Tustin families will soon be able to receive a free book in the mail each month for every child under 5 years old, addressed to them by name, at no cost.
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Arvida Book Co., a local independent bookstore located in the heart of Old Town Tustin, has signed on as the city’s first Local Program Partner for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
“Books should be accessible,” said Arvida’s founder Sam Robertson. “A family doesn’t have to qualify based on income. They just sign up, and every month a book arrives at that child’s home with their name on it.”
The partnership formalizes work already underway at Arvida, where Robertson and her team have given away thousands of books to children and adults across Tustin through the bookstore’s foundation. She said the Imagination Library shares the same idea.
Dollu Parton, who never forgot her humble roots growing up in a log cabin in the Tennessee mountains, launched the Imagination Library in 1995 for the children of Sevier County, where she grew up. She said the program was created to honor her father, Robert Lee Parton Sr., who grew up poor in rural Tennessee and raised 12 children without ever learning to read or write.
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Her initiative has expanded nationwide and overseas, gifting more than 300 million free books since it began and mailing more than 3 million books each month to children’s homes.
“She’s a true hero of ours,” Robertson said. “She didn’t just wish the world could be better, she decided to make it better and then did it. Bringing this program to Tustin feels like a way of carrying that forward.”
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According to U.S. Census Bureau figures, roughly 6.6% of the city’s nearly 78,000 residents are younger than 5. With no income requirements to enroll, an estimated 5,100 children would qualify for the program, which will officially launch Sept. 1.
Tustin Councilmember Lee Fink said the books will especially make a difference for children in working families and lower-income neighborhoods, where parents may lack the exposure, time or money to build a home library.
“The idea is, by the time a kid starts kindergarten, they’ve built up their own library of 60 books,” said Fink, who helped secure funding and promote the program, including sign-ups with a Dolly Parton stand-up he’s brought to Tustin’s Sunset Market for the past couple of months.
Fink said Tustin became the first city in Orange County to get the program because the Imagination Library has traditionally rolled out county by county. He explained that a launch across a county of roughly 3 million people proved too large to take on at once, prompting a city-by-city pilot approach, with four other OC cities in the works.
The effort is also backed by Orange County Supervisors Vicente Sarmiento and Don Wagner, with grant assistance from the Tustin Community Foundation.
Families can pre-register to be notified once the program is active in Tustin by entering their email on the “Check Availability” page at ImaginationLibrary.com.
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