Cathy Ackerman: Welcome to Sweet Tea and Strategy, a podcast by Ackermann Marketing and PR, featuring business and community leaders throughout Tennessee talking about issues and trends of importance to our state and beyond, and sharing some of their very best sweet tea recipes and tea sippin' stories. We're delighted to have as our guest today Jeff Conyers, CEO of the Dollywood Foundation. And Jeff, before we dive into talking about the foundation, regardless of where you are from—and I think you may be from Middle Tennessee—your close association with Dolly Parton and all things Smokey Mountains almost requires that you're a fan of sweet tea, even if it's an acquired taste. So do you like sweet tea? And if you do, tell us a favorite recipe or maybe a favorite restaurant that you think serves amazing sweet tea.
Jeff Conyers: Sure. Well, of course I love sweet tea. I grew up in Nashville and have lived in the eastern part of the state now here in Sevier County, Pigeon Forge area for the last 10 years. I don't know if they'll let you live here if you don't like sweet tea. I tell you, I don't necessarily have a recipe myself, but I do like my sweet tea with some mint in it—some spearmint. I think that's definitely the way to go. So certainly, any time you get some sweet tea is a good time, but especially on a warm summer day, you put a few sprigs of spearmint in there and you've got my number.
Cathy Ackerman: Sounds perfect. Thank you for that. You've now passed the official sweet tea test. Let's talk a little bit about you and the Dollywood Foundation. First of all, you—give us a little bit about your background and how you ended up as CEO of this amazing organization. What were you doing before, and what attracted you to come here and do this job, besides, of course, getting to work closely with Dolly Parton, a true national treasure?
Jeff Conyers: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. My quick version of my story is I was not one of the people coming out of school or going through school that knew exactly what I wanted to do in life. I'm always impressed with those people. I was open-minded, open-ended. When I was fresh out of school—a biology major thinking about medicine—a good friend of our family had decided that he was going to run for governor of Tennessee. This is, of course, two-term mayor of Nashville and then later two-term governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen. They asked me if I would be interested in joining his campaign and traveling with him on a day-to-day basis in a position that was called a "body man," which I knew nothing about. I didn't have any interest in the political world and originally thought, "I don't think this is for me." But they were looking for someone that he knew and would feel comfortable with because you're in each other's face all day. So I decided to do it, and it was one of the best decisions that I've ever made in my lifetime. I think I learned more in four or five years of working and traveling with Governor Bredesen than just about probably anything I could have done.
Jeff Conyers: What was interesting about why I mention that was I remember when we were traveling around and we were introduced to the idea of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. It started in Tennessee, and we were introduced to the concept of the program gifting a book each month to children, directly to their homes with their name on the mailing label—specially selected books. I remember Phil Bredesen—the look on his face. And by the way, he's one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. He said, "That is absolutely brilliant. Why didn't I think of that?" He said, "You know what? If I get elected, I'd really love to make sure that every child in Tennessee can participate in the Imagination Library." So he was elected in 2002. In 2004, he created a foundation called the Governor's Books from Birth Foundation. The mission of that foundation was to ensure that all 95 counties in Tennessee had a local Imagination Library program and that every child in every county could register and participate and receive books in the mail.
Jeff Conyers: I had the really great fortune a few years later of joining the Governor's Foundation as the president of that foundation. I led that foundation for about three years, and that's how I got to know Dolly and the Dollywood Foundation team. We worked, of course, very closely on the Imagination Library doing it statewide in Tennessee. You probably won't be surprised to hear that Dolly has always been a forward-thinking, visionary, "what are we doing next" kind of creator. When they were looking down the road at the foundation, they invited me to join and potentially one day lead the foundation. That was 10 years ago, and now it's just a real honor of my lifetime, in all honesty, to get to work with her and to get to work on this work that's so meaningful and important to so many children and families.
Cathy Ackerman: What a great story.
Jeff Conyers: Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I feel like the lucky guy, that's for sure.
Cathy Ackerman: So for those who may not know a lot about the work of the foundation, could you provide sort of an overview, beginning with its mission, how it began, how it's grown, and maybe some of the more significant achievements that you'd like people to know about?
Jeff Conyers: Yeah, absolutely. The mission of the foundation really starts back with Dolly. As just about everything that we do, she's such an inspiration. She's a creator by nature—of course, a prolific songwriter and movies and singer—but she's a creator at heart. You will often hear her say that she believes when you get in a position to be able to help, you should help. So when she went on and had a really successful career, she was thinking about, "How do I help?" Most everything that Dolly creates comes from a very personal place for her, and the Imagination Library is no exception. The Dollywood Foundation was created in 1988, and the Imagination Library came along in around 1995. They tried a few things with the foundation before really landing on the one that I think grabbed Dolly by the heart and grabbed the world by the heart—and that was the Imagination Library aimed at delivering books on a regular basis in a very personal way to children at home.
