Inclind Inc has launched Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library website. Utilizing our powerful content management system (CMS) publishing platform, managing their website is quick and painless and allows them to get their important message out. Their objective is to supply a book a month to children aged 12 months to 5 years to promote literacy at a crucial time in the development of young minds. Opportunity and education are cornerstones of our country and its great that foundations like this exist to help future generations get a head start.

How Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Started

Dolly Parton started this program in 1996 in her home county of Sevier, Tennessee, as a way to give back to her community and to promote literacy. She personally paid for each newborn child to receive a new board book, “The Little Engine that Could” by Watty Piper. Those children were also sent one new hard back book each month until they were five years old. On their fifth birthday, they received their last book, “Look Out, Kindergarten, Here I Come” a diploma, and a personal letter from Dolly for completing the program.

Here’s How it Works

A community must make the program accessible to all preschool children in their area. The community pays for the books and mailing, promotes the program, registers the children, and enters the information into the database. From there The Dollywood Foundation takes over and manages the system to deliver the books to the home.

Since 2001, the Dollywood Foundation has helped individual communities provide millions of books to children across America. The Imagination Library now provides books to children in over 700 communities, nearly all 50 states and two other countries including Canada and the UK.

About the Books

Penguin Group USA is the exclusive supplier of all of the books for the program. The free books are carefully selected to help develop a child’s literacy and vocabulary skills through age appropriate, developmental reading materials. There is a national committee of individuals who meet each year to review the Library. The committee is composed of representatives from Parents as Teachers National Center, the International Reading Association, the University of Tennessee, Rutgers University, and the teaching profession. New titles are introduced each year so younger siblings will not receive the exact same books as their older siblings.

Visit Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Website »

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