Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
An affiliate of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library soon will offer to mail free books each month to children up to 5 years old in Quay County.
Loren and Barbara Nelson of the Silver City-based Imagination Library of Grant County have been named fiscal sponsors of the Quay County book program until a local sponsor — a 501c3 nonprofit group or a school district — is enlisted to take over the program.
The couple will run a booth at Saturday’s Fired Up festival in Tucumcari to sign up children for the program.
The Nelsons said Quay County families who sign up Saturday should expect to receive the high-quality books in their mailboxes by November or December.
During a phone interview Saturday, the couple said more than 500 children in Quay County are eligible for the program, according to 2010 U.S. Census figures.
In a Sept. 18 email to Quay County officials, the Nelsons made their pitch to establish an Imagination Library affiliate in Quay County.
“We currently mail approximately 1,250 free, high quality, age appropriate books each month to 80% of our counties babies, infants and toddlers,” the email stated. “After having mailed over 105,000 books since our inception in 2010, we can attest to greater reading proficiency levels in our K through Grade 3 elementary school students as well as greater family bonding.
“Thanks to our success, the Dollywood Foundation has asked us to make the Imagination Library available to ALL of New Mexico’s preschool children,” the email stated. “To that end, over the last 2 1/2 years we have been able to expand the program to include 22 of New Mexico’s 33 counties. Sixteen of them are fully covered and 6 others are partially covered. ... Currently there are no affiliates in Quay County. We want to change that.”
The Nelsons’ Imagination Library serves as fiscal sponsors for affiliates in Curry, Harding and Eddy counties, along with parts of Colfax and Catron counties.
The Nelsons said the books typically cost $2.10 a piece to mail to each child per month. A state grant has dropped that cost to $1.05 until June 2019.
Parents or guardians who cannot attend Fired Up to sign up their children can go to imaginationlibrary.com, click on “Getting Started,” then “Affiliate Locator” to participate. The Nelsons cautioned the website probably won’t be ready for Quay County sign-ups for a couple of weeks, however.
Inspired by her father’s inability to read or write, music superstar Dolly Parton launched the program in 1995 to mail free, high-quality books for children from birth until they begin school in hopes to inspiring a love or learning and reading at a young age.
The program at first distributed books only to children in Parton’s native Sevier County, Tennessee. But it became such a success, it began to expand nationwide.
By 2016, Imagination Library mailed more than 1 million books each month and has expanded into Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
