“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.”
The world needs more Dolly Partons, that is for sure. But lucky for us, the world has many billions of people who are willing and able to participate in the sort of mutual aid that Dolly championed.
Growing up in the 80s everything is white folks or animals but almost always it is about a boy or boys.
I think the baby books are still board books. Cordoroy’s Shapes is part of what I remember about our first’s earliest years. Reading it over and over. We even did a first birthday theme for it. My mom made triangle tarts.
After that they are floppy picture books. I suppose at this scale is is probably both economical and reflects some of the material involved.
That is just fine, though it’s just not the same as holding a hardcover.
Our kids don’t care about that, though. It’s more about the time and talking about the pictures and how well we ham it up.
Dolly Parton has died
Bless Dolly, she was amazing!
—Sent from Dollywood
I like the sibling comment "We should be more ambitious with the people we build." -- there are so many great things people with some means can be doing!
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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