Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Turns Ten in Borrego Springs

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library mails one carefully chosen, age-appropriate book every month to an enrolled child, from birth until they turn five, at no cost to the family. The books arrive addressed to the child. That detail matters more than it sounds: for a great many children, the parcel with their own name on it is the first mail they have ever received, and the first book that belongs to nobody else.

The program only reaches a town where a local partner agrees to carry it — to fund the local share, sign families up, and keep going year after year. In Borrego Springs, that partner is BASIC. Ten years of it is what the room came to mark.

Volunteers spent the afternoon turning a school community room into somewhere worth celebrating in: the balloon arch, the Cradle-2-Graduation banner, lit letters spelling BASIC, tables of books to browse, and a long row of wrapped bundles for families to carry out at the end.

Families came early. Children who are in the program now sat with children who have long since aged out of it, and with a fair number of adults who have been funding, packing and delivering the books the whole ten years. Every chair in the room was taken, and then a few more were found.

The program was short and mostly personal: what the Imagination Library has meant in a town this size, who has kept it running, and what it takes to send a book out every month to every enrolled child. The best-received speaker of the evening was several decades younger than everyone else who took the microphone.

A recognition segment followed, for the people who have kept the local program going year after year without much ceremony about it. Small keepsakes changed hands. Nobody made a long speech.