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When news broke that Dolly Parton had died in August, the tributes poured in fast. Social media and news reports shared clips of "9 to 5," memories of "Jolene," and photos from Dollywood. While I was a fan of her music and entertainment, I was even more enamored by her philanthropy. That's the real measure of Parton's life. She wrote some of the most iconic songs in American music, but she may have done just as much good with her checkbook as she did with her guitar. The way she gave, not just how much, is a model for the rest of us.
In 1995, Parton launched the Imagination Library in her home in Tennessee, mailing free books to children under five. It wasn't a press event or a foundation with a marketing plan. It was a response to something personal: her father never learned to read, and she wanted to break that cycle for other children. My own children became part of the Imagination Library program, and I have fond memories of reading her recommended books to them when they were young. Not only did my children benefit from this, but I, as a parent, benefited from special, quiet time with my kids.
Three decades later, the program mails out roughly three million books a month across five countries and has distributed well over 300 million books total. She didn't start with a global vision. She started with a need she could see in front of her, and she kept saying yes as the need grew. That's an important lesson for how we usually talk about philanthropy as something that requires a foundation, a board, and eight figures before it counts. Parton's example suggests the opposite: start where you are, with what you have, and let the scale follow the impact rather than the other way around.
That model mirrors the work of a community foundation, like the Community Foundation for the Ohio Valley (CFOV). Every day we carry out the philanthropic wishes of people right here in our region. We get to connect what is important to them to the needs right here at home. We don't often work with multi-million dollar philanthropy, but at CFOV, we believe that anyone can be a philanthropist. As long as they have the heart to give, like Dolly, we can help them achieve it.
Long before the Imagination Library became famous, people in East Tennessee had quietly pieced together that Parton had been paying for high school band uniforms for years without ever attaching her name to it. It only came out because someone finally traced the pattern. When she used royalties from Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You" to buy a Nashville strip mall and reinvest in the historically Black neighborhood around it, that stayed private for decades too.
In 2016, after wildfires tore through the Great Smoky Mountains near Dollywood, Parton didn't wait for a formal disaster-relief group to arrive. Through her foundation, she committed to giving displaced families $1,000 a month for six months, cutting checks directly to people who had lost their homes. And in 2020, when a Vanderbilt doctor she knew personally told her about promising early coronavirus research, she wired $1 million before most of the country had fully registered what a pandemic was going to mean. That money helped fund the earliest stages of research that fed into Moderna's vaccine.
Neither of those decisions started with a committee. They started with trust in the people on the ground and a willingness to act on incomplete information because the moment demanded it. That's a harder kind of giving than writing a check to an established institution with a sterling reputation. It's giving into uncertainty, based on relationships and judgment.
It's tempting to file Parton's philanthropy under "nice, but irrelevant to me." She had a fortune most of us never will. But the importance of her giving isn't the size of the checks. It's noticing a specific, local need; acting on it without waiting for permission or credit; and staying with it long enough for it to compound. A teacher who buys supplies for a classroom, a neighbor who organizes a meal train, a small business owner who sponsors the local Little League team -- that's the same instinct at a different scale.
Parton ultimately had the reach to build her own infrastructure, including a foundation, a research fund with her name on it, a direct line to a Vanderbilt doctor. Most people don't, and that's precisely the gap community foundations exist to close. At the Community Foundation for the Ohio Valley, we have worked with donors across an eight-county stretch of the Upper Ohio Valley to build charitable funds that have paid out more than $40 million in grants and scholarships over the decades. We've funded similar things: literacy, health access, youth programs, help after a crisis.
Giving through an institution like CFOV solves the two hardest parts of "seeing a need and filling it" for people who aren't independently wealthy. First, we do the homework. The foundation's staff already know which local literacy program is effective, which food pantry is underfunded, which families need help after a flood. Second, we can allow small amounts to compound the way her donations did. A modest gift into one of CFOV's funds sits alongside gifts from hundreds of other Ohio Valley residents and gets deployed as a real grant to the kinds of programs that address our region's most pressing needs as they evolve. We even have an Imagination Library fund for Belmont County here at CFOV!
CFOV, like most community foundations, also offers donor-advised funds, which work a bit like Parton's own philanthropy: you give when you have something to give, direct it toward the cause you actually care about in the Upper Ohio Valley, and let the foundation handle distribution and credit (including staying anonymous, if that's the model you want to follow). If you "just give from your heart," the way Parton did, a donor advised fund is a great starting point.
Parton's death is a real loss, to music and to the countless people who never met her but were shaped by something she quietly funded. The best way to honor that isn't just to stream her records or movies, though that's fine too. It's to look at what's missing in your own town, your own school, your own family's orbit, and do something about it before you're sure anyone will notice, or thank you, or remember your name for it. Philanthropy often begins with a personal connection, like Parton recognizing her father's limitations. Is there something that touched your life that you would like to change for someone else?
She said it herself, more than once: she didn't really have a strategy. She just saw a need, and if she could fill it, she did. That's not a bad place for the rest of us to start.
Susie Nelson is the executive director of the Community Foundation for the Ohio Valley.