attitudes and motivation towards reading, increased literacy interaction between caregivers and children, and emergent literacy skills.
“There have been few academic publications evaluating the effectiveness of Dolly’s Parton Imagination Library and none that do so at the international level we are undertaking.”
Together we can inspire Australia’s children to dream more, learn more, care more, and be more.
The Dollywood Foundation has sponsored Galea’s research, she says, “because it would like to have academic rigour behind the way it surveys and analyses data to provide evidence to support the program as it expands".
As well as children developing a strong love of reading through the program, Galea predicts that communities will also benefit from a literacy level uplift, better health outcomes and, potentially, improved socio-economic standards in the long term.”
Parton’s dream for the program is that it bolsters a love of reading and nurtures the parent-child bond. At its Tamworth launch, the superstar enthused: “Together we can inspire Australia’s children to dream more, learn more, care more, and be more.”
Claire Galea is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University.
