The Northwest Territories Imagination Library Funding Proposal
Intent. This document makes the case to — and asks both Northwest Territories’s municipalities and community partners and the Legislative Assembly of Northwest Territories to help fund territory-wide — Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library so that every child in Northwest Territories from birth to age five can receive one free, high-quality, age-appropriate book each month, at no cost to families and regardless of income.
Goal. This proposal calls on both the local partners who run the program today — municipalities, libraries, and community organizations — and the Legislative Assembly of Northwest Territories to fund territory-wide enrolment in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library so that every child under five in Northwest Territories receives a free book each month, regardless of family income. Early literacy is one of the highest-return investments Northwest Territories can make — we need more of it, and we ask both local partners and the Legislative Assembly to fund it.
What follows. Four short sections build the case: (1) the proven benefits of the Imagination Library; (2) the Northwest Territories fiscal case, including cost and projected savings; (3) evidence from other jurisdictions already running the program at scale; and (4) why Northwest Territories’s local affiliates are ready and prepared to expand.
Benefits Of The Dolly Parton Imagination Library
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library mails a free, carefully selected book every month to enrolled children from birth until age five. By kindergarten, a consistently enrolled child has a home library of up to 60 books — often the first books a family owns.
The number of books in a child’s home is one of the strongest predictors of later reading achievement, independent of family income or parents’ education. Children read to regularly in their earliest years arrive at kindergarten with markedly stronger vocabulary, listening comprehension, and school readiness.
Peer-reviewed evaluations of the Imagination Library have found measurable gains in early reading attitudes and readiness, with the largest effects for children from lower-income households — exactly the children hardest to reach through school-based programs alone. Because books arrive by mail, addressed to the child, the program reaches families who never walk through a library or clinic door.
The program is also uniquely efficient: The Dollywood Foundation of Canada selects the books and negotiates wholesale pricing, titles are published by Penguin Random House Canada with a growing share of Canadian authors and illustrators, and each book is delivered to the child’s home by Canada Post — so a local dollar buys a full year of monthly books at wholesale cost.
Northwest Territories Fiscal Benefits Of The Dolly Parton Imagination Library
The cost is small and fixed. Northwest Territories has approximately 3,300 children under five. At the Imagination Library’s all-in cost of about $46 per child per year (books, shipping, and administration, in Canadian dollars), universal enrolment costs roughly $152,000 per year. Local affiliates and The Dollywood Foundation of Canada share this cost, so the territory’s share is a fraction of a single line item in a multi-billion-dollar education budget.
The return compounds. Every Northwest Territories child who arrives at kindergarten ready to read is a child less likely to need costly interventions later. In Northwest Territories, the territory spends on the order of $25,000 per pupil each year, and far more per student who requires additional support or repeats a grade. Early reading proficiency lowers the incidence of grade retention, remediation, and special-education placement — each of which costs multiples of a year of monthly books.
In Canada, the lifetime earnings gap for a high-school dropout begins around $200,000, and a diploma is worth an estimated half-million dollars to the graduate (Charity Intelligence Canada; Fortin, UQAM) — gains that flow back to the public purse through higher tax revenue and lower social-assistance and health costs. Canadian analyses estimate every $1 invested in early childhood learning returns roughly $2–$6 to society (TD Economics; Conference Board of Canada). Against that, $152,000 a year to reach every child is among the lowest-cost, highest-return early-literacy investments available to the territory. Sustained funding, not one-time grants, produces the strongest fiscal case.
Dolly Parton Imagination Library Evidence From Other Provinces & Places
The Imagination Library is not an experiment. It began in Tennessee in 1995, expanded across the United States, and now operates in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia — mailing over two million books a month worldwide, and more than 174 million books since 1995.
Across Canada, the program runs through more than 400 local community partners and has gifted over three million books to Canadian children since 2006, reaching families in every province and territory. In Prince Edward Island and the Yukon, the provincial and territorial governments already share the cost — covering half of the local per-child cost — and Newfoundland & Labrador began a province-wide expansion in 2025. Where governments invest alongside local partners, coverage climbs quickly and demand from families is high.
Independent evaluations consistently find gains in kindergarten readiness and early reading, with the strongest effects among children from lower-income, rural, and remote communities — a particular priority across much of Northwest Territories. The public-private model, in which public funding is matched by local partners and The Dollywood Foundation of Canada, has proven durable and replicable.
Northwest Territories can adopt a proven model rather than build something new: the book selection, wholesale pricing, and mailing infrastructure already exist and are shared internationally.
Northwest Territories Affiliates Are Ready & Prepared To Expand The Dolly Parton Imagination Library
The Imagination Library runs through local program partners — nonprofits, libraries, and community organizations that enroll children and help fund the books in their area. Northwest Territories already has local affiliates operating under Memoranda of Agreement with The Dollywood Foundation of Canada, with the systems and community relationships needed to scale.
Expanding to every child does not require building an organization from scratch. It requires closing the funding gap so existing affiliates can enroll every eligible child in their coverage areas and new partners can fill any remaining communities. The program provides the book ordering system, wholesale pricing, non-profit mailing rates, and an operations manual; local partners handle promotion and enrolment.
With a stable territory commitment, Northwest Territories’s affiliates are prepared to move quickly — the limiting factor is funding, not readiness or capacity. A predictable funding commitment lets partners plan enrolment, hold down per-child costs through full participation, and guarantee that no Northwest Territories child is turned away for lack of funds.
The ask. We ask Northwest Territories’s municipalities, community organizations, and local partners to continue and expand their support, and we ask the Legislative Assembly of Northwest Territories to provide territorial funding to match them — so that families can access Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Northwest Territories, so that every child — in every community and every postal code — can open a new book of their own each month. The full proposal is available at booksacrossthecountry.com.
booksacrossthecountry.com · info@booksacrossthecountry.com