Jeff Conyers: That comes from the experience that Dolly had with her father. Her father didn't know how to read and he didn't know how to write, so he was functionally illiterate. She often describes her father as one of the smartest men that she's ever met, but at the same time, she witnessed how not being able to read and write held him back in life. She always wondered what he may have gone on to do if he would have had just that solid base to begin from. So as she was thinking about her life and what she could do, she thought, "Gosh, we can get books into the hands of children early in life and help them develop a love for books and reading, see themselves as owners of a book, see themselves as readers, and get them past that hurdle early in life so that they start school ready to learn." That ultimately is at the heart of the mission of the foundation—it ties right back to Dolly's very personal experience with her father.
Cathy Ackerman: That's wonderful. So describe how the foundation works, how the Imagination Library works, who it serves, some of the awesome statistics in terms of just the pure numbers of children that you're impacting. And it's now international, right? What countries are you involved with?
Jeff Conyers: It is indeed. We started this program as I mentioned in 1995, and we're mailing a couple thousand books a month to children in Sevier County. What was interesting about it was—I'm assuming because Dolly was involved—people found out what she was doing and requests began coming into the foundation: "Hey, I would like to get this in my county." So she made the program available for replication. Basically what she said was, "I'll give you our team, I'll give you our model, we'll cover all of that stuff if your community would like to partner with us and cover the wholesale cost of books and mailing for children in your community." So none of that overhead or any of that part is built in, and communities that work with us get to take advantage of the economies of scale because we buy hundreds of thousands of books at a time.
Jeff Conyers: That's how it really started—just community by community. As I mentioned earlier, Governor Bredesen created the statewide foundation in 2004. Tennessee became the first statewide program where every child in the state 0 to 5 had access to participate. We started growing from there. We actually transitioned into a program in Canada in 2007, a program in the United Kingdom in 2008. Now programs in the Republic of Ireland and in Australia. Multiple statewide programs now—North Carolina, Delaware, Arkansas, West Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Oklahoma are coming on board. It just continues to explode. We now have about 1.8 million children a month that are registered and receiving a book in the mail from us. We just celebrated a huge milestone in December of 2020, which was having mailed our 150 millionth book.
Cathy Ackerman: That's so incredible. It's just exploded in terms of growth. Do you ever have more people wanting to participate than you have the ability to embrace within the program?
Jeff Conyers: Well, you know, I think fortunately the model that we've set up—this replication model—is so turnkey that we never turn anybody away. I do have folks from other countries that call that'll bring us up and say, "Hey, I'd love to do this in France," or wherever. We've sort of paused on expanding into other countries for the moment because we're focused on trying to do what we have well. But we don't turn any new programs away, so we're starting many, many new programs each and every week. Bringing on the statewide programs is something that we've really focused on in the past few years, and that takes a lot of time and energy—there's just more people involved, bigger dollars involved. But we're just growing like gangbusters. In 2020, in one of the toughest years for many people with regard to the pandemic, we were one of those sort of odd fortunate organizations where we grew the total books mailed in the program over the previous year by about 13.5%.
Cathy Ackerman: You were meeting such an enhanced need during 2020 with a lot of kids at home. Are there any states that you are not in now that you're really focused on?
Jeff Conyers: Plenty. Yeah. There's quite a few that we're in the development process with. Some of them are a little more difficult than others just in terms of the scale—I'm thinking Texas and California, for example. We're pulling up on two million children a month. When we begin looking at Texas and California, there are two million eligible children in Texas and another two million eligible children in California. Bringing on states of that scale are very, very doable for us; all of our logistic partners have the capacity. We've just now sort of gotten into a position to be able to do those. That's really exciting for us because I think one of the neat pieces about the Imagination Library is its scalability. That has a lot of factors: affordability, the simplicity of the program, and then the turnkey model.
Cathy Ackerman: What a beautiful model for a nonprofit organization. Are there other nonprofit organizations who don't have anything to do with the work of the Imagination Library who are looking to you to help them figure out how to do sort of this plug-and-play model effectively?
Jeff Conyers: Yes. All of our community partners that we work with are nonprofits. We have 2,000-plus community partners all across the US and in other countries. Effectively, what the Imagination Library helps them do is reach a large group of their constituency that sometimes can be really difficult to do. What's neat about it for nonprofits is the Imagination Library tends to be a great entrée to then reach out and offer these additional great services that they have locally. So it's really a win for everybody. The secret of the Imagination Library is local partnerships. These local community partners are at the heart of what we do. We've actually experienced this in a unique way: when we've tried to go in and just launch an Imagination Library ourselves in a community without that community partner, it doesn't work.
