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My daughter receives books through this program and I was curious how it was sustained at a $2.5/book wholesale cost. Interestingly, the coordinating body that selects books, facilitates distribution, and negotiates wholesale pricing is the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, but per-book funding is actually entirely through local charities and so on. This means that where charities are unable to act as partners, children will not receive books, but it also means that the program can operate by growing and shrinking as local support (including from state and local government grants) comes online and goes offline while keeping the overhead for local partners low. Dolly Parton came up with the initial local structure for her region in Tennessee and David Dotson of Dollywood scaled the operation using this decentralized model. Very impressive structure that makes this sustainable. Here’s the interview where he talks about it: https://www.endbookdeserts.com/dolly-parton-imagination-libr...
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Reminds me a bit of how Andrew Carnegie funded building public libraries: he would only build one if the local community agreed to provide books and operate it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library
Regarding cost per unit. I think the publisher likes this type of partner because they can really get their initial order volume up high without much risk. This allows them to have a super low cost per unit, maximizing profit, from the start.
This structure is (I would argue) a form of mutual aid. Alcoholics Anonymous famously operates under a similar structure. Mutual aid is very popular among Anarchists and is one of the most fundamental tactics of Anarchism, Food not Bombs probably being the most famous mutual aid movements that is explicitly Anarchists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid
some governments provide funding -- Tennessee has been covering half the costs statewide
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