Last week’s Time-Out Tuesday fund-raiser brought in more than $6,000 for the Franklin-Granville-Vance Partnership for Children in its effort to bring Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to this area.
The Dollywood Foundation program sends children a book per month up to age 5 so their parents can read to them and develop a love of reading in them.
The foundation requires its local partners — the Partnership for Children in Vance County — to pay $27 per year per child for the program, and the foundation pays the rest. The total cost is $80 to $90 per child.
That means the Imagination Library program will turn the $6,000 raised through the one-day event into about $18,000 — enough to supply more than 220 children with a year’s worth of books.
“Two hundred children with books, it has to help,” Henderson Mayor Clem Seifert said at Monday night’s City Council meeting.
Seifert praised the program, the fund-raiser, and the involvement of City Council members John Wester and Mike Rainey, Embassy Square Foundation head Kathy Powell, and City Manager Eric Williams. Each agreed to be placed in timeout at a local day care center and to use that time to make calls for donations to the program.
“The grand star in this fund-raiser was Mr. Williams,” Seifert said. Ten people in all were placed in timeout, and Williams raised more than a third of the money by himself.
Garry Daeke, the development coordinator for the Partnership for Children, the local Smart Start agency, couldn’t offer a starting date for the program but said his organization is working with several other groups for a comprehensive push on reading in the area. He said the Partnership for Children is arranging signup sites for the program.
Seifert said he hopes that Parton herself will be impressed enough with Vance County’s effort to visit Henderson, and Daeke said he’ll do his best to make that happen.
At that point, Rainey couldn’t resist the temptation and said: “Keep us abreast of it.”