Dolly Parton Knew What People Need

How the queen of country music gave unconditional cash to wildfire survivors — and proved basic income works

Dolly Parton died today at 80.

You’ve probably already seen the tributes pouring in, the greatest hits, the rhinestones, the Jolene memes, the Whitney Houston story, and all of that is real, and all of it matters. But I want to honor her by writing about something Dolly did that most people still don’t fully appreciate, something that should reshape how we think about helping people in their greatest time of need.

She gave people money. Unconditionally. No bureaucrats deciding what they were allowed to spend it on. No means-testing. No paternalism. Just cash, because she trusted that they knew their own lives better than anyone else.

“I always count my blessings more than I count my money,” she once said. “I don’t work for money, never did.” But she understood what money means to people who don’t have enough of it. She understood that when everything you own has burned to the ground, the last thing you need is someone deciding for you what help looks like. What you need is the freedom to decide for yourself. You need money.

A Fire in the Smokies

On November 28, 2016, winds reaching almost 90 mph drove a wildfire straight through the town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. It was Dolly Parton’s backyard, the heart of Sevier County where she was born into a family that had nothing but each other. Fourteen people were killed by that fire. Over 2,400 structures were destroyed. Families fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

In the 10-minute documentary about the fire and what Dolly did embedded below, the survivors describe what happened in their own words. “The fire just literally knocked on our front door and our whole house was just surrounded in fire, so we had moments to escape,” one resident recalls. Another returned to find “ashes, piles of ashes, everybody saying Gatlinburg is gone.” Don Daily, a maintenance worker at a local resort, said simply: “I lost everything.”

Two days later, Dolly was on the phone with her Dollywood Foundation. As David Dotson, the foundation’s president, describes it in the documentary, she “kind of intuitively and instinctively laid out the essence of the response, which is: we need to put money in people’s hands as quick as possible.”

They would give $1,000 a month for six months to every single household whose primary residence had been destroyed; renters and homeowners alike, rich and poor alike. No applications asking people to prove how badly they were suffering. No restrictions on how they could spend it. She gave the same amount to everyone.

No one yet knew how many homes had been destroyed. The foundation had no idea how much money they’d just committed to give away. “But we decided if we were all gonna jump off a cliff, we’d do it together,” Dotson said.

They named the fund after one of her songs. My People Fund. She launched a social media campaign, hosted a star-studded telethon in Nashville, and raised $12 million. It was nearly double what they’d expected. Nine million of that went directly into the My People Fund. On the sixth and final month, Dolly personally surprised every family with a $5,000 check because more money had come in than anticipated, bringing the total to $10,000 per household. Over 900 families received that money.

The philosophy behind the fund (her foundation calls it “Dolly-izing”) is explained in the documentary. “People should have the ability to spend money on their own road to recovery, however that road looks to them; not to be dictated,” says one of the fund’s administrators. “There were no strings attached. I felt that was the absolute most fair thing.”

That is a basic income. That is what basic income looks like in practice. Recurring, unconditional cash, the same amount for every recipient, with complete trust that they will use it to meet their own needs in their own way. Dolly Parton may not have called it UBI, and the My People Fund was never designed as a basic income experiment, but it functioned as one.

And the results proved her right.

The Evidence

Stacia West, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee’s College of Social Work at the time, heard the My People Fund announcement on the radio and immediately recognized its significance. As she recalls in the documentary: “I was driving home one day after teaching, and I heard that Dolly Parton was contributing $1,000 a month to each family that was impacted by the wildfires, and I thought to myself, this is a really genuine approach to dealing with disaster recovery.” She contacted the Dollywood Foundation and partnered with them on an evaluation.

The median household income of recipients before the fires was just $1,500 a month. A thousand dollars a month of unconditional cash was transformative at two-thirds of pre-disaster income.

Before the fire, about 50% of recipients owned their homes. Six months after the fire, the majority had shifted to renting. But by the one-year mark, homeownership had bounced back to roughly 50%. People had rebuilt thanks to Dolly.

