Dolly Parton’s philanthropy inspiration is her father who couldn’t read or write: ‘I saw how crippling that could be’

While it may not be adorned in rhinestones and diamonds, Dolly Parton’s name is now etched over the doors of the former East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville, which this week announced it would be named after the legendary country music star. 

Parton, who hails from Locust Ridge, Tennessee, has worked for decades on behalf of kids and families in her home state and far beyond. The nonprofit pediatric facility, which has served the region for roughly 90 years, is entering a new partnership with Parton that hospital leaders say will deepen its mission to treat every child “as one of our own.”

For Parton, whose philanthropy has long focused on children’s health, education, and opportunity, the renaming serves as a symbol of commitment that started at her own kitchen table growing up, watching her father, Robert Lee Parton, who never learned to read or write. 

Parton’s philanthropic work largely focuses on children’s needs; she’s donated millions of books to children locally and across the United States. For her immense philanthropic commitment, Parton earned the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022, and recalled the inspiration behind it all.

“This actually started because my father could not read and write and I saw how crippling that could be,” Parton said during her Carnegie Medal acceptance speech. “My dad was a very smart man. And I often wondered what he could have done had he been able to read and write. So that is the inspiration.”

What started as a local literacy experiment has grown into a global literacy engine. The Imagination Library now operates in thousands of communities across the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia, gifting more than 3 million books every month and having mailed more than 270 million in total as of 2025. 

The program recently marked a milestone of 200 million books donated, with Parton (who is worth an estimated $450 million by Forbes) calling the chance to help plant the “seeds” of children’s dreams in books “one of my greatest gifts in life.” Every book is free to families, no matter their income, a deliberate choice rooted in her desire to erase the stigma she saw shadowing her father.

“Daddy was a very smart man…but he was ashamed that he couldn’t read or write,” Parton told Oprah Winfrey in 2020. “That bothered him. He felt like he couldn’t learn after he was grown. I remember thinking, ‘I need to do something.”

Dolly Parton’s decades-long philanthropic career

That ultimately launched her near-four-decade philanthropic giving timeline, which started in 1988 when she founded The Dollywood Foundation. She launched the foundation in her home county with the hope to decrease the number of high school dropouts, giving away $500 to every seventh and eigth grader who finished high school. 

Over the years, The Dollywood Foundation grew to include an Imagination Library, which started sending one book per month to each enrolled child in her home county from birth until their first year of school—another endeavor inspired by her father. The Dollywood Foundation also in the early 2000s started a $15,000 college scholarship for high school seniors “have a dream they wish to pursue and who can successfully communicate their plan and commitment to realize their dreams.”

Then, 2007 marked when Parton began working with local health care organizations. She hosted a benefit concert that raised $500,000, and both Dollywood and Parton’s Dixie Stampede dinner pledged an additional $250,000 each, bringing the total for that one event to $1 million. The LeConte Medical Center opened in 2010 and includes a 30,000-square-foot Dolly Parton Center for Women’s Services. 

In the subsequent several years, Parton also dedicated some of her philanthropic giving to wildfire relief efforts, launching the People Fund, which provided $1,000 a month for six months to families whose homes were completely destroyed. Parton also hosted a telethon that raised more than $13 million for wildfire victims in 2016, and donated another $8.9 million to those in need.

Parton has also continued to dole out large donations to Imagination Library participants, and donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University in 2020 for coronavirus research. She continued her disaster relief work in 2021, raising $700,000 for local flooding victims. Parton made a subsequent $1 million donation to Vanderbilt in 2022 toward pediatric infectious disease research.

The country music star also gives back to the people working for her. The Dollywood Co. announced in February 2022 it would cover 100% of tuition, fees, and books for any of its 11,000 employees advancing their education. 

But even people who don’t work for Parton can at least benefit from her generosity and get a kickstart on their education—and broadening your worldview.

“The only thing I ever saw growing up was poor people in overalls and brogan shoes and ragged clothes,” Parton told Tennessee-based literacy publication Chapter 16. “But in my books, I would read about kings and queens with their velvet clothes and big diamond rings. That’s how I knew there was a world outside the Smoky Mountains.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com