Anuj is back, and to mark the occasion, Justin and Anuj sit down with Kathleen Robertsson, president of the ABC for Kids Society, to talk about the Dolly Parton Imagination Library and why Antigonish is being cited nationally as a model for how this program can work.
What Is the ABC for Kids Society?
The ABC for Kids Society is the local organization behind Antigonish’s Dolly Parton Imagination Library program. Its mission is wonderfully simple: make sure every child in Antigonish Town and County has access to books from birth to age five.
Through the program, every registered child receives one free, carefully selected book every month, mailed directly to their home and addressed to them by name. The ABC for Kids Society’s job is to make that possible locally, raising the money needed to cover the community’s share of the books and building the partnerships that have allowed the program to reach an extraordinary 80% of eligible children in Antigonish.
The books themselves come through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which handles the selection, printing, and mailing. The local society never has to buy, store or distribute the books. Its role is community building: fundraising, outreach, partnerships, and making sure families know the program exists.
And Antigonish has taken that role seriously. What began with a few people around a kitchen table has grown, in just three years, into one of the most closely watched local Imagination Library programs in Canada, earning the town a nickname that captures the whole idea: the little place that reads.
Who Is Kathleen Robertsson?
Kathleen is from Antigonish; her father was Henry Sullivan of Henry’s Barbershop, which will ring a bell for anyone who’s been here long enough. Like many Nova Scotians, she spent a significant chunk of her working life in Alberta, teaching in Fort McMurray.
She retired back home with a plan. In Fort McMurray, her friend Julianne sat on the Dolly Parton Imagination Library’s blue ribbon book selection committee. They talked about the program often. Kathleen told Julianne that when she retired to Antigonish, she would try to start it there.
She meant it.
In April 2023, Kathleen sat down at a kitchen table with some friends and asked: would you help? They said yes, and the ABC for Kids Society was born.
What the Program Actually Is
The premise is simple. From birth to age five, every registered child receives one free book per month, mailed directly to their home. The book is addressed to the child by name.
There is no catch, no free trial that converts into a subscription, no hidden cost to families. Kathleen says she still has to convince people of this because their first instinct is that it’s too good to be true.
Dolly Parton’s organization handles all the logistics: the book selection, the printing and the mailing directly to the child’s mailbox. The local society doesn’t touch a single book. What it does is raise $3.85 per book per child per month—$46.20 per child per year—to cover its share of the cost.
Everything else is funded by The Dollywood Foundation.
The books are not secondhand selections or publisher leftovers. They are properly curated, beautiful books selected annually by a blue ribbon committee that convenes in Tennessee for five days, scouring hundreds of titles for books that address character development, language, numeracy, imagination and age-appropriateness.
And the selection committee isn’t simply a room full of PR people or publishing executives. It includes bookstore owners, psychologists, and elementary teachers. Canadians are represented, too. Kathleen has been, as Julianne’s guest, to that gathering herself.
Occasionally a Nova Scotian author will make the list. One of those is Freddie the Flyer, about the first Indigenous pilot, written by Halifax-based author Danielle Metcalfe-Chenaila.
The Numbers
There are 815 children between birth and five years old in Antigonish, according to the census. Kathleen’s program currently serves 650 of them.
That’s an 80% enrollment rate.
The national target for a program like this is considered to be around 65%. Antigonish blew past that. Jan, who heads the national Canadian operation, mentions Antigonish regularly. The program has attracted attention across the country.
Why 80% Matters
This is not a program designed only for families who can’t afford books. Kathleen is emphatic about this.
The goal is a shared foundational experience; a common library of books that children arrive at primary school having read. Teachers at the pre-primary and primary levels have told her it is making a tangible difference. Kids come in with shared language, shared stories, and shared points of reference.
The program reaches the whole community, including families out in Tracadie, Arisaig and Havre Boucher who don’t need to drive into town and spend gas money to put books in their children’s hands.
The books come to the mailbox. And the name on the label matters enormously. Kathleen tells a story about a three-year-old named Luke from Pomquet who runs in from the mailbox each month holding his book to his heart, pointing at the label and spelling it out: L-U-K-E. “That’s me. This book is for me.”
That moment—a small child learning that someone out there knew his name and sent him something—is what Dolly Parton designed the whole program around. She understood, Kathleen says, that what you need a child to feel is that someone, somewhere, cares about them, regardless of what’s going on in their life.
Dolly
The program started in 1995. Dolly Parton’s father was illiterate, and she wanted to give him a gift. She decided to give free books to all the children in her home county of Sevier County, Tennessee.
Her father loved the gift.
The program grew from one county to the whole state, and from one state to the entire United States, and then to Canada and beyond. Today the Imagination Library mails out three million books per month to children worldwide.
Kathleen notes that this makes it bigger than both Walmart and Amazon by certain logistical measures. The whole operation runs out of a small office above a bank back in Sevier.
Dolly once said she wanted to be remembered not for her looks, but for her books. She ran the whole thing on this principle: she put in her own money, she found people who loved children and loved books rather than people who were good at corporate PR, and she insisted that every community do its own part — the shared partnership model that means the program can scale without becoming top-heavy.
How Antigonish Did It
Perhaps unsurprising, it was easy for Kathleen to get the idea off the ground in Antigonish. Most community orgs she approached said yes to the idea right away. The Kinsmen. The Town. The County. The Sisters of St. Martha’s. 98.9 XFM. The Monsieur Hugh McPherson Council of the Knights of Columbus. The Antigonish Lions Club, which runs a full breakfast fundraiser every year. The 100 Women Who Care.
And StFX, where Professor Mark McIsaac’s fourth-year business class—which Kathleen calls Team X—met with her six times over the course of a year to help build out the society’s social media presence and financial infrastructure.
That last piece, Kathleen says, is part of why Antigonish grew so fast. The students were phenomenal. They helped professionalize an organization that started at a kitchen table and turned it into one of the most recognized programs in the country within three years.
Dolly Day: September 25th
To mark Dolly Parton’s passing and celebrate what the Imagination Library has meant to this community, the Town of Antigonish has proclaimed September 25th Dolly Day. (Nine-Two-Five)
The ABC for Kids Society is inviting everyone to sparkle it up a little — wear something pink, something glittery, play a Dolly tune, bake a batch of Dolly Cookies, and give your staff a cup of ambition (rather than your boss).
If you want to donate, you can find the org’s page on CanadaHelps at this link: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/antigonish-imagination-library/
A gift of $9.25 covers two months for one child. You get a tax receipt. Boom, boom, it’s done, in Kathleen’s words.
And if you have a child between birth and five in Antigonish Town or County and they’re not yet enrolled, that is easily fixed. Just visit this link to register:
https://antigonishimaginationlibrary.com/
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Thanks to Whidden Park Campground and Healing Arts Reconciling People (HARP): The People’s Press, Community Sponsors of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.
Interested in becoming a sponsor? Email us at letstalkantigonish@gmail.com
