How Dolly Parton Made the World Better Through Charity

After making her name in music, Dolly Parton lived her life in charity. From the community where she grew up to frontier medical research, her impact was felt on scales large and small. Here are just a few of the projects to which she devoted her money and time: The Imagination Library Founded in 1995 and inspired by her father’s illiteracy, Parton’s Imagination Library has given away over 332 million books, according to the website’s updating counter. The Library says that “1 in 6 children under the age of five in the USA receives Imagination Library books.” Children’s Health and COVID-19 Parton had a long relationship with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, beginning with a $1 million pledge in 2017 in honor of the hospital’s treatment of her niece’s leukemia. In April of 2020 Parton donated $1 million to VUMC as part of the center’s work with Moderna on its coronavirus vaccine. She helped pay for the first phase of research that has now been delivered across hundreds of millions of doses. Parton followed it up in 2022 with another $1 million donation to VUMC, this time for pediatric infectious disease research. Education and The Dollywood Foundation Parton founded the Dol...