>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [ Music ] >> Jeff Conyers: I'm here representing the Dollywood Foundation. And the Dollywood Foundation is Dolly Parton's foundation. Singer, songwriter, actress, Living Legend award from the Library of Congress Dolly Parton. And so our signature program is called Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. And Dolly created the Imagination Library really to instill a love of learning and a love of reading in children from a very early time in their lives. And so at its very simplest form, the Imagination Library mails a specially-selected age-appropriate high-quality book to children right at their homes between the ages of birth and 5. By the time they turn 5 and graduate from the program and begins school, they'll have their very own home library of 60 books. And so when Dolly created the program, it really came from a very personal place for her. She grew up very poor in a rural part of Tennessee. And her father was illiterate, he couldn't read nor write. And so she often described him as one of the wisest men that she's ever met, but at the same time, she witnessed firsthand how being functionally illiterate held him back and made him struggle in life. So when she went on and became big and famous, she wanted to do something, give her gift back to children. And so she started the Imagination Library in 1996. It was originally intended for children in her hometown where she grew up, in Sevier County, Tennessee. And so after much deliberation, Dolly decided to come up with a mechanism to make the Imagination Library replicable for other communities that wanted to offer the Imagination Library to their children. And so that's the way that it exists today. Communities get in touch with us. They want to offer the Imagination Library to their children, and we help get them set up. They enroll their children locally and cover the cost of the book and the mailing, the wholesale cost of the book and mailing, which is roughly $2 per child per month. We see what we do as providing a very critical service at a very critical time in a child's life. So that is making sure that they have books at home at a very early age. Ideally, if we can get the books there, the child will grow up in an environment of books. They'll see themselves as a reader, as someone who owns books, that's just something that I do. Hopefully their mom or dad or whomever their caregiver is spends time with them reading those books, gets them familiar with the written word and the spoken word. And they go on to school better prepared to learn and are meeting literacy benchmarks along the way and graduate and go on to higher education and have a long successful life. And hopefully all the bad things that could happen to that child and to our society as a result of those things not happening are mitigated to some degree. I mean we know that it takes a breadth of community services to support that family and to support that child's success. But getting books in the home, for us, is an essential, it's just as necessary as eating or breathing. And it's an easy one that we can do and one that we don't think should be missed out on. So the program is available to every child in a community where it's offered. It's not available to these children because they're different in some way, it's every child. That helps both at the community level. So our partners who are offering this, when they first hear about the Imagination Library, it's not confusing. They're not burdened with trying to qualify families in some way. You offer the program, you offer it to all children. So the Imagination Library unifies communities. It brings communities together around children and books. It's something that we believe all children should do, not just these children . We think it's a give that all children should participate in. And so what we'll see is when communities offer the program, we'll see that unity start to happen. The Imagination Library spreads out into the community and it provides a common place for children to connect and families to connect. And a lot of times, you know, children will arrive at school having very different backgrounds in life. Not having many things in common at all, but the Imagination Library can be different. They're, oh, I had that book in my home, I did too. And now we have a place to work from, right. So those are 3 things that have been significant have had a significant impact on that for us. The Imagination Library is very affordable and is very scalable, so you can reach a large number of children with the program and create a relationship with families and children throughout a community. And really what communities do is you'll use that to sort of pave the way to have a relationship with those families and offer many many other services to support that family along the way. So those are 3 things both from the child and parents standpoint and from the community standpoint. Our plans for the future are very exciting, actually. So right now, we mail in the United States alone, we mail about 750,000 books a month. In the US, that's about 4% of all children under the age of 5. We would love to reach 10%, 1 out of every 10 children in the US. We think we would look back and say, wow, we've done something really really special and really really significant. We can't think of anything else that has that kind of a reach. So that's certainly something that's a milestone on our horizon. We also you know, we work in Canada and the United Kingdom and Australia. We also have a lot of interests from other countries as well. So right now we're looking at other countries who are interested in starting the Imagination Library, certainly with our eye on some developing and some emerging countries. And lastly is a unified research effort. So there's been a lot of research done on the Imagination Library and its impacts both in the amount of reading that happens in the home between the child and the caregiver, a mom and dad, but also what are the impacts when that child arrives at school. And you know, usually there's been some pretty sizable research pieces done. But what we would like to do is a more unified national look, maybe even international look, at the Imagination Library, just to show what we already know, which is that north, south, east, west, urban, rural, international, it doesn't matter, if you get age appropriate books in the hands of children and families from the very start of their lives, you will see significant impacts. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.Gov.