Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library back in Denver after community rallies to restore funding

Thank goodness for Dolly Parton and for some good folks in Colorado who are making sure one of her mission’s continues on even after funding dried up.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is delivering free books to Denver families again after a funding crisis shut down the program last May, thanks to a wave of community donations that brought it back within three months.

Imagination Library Denver, which mails a free book each month to children from birth to age 5, paused deliveries in May 2025 after a sharp increase in enrollment and book costs coincided with a loss of funding from family foundations.

The program had been serving about 8,300 Denver-area families when it went dark.

But a surge of donations from individuals restarted deliveries in August 2025, and the program is still going strong in 2026.

The program has since added a bilingual English-Spanish book option for interested families, a feature that had been in the works before the funding crisis began.

Statewide, the program recently hit a milestone. Gov. Jared Polis handed out the 3 millionth book delivered through Colorado’s Imagination Library last week. The program now reaches 26 percent of the state’s children ages zero to 5 across all 64 counties.

Dolly Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995 in her home county in Tennessee. The program now delivers more than 3 million books each month to children worldwide and has mailed over 280 million free books to date.

Families can enroll at imaginationlibrarycolorado.org.