United Way of South Central Nebraska Inc

YOUR CONTRIBUTION

With your contribution today, the United Way of South Central Nebraska will start bringing one of their visions to life in our four county area of Adams, Clay, Nuckolls and Webster.  100% of donations made during Give Hastings Day will be used to implement a special project called the Dolly Parton Imagination Library.

The Dolly Parton Imagination Library is a unique early years book gifting program that mails a brand new, age-appropriate book to enrolled children every month from birth until five years of age, creating a home library of up to 60 books and instilling a love of books and reading from an early age. Any community in the USA, Canada or UK may replicate the Imagination Library and sponsor the regular gifting of books to every child under five in their community.

DOLLY PARTON IMAGINATION LIBRARY

In 1996, Dolly Parton launched an exciting new effort, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, to benefit the children of her home county in East Tennessee, USA. Dolly's vision was to foster a love of reading among her county’s preschool children and their families by providing them with the gift of a specially selected book each month. By mailing high quality, age-appropriate books directly to their homes, she wanted children to be excited about books and to feel the magic that books can create. Moreover, she could insure that every child would have books, regardless of their family’s income.

Dolly’s Imagination Library became so popular that in the year 2000 she announced that she would make the program available for replication to any community that was willing to partner with her to support it locally. Since the initial program launch in the United States, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library has gone from just a few dozen books to nearly 40,000,000 books mailed to children in the United States, into Canada and across the proverbial pond into the United Kingdom! Currently over 1600 local communities provide the Imagination Library to almost 700,000 children each and every month. Already statistics and independent reports have shown Dolly Parton's Imagination Library drastically improves early childhood literacy for children enrolled in the program. Further studies have shown improved scores during early literacy testing.

The estimated cost of the program is $27 per child per year.  We are estimating that we would need to raise a total of approximately $30,000 to get this program up and running in our community the first year.  All monies raised today will go towards establishing a Dolly Parton Imagination Library in our community.  There is simply no limit on how far we can take this program, but it is an absolute impossibility without your help!