When Dolly Parton died at 80, tributes flowed not just for her music but for her philanthropy, which focused most on helping children. In 1991, she made an offer to every seventh and eighth-grade student in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up: she would personally give them $500 each if they graduated high school. The students had to pick a buddy to keep each other accountable, and if one didn't graduate, neither would get the money. The idea worked, and the county's high school dropout rate fell from 35% to 6%.
Practical, radical charity
This was the kind of practical, radical act that Parton, nicknamed "St Dolly", dedicated her life to. By showing that a promise of $500 could incentivise kids to stay in school, Sevier County had to address the dropout rate, and it did. In 2021, she told People: "I'm kind of addicted to the feeling of giving. Knowing that I'm doing something good for someone else."
Parton's family encouraged fans to honour her legacy by donating to the Imagination Library, her charity that sends children around the world a free book every month from birth until they turn five. More than 300 million books have been sent to children since 1995; last year alone, the Imagination Library sent a book to a child the equivalent of one every 0.78 seconds.
Deeply personal reasons
Some causes seemed varied, like the 30,000-square-foot bald eagle sanctuary she founded in 1991, but there were often deeply personal reasons behind her giving. The Imagination Library was perhaps the most personal to Parton, the fourth of 12 children raised in poverty. "My father could not read and write, and I saw how crippling that could be," she once said. Receiving a gift in the mail could also boost a child's self-esteem. "It's the fact they get recognised," Parton explained. "They get this little book with their little name on it in the mail, and they feel special. They start taking pride in themselves, and they know that somebody out there is thinking of [them]."
Parton never had children but felt a particular duty to them. "I didn't have children because I believed that God didn't mean for me to have kids so everybody's kids could be mine," she told Oprah Winfrey in 2020, the same year she read picture books aloud on YouTube on Thursday nights for 10 weeks to distract scared kids during Covid.
Foundation and major donations
She founded the Dollywood Foundation in 1988, which has managed her philanthropy since: it handled her deal with the seventh and eighth graders, distributed $12m to Sevier County families whose homes were destroyed in wildfires in 2016, and gives out thousands of dollars in scholarships every year to high school students in Sevier County. After Hurricane Helene in 2024, the foundation pledged $2m to recovery efforts in east Tennessee.
In 2017, she gave $1m to the Pediatric Cancer Program at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's hospital in Tennessee to honour her niece who survived leukemia, and then gave $1m more in 2022 for paediatric infectious disease research. After an undisclosed donation earlier this year, the East Tennessee children's hospital announced it would be renamed the Dolly Parton children's hospital.
In April 2020, she donated $1m to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, which directly funded coronavirus research that helped develop the Moderna Covid vaccine. There was a personal link to Dr Naji Abumrad, who Parton had befriended six years earlier when he treated her after a car accident. He'd told her the vaccine research was promising, and she got out her chequebook. When the Moderna vaccine became available, she got her jab on camera, showing her fans it was safe – while singing "Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine" to the tune of Jolene.
Advocacy and recognition
Where other public figures remained silent about HIV/Aids in the 1980s and 1990s, Parton pushed for compassion and research. In 1994, she gave her song You Gotta Be My Baby to a charity album that raised funds for HIV/Aids research, and joined 35 other country music stars in an Aids Awareness campaign called Break the Silence, speaking in public service announcements aimed at rural communities that saw Aids as an urban issue. Her production company, Sandollar Productions, co-produced the 1989 Academy Award-winning documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, about the lives of the people memorialised on the Names Project Aids Memorial Quilt.
Some acts were only made public years later – like in 2021, when she revealed that she had invested some of the royalties she earned from Whitney Houston's cover of her song I Will Always Love You into an office complex in a Black neighbourhood in Nashville. "It was mostly just Black families and people that lived around there," Parton said. "It was a whole strip mall. And I thought, 'This is the perfect place for me to be, considering it was Whitney … I'm going to be down here with her people, who are my people as well.'"
In 2022, Parton was awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, sometimes dubbed the "Nobel prize of the philanthropic world". Accepting the award – after joking that she might need to "take my hair off" to put the medal on – she summed up her approach to charity. "I just give from my heart," she said. "I never know what I'm going to do or why I'm gonna do it. I just see a need and if I can fill it, then I will."
