Showing love through literacy

Free books are in the future for Union County kids thanks to the hard work of the Gibson Memorial Library and the Friends of the Library.

After more than a year of work, Union County has officially joined millions of readers around the world in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. This program works with counties worldwide to mail one free book a month to kids ages birth to five.

Library Director Danielle Dickinson Thaden said she’d known about the program for a while, but truly started looking into it as a possibility when she became the children’s librarian in 2022.

“I had gotten into it because I was pregnant myself and I was like, I wonder if this exists for us? To my sadness, it didn’t,” Dickinson Thaden said. “At first I wanted to do it as soon as possible, but I realized that there were quite a bit of community support you had to build up prior to trying to launch.”

In 2024, Dickinson Thaden came to the library board of trustees and the Friends to propose bringing the Imagination Library to Union County. Both groups were immediately supportive and the effort to start the program here began.

In order to bring free books to area children, funds from other local organizations are needed.

“The Dollywood Foundation heavily subsidizes the cost of the program with the ordering system and the cost of the books themselves, but it still does cost our community about $32 a year to mail books to one kid, that’s 12 books per kid,” Dickinson Thaden said. “They ask that you have a team kind of set up ahead of time, [as well as] two full years of funding already fundraised so they know once you start, you’re not going to immediately fall apart and leave kids in the lurch.”

Community support was immediate and strong, with various organizations reaching out to the library before Dickinson Thaden began her own planning.

“We’ve had lots of other organizations willing to pitch in. We’ve gotten checks from some of the local banks, our South Central Iowa Community Foundation gave us a sizable donation for getting us started too,” Dickinson Thaden said. “It really was a team effort to get started and it will continue to be a community effort to keep it sustained as hopefully we get lots and lots of kids signed up.”

Families are now invited to sign their little ones up for this free program. A child must be under the age of five and reside within Union County to qualify. Registration forms can be found both at the library and online at the Imagination Library website. Families who sign up in the month of September will receive their first book in November.

“That’s the extent of their responsibility beyond letting us know if they move,” Dickinson Thaden said. “Eight to 10 weeks later, they’ll get their first books and they’ll continue through getting a monthly book until the birthday month of their child’s fifth birthday.”

According to the Imagination Library website, the first book a child will receive is a customized version of “The Little Engine That Could.” The final book a child will receive, the month they turn five, is a customized version of “Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come!”

Dolly Parton founded the Imagination Library 30 years ago with the goal of inspiring a love of reading in children. Since then, more than 3 million children have been registered and more than 287 million books have been gifted. It’s this same goal that inspired Dickinson Thaden.

“I taught high school in town for like eight years and I know how a lot of kids grew up loving reading and then it kind of faded by high school,” Dickinson Thaden said. “I found increasingly, as I went through my years, that some kids said they had never really loved reading. As a life-long reader myself, that completely broke my heart.”

She explained that along with finding joy in reading, early literacy helped in academic growth and bonding with parents. However, most important is reminding area kids that they are cared for.

“I just think it’s such a powerful tool to let kids know that they’re cared for, that even a stranger loves them enough to want to send them books each month,” Dickinson Thaden said. “Yes, literacy, academic skill, so important, but building up the full kid, knowing that they’re cared about and loved is just as important.”