July 22, 2024
State Strategies
More than 13,000 additional children are registered for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that mails free, high-quality books every month to kids from birth to age 5, after the successful statewide expansion coordinated by Read On Arizona.
The Arizona Department of Economic Security (DES) Division of Child Care dedicated funding from federal COVID-19 relief funds for accelerating access to early childhood literacy, including the expansion of the Imagination Library program, which had previously served approximately 11,000 young children in select Arizona communities.
Read On Arizona coordinated the statewide effort — in partnership with the Dollywood Foundation, DES, the Arizona Department of Education, and the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona — to serve additional children and families in primarily rural and high-need communities where the program was not previously available.
Arizona has exceeded its goal for the expansion, more than doubling the number of children receiving free, age-appropriate books by mail every month until their fifth birthday.
Additionally, as part of the expansion, 200 early learning sites across Arizona received a specially-selected set of 28 high-quality children’s books to help support early literacy in their programs.
Access to Books at Home
Reading is vital to a child’s ability to learn and be successful in school, and the skills needed to be a good reader start developing from birth. Having a selection of books at home is an important way to support language and early literacy.
Dolly Parton created the Imagination Library program in 1995 to inspire kids in her home county in Tennessee to love to read. Now reaching children worldwide, the program gifted more than 3 million books last month alone and nearly 250 million total books since its inception.
