How Dolly Parton showed what wealthy donors can do

The death of Dolly Parton, the queen of country music, touched people around the world, but in Appalachia her loss is far deeper because no one person will, or perhaps even can, occupy the throne upon which she sat as a cultural, artistic, familial, and moral voice.

Nonetheless, all of us can carry out Dolly’s approach to giving. When news of her death was announced, I was gathered with leaders from across the Appalachia Funders Network. We stood in a room overlooking the green mountains and sandstone cliffs of the Breaks, a state park that straddles Kentucky and Virginia in the heart of the mountains. Each person gathered there had devoted their careers to many of the causes Dolly championed: children and families, literacy, education, economic opportunity, and the stubborn belief that where you come from should never determine the limits of what you can become. Many had helped bring Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to their communities. Others have worked alongside her foundation in the aftermath of disasters.

Dolly’s life offers a challenge to those of us entrusted with wealth and philanthropic institutions: Invest in the places that made us. Trust the people closest to the problem. Build institutions that can outlive their founders. Measure whether people’s lives change. Use influence to bring others to the table. And remember that wealth can accomplish something far more enduring than its own accumulation.

Her example is particularly urgent now. We are living through an extraordinary concentration of private wealth, and some of America’s wealthiest people and corporations are retreating from charitable commitments. Dolly represented another possibility: Wealth could be enjoyed without being hoarded, and success did not require severing your obligations to the people and place that made it possible.

Never left the mountains behind

Growing up one of 12 children in material poverty, she famously watched her mother stitch a winter coat from scraps, a story she transformed into “Coat of Many Colors.” Ridiculed at school for being poor, Dolly realized that her family possessed things money could not buy: love, kindness, and belonging. That distinction resonates deeply with many Appalachians who learned early that their net worth does not represent their value as a human.

Dolly could have left the mountains behind and never looked back. Instead, she flipped the script on extraction in Appalachia by locating her signature business enterprise at home, created jobs there, built a foundation there, and invested in children there. Dollywood is Sevier County’s largest employer and estimated to contribute nearly $2 billion annually to the local economy. Dollywood is a business, not philanthropy, but Dolly’s decision to build it in East Tennessee reflected the same philosophy that shaped her charitable work: Wealth generated from a place could be reinvested in the capacity of that place.

That is no small distinction in Appalachia, a region that has spent generations watching timber, coal, natural gas, labor, and wealth leave our communities.

Dolly’s most consequential philanthropic achievement followed the same pattern. Dolly started the Imagination Library in Sevier County in 1995, inspired by her father, who could not read or write. The premise was wonderfully simple: Children who enrolled in the program would receive a free book in the mail every month from birth until kindergarten. In Appalachia, that intervention carries weight. Roughly two-thirds of adults across Appalachian counties read at or below an eighth-grade level, according to the Appalachian Learning Initiative. Low literacy has a ripple effect — exacerbating poverty, educational attainment, and health concerns. Dolly understood that putting books into the hands of children wasn’t simply about teaching them to read — it was an investment in nearly every opportunity that might follow.

The scale and reach of that investment are now almost difficult to comprehend — more than 330 million books have been distributed across five countries.

But the most important thing Dolly did was something she didn’t do. Dolly did not pay for 330 million books herself. She invested in the nonprofit infrastructure and civic capacity that allowed one person’s generosity (hers) to become collective action (ours). She built something far larger and more durable than anything she could have funded alone.

She enlisted local donors, foundations, publishers, and other businesses to contribute. Governments eventually followed. In Kentucky, where more than half of eligible children are enrolled, the state government now matches locally raised Imagination Library dollars in every county. Philanthropy, take note.

Life-altering outcomes

Dolly cared about whether the program worked, and it did. An international study involving more than 86,000 families across five countries found that after receiving 10 books, participating children were four times more likely to have developed the habits and skills that lead to a life of literacy. Those are life-altering outcomes.

And when wildfire devastated her home county in 2016, Dolly’s approach was simple and powerful: Trust people.

Through the My People Fund, her foundation provided unrestricted cash directly to families whose primary residences had been destroyed. There were no elaborate theories of change between a family and the resources it needed to recover. She knew people who have lost their homes know what they need.

She showed the same instinct after Hurricane Helene. In the months following the storm, our own data and tracking at the Appalachia Funders Network revealed just how unevenly recovery resources were reaching communities across the region, including significant gaps in parts of East Tennessee, disparities our Appalachian Helene Impact Explorer now helps funders see and respond to. Then came Dolly. Dolly personally committed $1 million to relief efforts in East Tennessee, while Dollywood, her other businesses, and the Dollywood Foundation committed another $1 million. Walmart announced its own expanded $10 million relief commitment alongside her.

Walmart’s gift is an example of how Dolly’s generosity attracted other capital and how she understood the power of influencing by doing.

Dolly’s greatest contribution to Appalachia, however, may be the one no charitable tax filing will ever measure.

She changed our story.

For generations, many people have attempted to reduce Appalachia to a collection of stereotypes: poor, backward, ignorant, helpless, or angry.

Dolly never escaped those stereotypes by distancing herself from us. Instead, when people mocked her accent, she kept it. When they underestimated her intelligence, she showed them she could become a sophisticated international businesswoman without surrendering the rhinestones, the humor, the faith, or the mountains. And she did so while standing in solidarity with Black and LGBTQ communities, and even invested the royalties from Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” in a historically Black Nashville neighborhood — an investment she called “the house that Whitney built.”

That, too, is philanthropy.

Stories influence where capital flows, whose expertise gains currency, what policymakers consider possible, and whether young people grow up believing their home is somewhere they must escape or somewhere they might help build. Dolly told Appalachian children they were worthy of opportunity and then mailed them a book. She told communities they were capable of solving problems and invested in their capacity to do it.

We can all celebrate her life by learning from her example — and recognizing that the crown she leaves behind is ours to carry together.