Cathy Ackerman: Jeff, what is your favorite book of the books that you all have been distributing?
Jeff Conyers: You know, we have so many of them that it changes occasionally, but there are a few steadfast books. Sometimes that depends on which books I'm reading with my kids. I have a nine-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter at home. One that we always have fun going back to and reading no matter what is The Little Engine That Could. It's sort of the theme book of the Imagination Library and Dolly herself. She often calls herself "the little engine that did." So that whole theme of "I think I can, I think I can" really defines our philosophy and approach with the Imagination Library.
Cathy Ackerman: That's a good one for all of us. Okay, so the question that I'm sure everyone is waiting to hear the answer to is: What is it like to have the privilege of working with Dolly Parton, one of the most beloved celebrities in the world? What is she really like off-camera?
Jeff Conyers: It's humbling for me. She is an amazing creator by nature. What you quickly figure out is they're people too—they have emotions, they have fears and triumphs and all of the stuff that us "normal" people have. What's amazing about Dolly Parton is she has managed to stay sort of in the middle of the road, especially at a time when our country is particularly divided. She has managed to stay appealing to so many different groups of people. It's been really interesting to watch that process and watch her thoughts on that happen. But the most beautiful part about Dolly Parton is what you see on TV or you hear on radio or you hear in a movie is exactly what you get in real life, if not even more. I often tell people she's more funny, she's more beautiful, she's more genuine in real life than sometimes even what you get in a public setting. She has a way to make you feel at home, and she's one of those kind of people that when they look at you and talk to you, you feel like nothing else around you is there. They're just sort of locked in. She's just a beautiful person. She really genuinely wants to just inspire and uplift people—that's what she feels like she's here to do and she tries to have that come through in everything that she creates.
Cathy Ackerman: I'll tell you a tiny little Dolly story. When our company was a lot younger, one of our earliest clients was Dollywood. I think the third year of their opening of the park, they were looking for some new ideas to sort of make that opening fresh and they called us in to do some work for them. So we were going to actually meet her in her apartment that was over one of the retail stores in Dollywood. Of course, we were all terribly nervous. We knocked on the door, she opened the door herself, was standing there eating a bowl of cheese grits and said, "Y'all come in and have some cheese grits with me." And of course, everybody just breathed a sigh of relief and we literally sat there for a good 30 to 40 minutes talking about whatever before we got to the business at hand. So her sense of reality and being able to no matter what setting she's in always be her is a really amazing thing.
Jeff Conyers: It really is, isn't it? She I think she senses that. I've never seen genuine stars run over to Dolly to have their picture made with her or get her autograph as if it were just another member of the public. It's an amazing thing and I think she has developed this knack for sensing that and just making people laugh or smile or just feel at ease around her.
Cathy Ackerman: Do you have a favorite Dolly quote?
Jeff Conyers: I'll tell you one that we use all the time at the Dollywood Foundation, which I think is absolutely true, is "you can never get enough books into the hands of enough children." It's a philosophy that we have in trying to get books into the hands of children and families very early in life so that hopefully they have their own library of books by the time they start school. If we can accomplish that, children are more comfortable around them, they spend more time reading books by themselves, families read more together—you just lower that barrier to entry on reading and books.
Cathy Ackerman: Jeff, you all are doing amazing work. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or I haven't asked you about that you would love to talk about?
Jeff Conyers: I think we talked about it a little bit, but one of the things that doesn't get emphasized quite enough when we talk about the Imagination Library is back to those community partnerships. We have community partners in all 95 counties across Tennessee. We often say to families, "Hey look, the Imagination Library is free to your family." But as we all know, that doesn't mean it's free, right? These community partners are at the heart of what we do. If we've tried to go in and just launch an Imagination Library ourselves in a community without that community partner, it doesn't work. It is a true community-based program.
Cathy Ackerman: So if people want to volunteer, how would they best do that?
Jeff Conyers: They can go to our website which is imaginationlibrary.com and they can check the availability of programs in their community by typing in a zip code. If there is, you can pull up information on that local program and get in touch with them and see what they need. Sometimes they need help in finding children that live in the community, sometimes they need help fundraising, sometimes they have local reading events—just depends on community to community.
Cathy Ackerman: Jeff, we appreciate this so much. We love the work that you're doing. Thank you so much for being our guest on Sweet Tea and Strategy. It has been thoroughly enjoyed.
Jeff Conyers: It's been absolutely my pleasure. Any day I get to wake up and talk about what I do for a living is a great day to me and thank you for this platform.