BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM

Dolly Parton launched the Imagination Library in 1995 on a premise that hasn’t changed since: send a free book to every registered child under five, once a month, for the first years of their life. No application, no means test, no reading assessment required. It’s as simple as a book, addressed to the child by name, showing up in the mailbox.

Thirty-one years and 330 million books later, the program is still growing; Now it’s growing without her.

Parton died earlier this year. Less than a month later, the Imagination Library announced it’s doubling its London presence, going from five of the city’s 32 boroughs to 10. That makes 157,000 more children eligible for a book every month.

A program built to go beyond its founder

Jeff Conyers, president of the Dollywood Foundation, said Parton would have been “incredibly proud.” “Dolly always wanted the Imagination Library to be something that lived on for generations into the future,” he told the BBC. “She was constantly pushing us about how we get the Imagination Library to more and more children and more and more families.”

The London expansion is funded by the Postcode Lottery, a U.K. charity lottery. Clara Govier, the Postcode Lottery’s managing director for the U.K., said Parton “understood the extraordinary power of something very simple: a child, a grown-up, and a book.”

The Imagination Library doesn’t approach reading through apps or skill assessments. It just gets books into homes. The program’s research shows parents say their kids become more interested in reading once the monthly books start arriving, and some studies find those children develop stronger literacy skills than peers who didn’t enroll.

Falling reading scores on both sides of the Atlantic

Early childhood literacy is going the wrong way in both the U.S. and the U.K. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress data puts 33 percent of U.S. eighth graders at “below basic” reading levels, the highest in the test’s 30-year history. Forty percent of fourth graders scored the same, the worst result in two decades.

In the U.K., a survey of 1,000 teachers found that nearly a third of preschool-age children can’t properly interact with a physical book. They tap and swipe at the pages as though they were touchscreens. These kids aren’t uninterested in stories, they’re just distracted by the devices that get there first.

From one Tennessee county to 10 London boroughs

The Imagination Library started in Parton’s home county of Sevier County, Tennessee. It now runs across all 50 U.S. states and in Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. The model travels because it comes down to one thing: find a local funder, cover the books, and the Dollywood Foundation handles the rest. No bespoke infrastructure, no rebuilding from scratch.

The London expansion works the same way: the Postcode Lottery covers the new boroughs while The Dollywood Foundation provides the infrastructure.

What Parton built was simple enough to cross borders and durable enough to keep going after she was gone. London now covers 10 of its 32 boroughs.

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