photo by: Office of the Kansas Governor

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly is pictured with Dolly Parton Monday, Aug. 14, 2023, in Overland Park.

When country music superstar Dolly Parton visited Overland Park on Monday to celebrate the successful statewide expansion of her flagship Imagination Library program, it made for an especially jubilant moment for a small group of volunteers from the county next door.

The push in the Kansas Legislature to extend access to the Imagination Library — which provides one free book per month to kids from birth through their fifth birthday — to every child in the state began in 2021. But efforts to launch a local chapter in Douglas County actually kicked off roughly four years sooner.

On Monday, nearly a dozen people who have played a part in that effort at some point along the way were able to celebrate the milestone together — and with Parton just a few feet away on stage, answering questions from Gov. Laura Kelly as part of a closed event for nearly 500 supporters in honor of the program’s record of statewide success, which Parton said has kids across the state “running for the mailbox” each month.

“It is my belief that if you can read, you can self-educate yourself if you care to go to college or to school,” Parton told the crowd at Monday’s event. “It’s really a sweet program.”

Julie DeYoung, one of the local volunteers who helps with Douglas County’s chapter, and several others have seen the local affiliate, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library of Douglas County, grow from the idea of one mother to a resource serving 50% of all kids in Douglas County age 5 and younger — nearly 2,500 in total. The Douglas County affiliate has been officially active since early 2020 and, to date, has mailed more than 60,000 books to children.

Across the state, which now has 112 local programs covering all 105 Kansas counties, there are more than 52,000 kids enrolled who have been the recipients of some of the more than 3.8 million books distributed since 2005. That’s when the very first Imagination Library chapter outside of Parton’s home state of Tennessee began operating in Pratt, Kansas, a city of roughly 6,600 located in the middle of the state.

“That gave them sort of a template for other communities on how they could make something like this happen,” Kelly told reporters ahead of Monday’s event. “…And it’s grown in Kansas; we’ve had (chapters) in a number of other communities.”

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Gov. Laura Kelly speaks to reporters ahead of an event celebrating the statewide expansion of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Overland Park Monday, Aug. 14, 2023.

The Douglas County chapter, for its part, started with local mom Dara Allgeier, who in 2017 was new to Lawrence after moving here from Delaware and happened upon a used book from the Imagination Library at a book sale. Allgeier found support for starting a local chapter after speaking with Jenny Cook, senior children’s librarian with the Lawrence Public Library, and posting in a Facebook group to gauge other local moms’ interest.

From there, the effort was off and running. Within months, the group had obtained a fiscal sponsorship through the United Way’s Success by 6 coalition and entered into a partnership with Parton’s Dollywood Foundation. Since then, the local chapter’s been led by an all-volunteer leadership board.

photo by: Contributed

Douglas County was well-represented at an event celebrating the statewide launch of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Kansas on Monday, Aug. 14, 2023, in Overland Park. Pictured in the back row from left to right are Kristen Schneller, Jenny Cook, Julie DeYoung, Jen Sherwood, Rich Minder and Janice Blair. Pictured in the front from left to right are Breanna Orton, Dara Allgeier, Jade Martens and Karen Allen.

“I have to say, I’m leaving the event just really inspired and fired up to continue to work harder to get more kids signed up for the program,” DeYoung told the Journal-World in Overland Park. “I think it’s really a reinforcement of what the local volunteers have been doing locally for three years to grow the program, and it’s really an inspiration for us to continue to move forward.”

Cook and Allgeier were both among the group that joined DeYoung and another of the local chapter’s volunteers, Jen Sherwood, at Monday’s event. Sherwood manages enrollment for the Douglas County Imagination Library chapter, and she said the statewide expansion resulted in a significant spike in local kids receiving books.

At the start, she said the chapter was averaging about two or three new enrollments per day. But the announcement about the statewide program a few years later caused something she’d not seen before — 113 new enrollments in just one day. Now, the chapter is averaging 25 new registrations a day.

And on top of that accomplishment, Sherwood and her peers were even treated to surprise live performances of two of Parton’s songs, “Coat of Many Colors” and “Try,” at Monday’s event.

“…You do this because you love the books and you love the program, and it seems like the reward is now that you get to see Dolly Parton perform 10 rows away,” Sherwood said. “It’s just like, ‘What?'”

Although the statewide expansion has been a boon for Douglas County’s Imagination Library chapter, the work isn’t done. The Dollywood Foundation selects and distributes books, but local affiliates manage the program and pay half of the book and mailing costs, and the Kansas Children’s Cabinet underwrites the other half of local affiliates’ costs.

As the local affiliate, the Douglas County chapter has to raise $1.10 per child per month — or $13.20 per year for each child enrolled — to get books in the hands of those 2,500 kids. With numbers still growing, that means donations are a big help.

The chapter has a fundraising campaign starting in September, but DeYoung said folks are encouraged to contribute any time. People who are interested in donating or enrolling their child in the program can do so on the Success by 6 coalition’s website.