Dolly Parton is doing something wonderful. With her Imagination Library book giveaway program to improve literacy, which has expanded to 21 states over the past three decades, the 78-year-old country music legend has made it so that all children under the age of 5 can enroll to have books mailed to their homes monthly, via AP . She celebrated her incredible program on Tuesday (August 27) with stops in both Missouri and Kentucky to promote the initiative and talk about her dad Robert Lee , who died in 2000.
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“In the mountains, a lot of people never had a chance to go to school because they had to work on the farms,” she said at the Folly Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, via AP . “They had to do whatever it took to keep the rest of the family going.” She initially rolled out the book giveaway program in a single county in her home state of Tennessee in 1995.
Now, over 3 million books are sent out each month, and books have been sent to more than 240 million to kids in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, according to the report.
For a detailed breakdown about how it all works, click here. Missouri covers the full cost of the program, costing $11 million in the latest fiscal year, while most the other states contribute money through a cost-sharing model, AP notes. In Kentucky, more than 120,000 kids, nearly half of all preschoolers, are currently enrolled to receive books through the program, first lady Britainy Be.