“We wanted to come out Jan. 1 and say, ‘OK, now we are serving the entire county,’ but we came up a little bit short on that goal,’” Athens-Limestone County Family Resource Center Director Emmett Moore said.
The Athens-Limestone County Family Resource Center serves the community in several ways, and one of the latest has to do with early literacy in Limestone Children.
The ALCFRC became the Limestone County hub for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in July 2023.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is an early literacy effort for children aged 0-5.
“Dolly Parton grew up in Appalachia, and she grew up around a lot of illiteracy when she was a child. I think her father was illiterate. So one of her passions has been to provide books for children from birth to age 5, all throughout the world,” Moore explained.
He continued to say that a family can sign up for the program online at imaginationlibrary.com. Then the hub verifies their location and age to continue the registration.
“Then the Dolly Parton Foundation in Knoxville sends out a book to the child on a monthly basis until the child ages out of the program,” Moore said.
At the time the hub moved to ALCFRC, the program only covered two ZIP codes in Limestone: 35620 and 35614. The ALCFRC currently serves approximately 450 children in those two ZIP codes.
“We’d like to open it up to the entire county, but in order to do that we need more funding. Clearly 35611, Athens, is going to be a monster ZIP code once we open it up to that,” Moore said.
The funding for that goal is $10,000, and the ALCFRC needs more help expanding to cover the county. It has reached out to partners and friends of the agency as well as on Facebook to those who might be able to donate.
Those who want to donate can send money directly via PayPal at https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/alcfamilyrc or reach out to the ALCFRC by phone at (256) 230-0880 for more information.