Read to Them is proud to announce the nonprofit literacy-boosting organization will serve as the City of Richmond affiliate for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
Imagination Library, founded by Dolly Parton in 1995, is an international book-gifting program designed to foster a love of reading in young children. Parton founded Imagination Library to honor her father who could not read or write.
Each month, Imagination Library will provide a high quality, age-appropriate, personalized book for each registered child aged birth to five in the City of Richmond, at zero cost to the family.
Among its duties, Read to Them is primarily responsible for registering children and covering the cost of books and postage. The program’s first year expenses have been funded in part by a grant from Robins Foundation.
As of June 22, more than 300 children under the age of five have already been registered in the City of Richmond. Children must be registered by a parent or guardian in order to receive the books. Registered children will begin receiving their books about eight to ten weeks after their registration forms are received.
Read to Them – Connecting Kids and Books
For more than twenty years, Read to Them has been dedicated to building connections between home and school, providing students and their families the necessary tools, resources, and guidance to create a culture of literacy in their community.
Read to Them Executive Director Christa Donohue said, “Read to Them has a long history promoting family literacy and a love of reading across the US as well as in our own hometown, the City of Richmond. I am beyond thrilled that this valuable resource will be available to the families in our community. We cannot wait for kids to start receiving their books!”
Improving early childhood literacy with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library creates opportunities for children to thrive and be prepared to enter kindergarten, as well as help their communities grow and prosper.
Donohue said, “Building a home library is a vital part of nurturing a love of reading at an early age. What’s most important, however, is taking the time to read aloud to your child, enjoying the story together.”
There are more than 13,500 children aged zero to five years living in the City of Richmond and Donohue knows “it will take a village” to reach and register all of them.
Read to Them hosted a community partner luncheon in May and had more than thirty organizations in attendance who had an interest in a successful implement of Imagination Library RVA. “The support was overwhelming … we have many people and organizations working to improve life for our children in Richmond,” Donohue shared.
How to sign up for Imagination Library:
To register your child with Imagination Library RVA, please visit imaginationlibraryrva.org/sign-up-now
About Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library:
Since launching in 1995, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has become the preeminent early childhood book gifting program in the world. The flagship program of The Dollywood Foundation has gifted well over 209 million free books in Australia, Canada, The Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Imagination Library mails more than 2.4 million high-quality, age-appropriate books each month to registered children from birth to age five. Dolly envisioned creating a lifelong love of reading, inspiring them to dream. The program’s impact has been widely researched, and results suggest positive increases in key early childhood literacy metrics. Penguin Random House is the exclusive publisher for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. For more information, please visit imaginationlibrary.com.
About Read to Them:
Since 2002, Read to Them’s family literacy programs have used the power of reading aloud together to build connections across families, schools, and communities to cultivate students’ learning and success. Their flagship program, One School, One Book®, helps educators select a book that each student in a school will receive to read at home as a family. At school, students celebrate and explore the novel with their classmates. This essential strategy reinforces reading instruction, increases parental involvement, bridges the home-school connection and builds a true community of readers. One School, One Book® has been expanded to suit district and state-wide needs. For more information, please visit readtothem.org.
