Since November of 2010, children ages birth to five years old had the chance to register for and receive free books from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program, however, due to lack of funding the program may be cut back.
Kelly Frink, executive co-director for United Way of Southwest Wyoming, said the program provides one free book, each month to kids birth through five years old who registered for the program in Sweewater, Uinta, Lincoln and Sublette counties.
“Once they turn five, they receive a graduation book,” Frink said.
This book is usually a book about preparing for kindergarten. Children in the program receive books based on their age. Frink said they are also careful to not send duplicate books to the same family.
Currently, 2,399 children are enrolled in the program. Of those 1,070 are from Sweetwater County,” Frink said.
A total of 1,773 children have graduated from the program since it started registering children in November of 2010.
This program is aimed at increasing reading to children.
“As part of United Way’s education initiative, it is our goal to increase kindergarten readiness and third-grade reading scores,” Frink said. “Research shows that reading aloud is the single most important thing a parent can do to help their child prepare for school. We want to help them do that. Reading aloud for just 15 minutes each day can make a huge difference.”
Although all of the books are free to the United Way of Southwest Wyoming, they still need to cover the cost of postage.
According to Frink, it costs $35 per child, per year to cover the shipping costs for the 12 free books they receive each. To keep it going in Sweetwater County alone, would cost $37,450. For the whole program to continue it would cost about $84,000.
“So far, in 2015 we have mailed out over 15,000 books,” Frink said.
Starting the program, was not the problem, she said keeping it going is what the problem is. She said when they first started the program they had a lot of big grants to support its start up, but over the years those grants have become smaller or have disappeared altogether.
“We had quite a pool of money when we launched it,” Frink said.
The plan was to increase the program to 5,000, but now they are looking at scaling it back.
“We have not tried to push it,” she said. “We’ve kind of been struggling with this for some time.”
The last thing they wanted to do was make the program even bigger and run out of funds faster.
Frink said they would love to continue the program and even increase it, but they need donations to keep it going. When Facebook didn’t yield the results for donations the organization hoped it would, the organization started looking to local businesses for support. So far, Frink said they are still trying to get the word out about the need for funding.
Those who would like to make a $35 donation or more can do so by visiting Dolly Parton Imagination Library portion of the United Way of Southwest Wyoming’s website at http://www.swunitedway.org/dolly-partons-imagination-library.
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