this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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Huh. Her only charity that I was aware of was the kids books, which, while super cool, amounts to crumbs from someone with that much wealth. I had her filed with other 'philanthropists' whose contributions add up to a small fraction of what they should be paying anyway via taxes, but our laws are shit, so they don't.
Doing charity and not making a scene about it though, huge respect! I wonder what else she was involved in.
I'm thinking my initial reaction was way too crass - apologies for acting shitty.
A year or two ago someone was trying to figure out how some low-income schools were able to get new uniforms for their bands every year. Turned out Dolly had been quietly donating new uniforms to them for decades.
More broadly, she donated massive amounts of money to schools, starting with her home county. When she was in school, her high school had about one in three students drop out. That number dropped to one in twenty. The Dollywood theme park literally just exists to create jobs in Dolly's community because the unemployment rate was pretty high. Employees are quite well paid before factoring in the total coverage of their healthcare, their family's healthcare, and their and their family's college education. The profits then go to the Dollywood Foundation, which operates things like the Imagination Library.
How rich do you think she was? She wasn't a billionaire. The millions she put into that charity were not as much of a crumb to her as Taylor Swift's $2 million donation to it.
650 million. Not billionaire, but still -usually- guillotine territory. The more I'm reading about Dolly, the more I'm seeing that she did infact make herself a net positive to humanity, hence my apology. If you had the misfortune of seeing my posts when the news of her death was breaking, I kinda just shrugged it off as another rich hoarder biting the dust, but I was very much in the wrong.
Different thread, but the Lemmy community is still small enough that common posters become familiar, so if you're reading this thread odds are good you read the other one, too.
Anyway, what I posted was shitty, and I wanted to own up to that - you all deserve better.
You didn't say anything shitty, you just didn't know the full picture.
Everything about Dolly Parton can be summed up in how she chose to spread her wealth instead of getting richer. If she parked her wealth into investments like most rich people or celebrities, she'd have been a multi-billionaire a decade ago. She was still very wealthy thanks to an insane amount of musical and movie success but she did coordinate that wealth into good more than most. For example, the reason she made Dollywood was to give her extremely impoverished home county a booming industry and revenue. The park didn't even have anything specifically Dolly Parton themed until a couple of years ago too, most of its life was dedicated to the characters from the various children's books she distributed through the Imagination Library so kids could recognize characters when they visited her park.
She was the rare example of someone who got a massive amount of wealth through her own efforts and then used it to help others as much as possible. Her charities weren't tax shelters, she really did contribute a lot to society on her own (very considerable) dime. When people say they wished rich people would help society more with their wealth, Dolly's who they're thinking of.