RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Dolly Parton proved that helping others is not only easy to do, but can be a lot of fun. | Katherine Bomboy/NBC
Dolly Parton was on her way to the studio to polish off “ Blue Smoke ” when the SUV she was riding in collided with a sedan in a Nashville intersection in 2013. At the hospital, she struck an unlikely friendship with her physician, Naji Abumrad, who, like Parton, was raised in a misty mountain village, hers in East Tennessee and his in Lebanon.
“It’s just like how you meet people in your life. You just click, you just feel like you know them,” Parton once told his son, Jad Abumrad, a public radio host who interviewed Parton for a nine-part series on her life. “There are just some things that, you know, you just can’t explain it. You just be it, you just live it, you just know it, and you just feel it.”
The whole world, it seems, felt it — that inexplicably swift, sweet connection — with Dolly Parton herself, a light-filled, lifelong philanthropist in the truest, most etymological sense of the word: a lover of humankind.
Some seven years after their friendship began, Abumrad told Parton that his fellow researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were looking into a possible vaccine for Covid-19, which had just begun to rage across the country. Without missing a beat, Parton wrote a check for $1 million, an early contribution toward what would eventually become the Moderna vaccine against Covid-19.
Her donation “made the research towards the vaccine go 10 times faster than it would be without it,” Abumrad later told the Washington Post , calling his friend “the kindest and most philanthropic human being” he’d ever known.
Parton, who died at the age of 80 yesterday, was raised with her 11 siblings amid poverty in the Smoky Mountains of Eastern Tennessee. She often credited her upbringing as a muse for both her music and her generosity. Just as integral to her persona as her kitschy high-femme glamour, her poofy hair and rhinestones, was Parton’s capacity for helping others.
With an infectious sense of joy and optimism, she proved that helping others is not only easy to do, but can be a lot of fun.
Parton’s most famous foray into philanthropy by far was her Imagination Library, which she founded in 1995 in honor of her father, who never learned to read or write. Since then, the initiative has doled out a jaw-dropping over 300 million free children’s books to young kids around the country and the world.
“I just give from my heart,” she remarked while accepting the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, a kind of Nobel Prize for giving, in 2022. “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.”
After wildfires tore through her native Tennessee in 2016, she raised millions of dollars that she used to give thousands of dollars in direct cash payments to hundreds of families who’d lost their homes. In recent years, she’s given millions of dollars to families affected by Hurricane Helene, to pediatric infectious-disease research, and to children’s charities across Tennessee. Back in 1990, Parton helped open a sanctuary for injured eagles in partnership with conservationists at Dollywood, the Eagle Mountain Sanctuary, which was forced to close after a brutal storm earlier this year. (You can donate to the American Eagle Foundation, which is rehoming Dollyland’s eagles here .)
Parton, who had a net worth of about $450 million according to Forbes , may have given away many other donations privately. In 2006, when asked about the full scope of her donations, she told my former colleagues at The Chronicle of Philanthropy with her characteristic sass that “it’s none of your business. I have often said that I count my blessings a whole lot more than I count my money,” she said, “the same is true for the contributions I make.”
The world may have gotten a peek into her private giving a few years ago, when some savvy social media users helped break the news that Parton had been casually paying for band uniforms at high schools across Tennessee, and had been quietly doing so for decades. She also received $100 million as a recipient of Jeff Bezos’s Courage and Civility Award to give away as she saw fit. It’s unclear where she chose to spend that money, but it could certainly buy a lot of school band uniforms, children’s books, or pediatric hospital wings.
There was always something otherworldly about Parton’s kindness. It was as if the nicest person you’ve ever met found herself in possession of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash. But as serious as her contributions were — to the music industry, and to millions of children around the country — she never took herself too seriously, and maybe that’s what made it feel so enthralling to watch.
“I’m kind of addicted to the feeling of giving,” she told People in 2021, “knowing that I’m doing something good for someone else.”
And that’s a lesson that all of us, legendary multimillionaire country superstar or not, can use to help carry her legacy forward.
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