imaginationlibrary.com
Dolly Parton's Imagination Library
With today's news, I thought I'd share this great program: “When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”
Comments
5 preview comments · loading full threadLog in to h4cker, then connect Hacker News to publish comments.
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...
In Tennessee hospitals a nurse, staff member, or authorized volunteer will swing by your room in the mother-baby unit and sign you up. Then you start receiving free books by mail each month until age 5. An amazing program by an amazing person!
I don't need Imagination Library. We are very well off for now, however, someone signed us up for it and I was pissed cause we can buy all this and not take away from someone who needs it. Then we received our first book. My 3 year old loves going to the mail with me and if there's a book, it makes him so happy he opens it and sits in his chair and just looks at it and asks for it to be read to him. He doesn't know about bank accounts or anything, all he cares about is books, his cozy (blanket), Buzz, and Elmo. We decided to keep it and donate to it and I think more people in our position should have services like this to hopefully ground them in a way you forget only by reminding by the smile and laughter of your child, then donate to them.
My 5 year old just got his last imagination library book. It showed up right after Dolly passed away. There was a letter from Dolly to him that ended “I will always love you”. Made my wife tear up.
We should be more ambitious with the people we build.