Her first thought was not about herself. On November 11 2022 days after her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction seventy six year old Dolly Parton stood on stage as Jeff Bezos and Lauren SΓ‘nchez handed her the Bezos Courage and Civility Award along with an unrestricted 100 million dollars and she immediately thought about how many people in need that money could reach.
Instead of keeping any portion of the money Parton placed the entire nine figure sum into charitable trusts and began distributing grants within months. Her giving started with a 1 million dollar gift in June 2023 to the Pediatric Infectious Disease Research Program at Vanderbilt University Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital in Nashville.
That lifelong instinct to give money back to working families grew out of her childhood in Locust Ridge Tennessee where she was born on January 19 1946 as the fourth of twelve children in a one room cabin without electricity or running water. The local doctor who delivered her Dr. Robert F. Thomas accepted a sack of cornmeal from her father as payment.
Inside that Great Smoky Mountains cabin the family Bible was the only book on hand. Her father Robert Lee Parton worked as a sharecropper and construction laborer to feed twelve children yet he had never been able to attend school and went through adult life unable to read or write.
In later interviews Dolly explained that her father possessed a sharp business mind though he carried a lifelong embarrassment over his inability to read and believed he was too old to learn once he reached adulthood. That quiet shame became the deepest root of her charitable work.
True success for her was never measured by the fortune she built but by the families she could help stay together and move forward.
After her hits Jolene and I Will Always Love You and thousands of other songs and her 1986 investment in the Dollywood theme park brought massive wealth into East Tennessee she formed the Dollywood Foundation in 1988 to address education in her home county. True to her lifelong habit she was giving away huge portions of her income long before ever becoming a billionaire.
When the high school dropout rate in Sevier County climbed past 30 percent in the early 1990s she launched the Buddy Program. She invited classes of seventh and eighth graders to Dollywood and promised 500 dollars to every student who graduated if both the student and a chosen classmate signed a contract to keep each other in school and she also promised her personal attendance at graduation. The initiative helped bring the dropout rate of the county down to about 6 percent.
Seeing that many rural students fell behind before they ever entered a classroom Parton looked for a way to put books into mountain homes during early childhood while honoring her father. In 1995 she established the Imagination Library in Sevier County. The program mailed one hardcover book each month free of charge and regardless of family income directly to every registered child from birth until age five and started every child with the classic tale The Little Engine That Could.
Because the books were addressed in the name of the child and never had to be returned a child enrolled at birth entered kindergarten owning a personal shelf of sixty books. Robert Lee Parton helped her select and organize the early local mailings and lived long enough before his death in November 2000 at age 79 to hear neighborhood children call his daughter The Book Lady.
In 2000 the year her father passed away Parton expanded the Imagination Library into a national replication program. Launches followed in Canada in 2006 and the United Kingdom in 2007 and Australia in 2013 and Ireland in 2019. By 2023 the program had mailed its 200 millionth book and reached one in seven American children under age five and was sending over two million books a month worldwide.
Her disaster and medical giving followed the same direct model. After the November 2016 Chimney Tops 2 wildfires destroyed thousands of structures in Sevier County her My People Fund distributed 1000 dollars a month for six months plus a final 5000 dollar check and handed 10000 dollars directly to nearly 900 displaced families who lost a home. In April 2020 she donated 1 million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to fund early trials for the Moderna COVID 19 vaccine.
The promise began with a sack of cornmeal and the memory of her father and it grew into help that reached children and families around the world.
The November 2022 Bezos grant accelerated her philanthropy across her final years. Following her June 2023 pediatric infectious disease gift to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital where she had previously endowed a pediatric cancer fund in 2017 she donated 1 million dollars to the Salvation Army in late 2023 and continued directing millions toward flood relief and pediatric cancer care.
When Hurricane Helene triggered catastrophic flooding across East Tennessee and Southern Appalachia in October 2024 Parton personally donated 1 million dollars to the Mountain Ways Foundation for immediate flood relief and matched it with another 1 million dollars from Dollywood and her regional businesses. She later provided transformational funding to East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville which was renamed the Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital in her honor.
Even after sending more than 300 million free books into the mailboxes of children and giving away hundreds of millions of dollars from the fortune she built after Locust Ridge the cabin wall at her childhood home replica still kept the memory of the sack of cornmeal her father traded the night she was born.