For over twenty years, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library has brought a gift to kids all over the world. While providing books and literature to preschool children, her main goal was for every child to be able to have a book to read, regardless of their family’s income. Families who join this program receive an age appropriate, free book each month, until the child has reached the age of five. Within the past twenty years, over seventy million books were distributed to children all over the U.S, UK, and Canada. Due to the assortment of books received to the adolescents, test scores have improved tremendously throughout the years for the kids enrolled and who have taken literacy exams. Pascagoula’s Excel by 5, first brought Dolly’s program to south Mississippi. Today there are more than three hundred kids that are currently enrolled, and through United Way of South Mississippi (a community improvement organization) 2,000 are enrolled. The Imagination Library in now accessible to natives who live in Harrison, Hancock, Stone, and the Pearl River Counties.
To enroll, and learn more about the Imagination Library, click HERE