What Dolly Parton Taught Us About Investing in Children — A Reflection from Johnson City

This week, East Tennessee lost one of its own. Dolly Parton passed away on August 25, 2026, at 80, after a brief battle with cancer — surrounded by loved ones in Nashville, less than two hours from our office here in Johnson City.

For those of us who call this region home, Dolly wasn't just a global superstar. She was the girl from a two-room cabin in Sevierville who never stopped showing up for her people. My own family has enjoyed floating down and splashing around Dollywood's Splash Country — the kind of ordinary, joyful memory that millions of East Tennessee families share. It's strange to grieve someone you never met and yet feel like you've lost a neighbor.

As the tributes have poured in — flowers piling up around her statue in Sevierville, the Henley Street Bridge lit in her honor, flags lowered across the county — one thread keeps surfacing: Dolly didn't just perform generosity. She engineered it. 
 

She built systems, not just gestures

In the early 1990s, Dolly noticed something troubling about her home county: nearly a third of Sevier County students weren't finishing high school. Her response wasn't a one-time check or a feel-good telethon. She founded the Dollywood Foundation to bring that dropout rate down—a targeted, measurable intervention aimed at the root problem.

That same instinct scaled into the Imagination Library, which has now placed hundreds of millions of free books into children's hands worldwide, and into the My People Fund, which gave direct monthly payments to families who lost everything in the 2016 Sevier County wildfires.

The lesson isn't just that Dolly gave — it's how she gave. She built durable, repeatable systems designed to outlast a single check, a single campaign, a single news cycle. That's the same conviction that shapes Develop Africa's approach in Sierra Leone: scholarships, school supplies, and infrastructure aren't one-off acts of kindness — they're pieces of a system built to keep children in school for the long run.

Her reach went further than the mountains

What struck me most, though, was hearing how far this reach actually extended — well past Tennessee, past the U.S. altogether. A friend of mine in the UK, George, shared this memory this week:

"RIP Dolly Parton. I was once a poll clerk for one of London's mayoral elections in a not-particularly-nice part of south London, and the building we were using as a polling station also housed a children's library, for which Dolly had provided the books."

A children's library in an unassuming corner of south London, stocked in part by a woman from a two-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains. That's the Imagination Library working exactly as designed — not a headline-grabbing gift, but books quietly showing up on shelves in communities she'd likely never visit, doing their work regardless of whether anyone traced them back to her.

It's a small story, but it captures something bigger: generosity built as a system doesn't stay local. It travels. A library card in London and a scholarship in Freetown aren't so different in spirit — both are proof that someone decided a child's access to books and school shouldn't depend on geography.

Why this matters for our work

None of this is really about celebrity philanthropy. It's about a mindset: notice a specific, solvable problem close to home, build something durable to address it, and keep showing up for the people who need it — regardless of whether they'll ever know your name.

That's the same conviction behind Develop Africa's 20 years of work in Sierra Leone — scholarships for children who would otherwise be pulled out of school, supplies for classrooms that have none, and systems built to last well beyond any single donor or campaign.

Dolly Parton spent her life proving that where you come from can become the very thing you invest in most. We're grateful for the reminder, and for the chance to carry a piece of that spirit into our own work half a world away.

Thank you, Dolly. 

 

Attribution: Photo Credit

[Dolly Parton at a press conference in Australia, 2011] 
*Photo: Dolly Parton at a press conference in Australia, 2011, by [Eva Rinaldi] 
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dolly_Parton_2011.jpg). No changes made.* 
Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons