Washington County Gave!

The innaugural county-wide give day, Washington County Gives, is now in the history books, but what a day it was!

Thousands of donors made hundreds of contributions, and, when added to matching dollars and incentive dollars, nearly $170,000 was raised by the 48 participating organizations.  These funds are unrestricted in their use, and an unexpected bonsu for the agencies.  "Giving is evolving, and so is our approach to fundraising," said one participating executive director.  "Operating and overhead dollars are difficult to defend, and this effort gives us some leeway in the way in which we spend these dollars."

In addition tothe financial benefit, we at the Community Foundation considered the event a great success just by the developing and stregthening of partnerships within the community, and the camaraderie among the nonprofits.  Like and endowment fund, these relationships have the potential to benefit our  community forever.

The Community Foundation, with the support of Thompson Gas and the Hershey Family Fund, was proud to bring this initiative to our community.  Many thanks to all of you who particiapted!

Imagination Library

In 1996, Dolly Parton launched an exciting new effort, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, to benefit the children of her home county in East Tennessee, USA. Dolly's vision was to foster a love of reading among her county’s preschool children and their families by providing them with the gift of a specially selected book each month. Currently over 1600 local communities provide the Imagination Library to almost 700,000 children each and every month. Already statistics and independent reports have shown Dolly Parton's Imagination Library drastically improves early childhood literacy for children enrolled in the program. Further studies have shown improved scores during early literacy testing.

In response to Goal #1 of the Strategic Community Impact Plan to increase the number of children in Washington County who enter kindergarten ready to learn, this program has come to Washington County.   The Community Foundation, along with WCPS, the Agnita Stien Schreiber Foundation, the Mathias Charitable Trust, the United Way and the Pauline Anderson Foundation, launched a local affiliate of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library that is currently serving over 600 children in the qualifying demographic.  The response to the program has been so positive, that we hope to expand it to a full complement of 1,500 qualifying children within the next year.