Charities in the Middletown area are often the “front-line responders dealing with the heftiest of societal issues,” said Middletown Community Foundation Executive Director T. Duane Gordon.

Often, he said, the public knows charitable organizations make a positive impact in the community, but they may not understand the extent of their work.

To improve this understanding, the Middletown Community Foundation is kicking off its Knowledge Series in hopes of spurring discussion of the greater Middletown area charitable sector‘s impact and to educate the public on the work that the Middletown Community Foundation and its nonprofit partners accomplish, Gordon said.

The inaugural event will feature keynote speaker David Dotson, president of the Dollywood Foundation in the United States and CEO of the Dollywood Foundation in Canada and the United Kingdom. In that role for the past 14 years, he has overseen the expansion of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library from operating in one county in Tennessee to partnering with thousands of local organizations in more than 1,600 communities throughout the United States, Canada and U.K. In that time, those partnerships have delivered more than 45 million books to children.

The program aims to give children in a participating community the same pre-school experience of having received the same set of expert-selected books — one a month from birth to age 5 at no cost to the parents — to help instill the basic literacy skills necessary to be successful in school. Parton’s foundation covers the administrative costs, and local partners pay the actual cost of book purchase and postage for their local children.

The Dollywood Foundation partnered with the Middletown Community Foundation in January 2009 to launch the initiative locally. It has grown to be the largest of the 28 chapters of the program throughout Ohio, serving 2,100 children each month and having “graduated” more than 1,100 over the past four years.

Gordon said that in that time more than 57,500 books have been distributed to children in Middletown, Monroe, Madison Twp. and the Trenton area. He said children who participated in the program score significantly higher on their entering literacy tests than those who didn’t receive the books.

Dotson is expected to discuss how Parton, inspired by her own father’s lifelong illiteracy, created the program, the impact it has seen on participating children throughout the country and how partnerships like those with the Middletown Community Foundation have made it possible for them to reach hundreds of thousands of youngsters.

The second installment of the series will take place in May and feature keynote speaker Cincinnati Bengals Coach Marvin Lewis.