Dolly Parton Imagination Library is LIVE in Ottawa County!

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Miami Public Library’s (MPL) partnership with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library program https://imaginationlibrary.com to include the entire Ottawa County. We are asking for your help! Our goal is to enroll 65% of the eligible children in our county, and we need the financial support of community members and leaders to make this program a success.

It is important to note that young children who are read to regularly display greater language comprehension, larger vocabularies, and higher cognitive skills than their peers. The Dolly Parton Imagination Library (DPIL) is a program where children from birth to age 5 receive a free, age-appropriate book every month in the mail with their name on it. This equals up to 60 free books per enrollee! The only restrictions are that the child(ren) must be between the ages of birth and 5 years old, and they must live in Ottawa County.

Annually 2,633 children could be impacted by this program in Ottawa County. Since the inception of their program, the DPIL has gifted over the 193,00,232 books, and over 2,240,974 children are registered in 5 countries.

Oklahoma Department of Education (ODE) is committed to providing a 1-to-1 match for this program through 2025 and plans to continue to match thereafter. Overall, it costs $2.60 per child per month to keep the program going.

Each sponsor will be recognized on all Miami Public Library and Friends of the Miami Public Library Facebook pages and the Miami Public Library website. A sponsor will be recognized on one of the monthly books each month. (Cannabis-related organizations will be shown on Friends of the Library pages, not city pages/sites, due to restrictions.)

Help make this a reality for children in our community by making a one-time or reoccurring annual donation. 

Make checks payable to: Friends of the Miami Public Library

Memo: DPIL or Dolly's Library

Mail or drop off: Miami Public Library at 200 N Main St, Miami, OK 74354.

We thank you for your consideration in sponsoring this program, as the community and our young children will benefit for the rest of their lives.

If you have any questions, please give us a call at 918-541-2292

Program Mission

We aspire to firmly establish Dolly Parton and the Imagination Library as the highest quality, most effective, instantly recognized, global book gifting resource that policymakers, early childhood organizations and families trust to help inspire a love of reading and learning in children as we provide the most powerful opportunity for children to dream more.

History

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is the flagship program of The Dollywood Foundation. The Dollywood Foundation was created in 1988 by Dolly Parton to inspire the children in her home county to achieve educational success. Initial efforts focused on decreasing the dropout rate in the county’s high school. In the early 1990’s, Dolly promised every 7th-grade and 8th-grade student $500 if they successfully graduated from high school. This effort, called the Buddy Program, reduced the dropout rate for these two classes from 35% to 6%. More importantly, the program catalyzed the community to provide additional resources to sustain this improvement in the dropout rate.

In 1995, the Foundation implemented Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Sevier County, Tennessee. This monthly book gifting program for children under five focused on inspiring a love of books and reading for all preschool children in the county. What was founded as a local program grew into an international movement through the unique partnership among the Foundation, the publisher, the fulfillment centers and the thousands of local organizations who adopted the program. The Imagination Library continues to be the signature program of the Foundation.

The program became such a success that in 2000 a national replication effort was underway. By 2003, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library had mailed one million books. It would prove to be the first of many millions of books sent to children around the world.

 Dolly’s home state of Tennessee pledged to pursue statewide coverage in 2004, and global expansion was on the horizon. After the United States, the program launched in Canada in 2006 followed by the United Kingdom in 2007. Australia’s program was launched in 2013 with the Republic of Ireland joining in 2019.

For more information, please visit imaginationlibrary.com