Insurance coverage, which is often the first thing to slip in low-income communities, actually increased. Before the fires, only 40% of recipients had homeowner’s or renter’s insurance. One year later, 70% did.

About 60% of recipients had savings at the one-year mark. Of those, over 95% reported having more than $1,000 saved. This, mind you, is in a country where nearly half of Americans can’t come up with $500 for an emergency.

And here’s the part that likely matters most to anyone who believes that providing people with unconditional cash makes them work less: the average number of hours worked remained exactly the same (40 hours a week) before, during, and after receiving the monthly cash. People didn’t quit. They didn’t become lazy. They used the money to buy groceries, clothes, to pay bills, and to rebuild their lives, just as Dolly trusted they would.

Dotson put it this way:

“People are so afraid of what people are gonna do or not going to do with the money. I always feel like, at the end of the day, any kind of program or approach that’s built on the belief that people are smart, they’re good, they know what to do, and you trust them to do that — that when you ground something in the positive perspective of humanity, then positive things happen.”

The Ripple to Maui

Seven years later, on August 8, 2023, the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than a century swept through Lahaina on the island of Maui, killing at least 115 people and destroying thousands of homes. When Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson were trying to figure out how to help, they turned to Dolly Parton’s playbook.

Oprah said she was inspired to create her fund after reading about what Dolly had done in the Smokies. The Dollywood Foundation’s president Jeff Conyers consulted with Oprah’s team multiple times to share the lessons they’d learned from administering the My People Fund. As Conyers described Dolly’s philosophy: “These are my people and I want to take care of them and we trust them to know what recovery looks like for themselves and their families.”

And so Winfrey and Johnson launched the People’s Fund of Maui, pledging $10 million of their own money and providing $1,200 a month directly to adults whose homes were lost or uninhabitable. Over 8,100 residents received that money. Nearly $60 million was distributed.

Here’s how The Rock explained why they chose cash: “You want to take care of the greatest need of the people, and that’s giving them money.”

Not food boxes, not gift cards, not a government committee deciding what displaced families deserve, but money. It was money. Because money is freedom. Money is agency. Money is trust. Dolly didn’t need over 250 experiments to know this. Do you?

Books, Empathy, and the Thing She Was Most Proud Of

Dolly Parton held two Guinness World Records and sold over 100 million albums, but she always said the thing she was most proud of was the Imagination Library — the book-gifting program she started in Sevier County in 1995 that, by the time of her death, had given away over 300 million free books to children around the world.

She started it because of her father, who was by Dolly’s account the smartest man she ever knew, and he couldn’t read. “I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams,” she once wrote. So she set out to make sure no child in her community would face that same barrier. Families could sign their children up at birth, and every month until kindergarten, a book would arrive in the mail, and with the child’s name on the label, because Dolly insisted it had to feel personal, not like charity.

Three million books now go out every month to kids in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Ireland. And in the last book every child receives before they age out of the program, Dolly included a letter that contained the following: “Dream big dreams, learn everything you can learn, and care for all those who care for you.”

I think there’s something even deeper here, something Dolly understood intuitively. Books are empathy machines. When we read, we step inside someone else’s experience. We learn to see through eyes that aren’t our own. We practice caring about people whose circumstances are different from ours. And when you’ve spent years doing that as a child by stepping into story after story, and life after life, it becomes easier to look at a real human being and imagine what they might be going through. That is empathy. That is the skill that makes everything else possible.

In a world where some of our wealthiest and most powerful people now openly describe empathy as a weakness — as something to be engineered out of humanity — Dolly Parton lived as a daily refutation of that idea. She never hardened her heart. She once said, “I have to not harden my heart, because I want to stay open to feel things. So when I hurt, I hurt all over. And when I cry, I cry real hard.” That openness wasn’t weakness. If you think that, you can’t be more wrong.

Empathy is not a bug in the human operating system. It is arguably our greatest strength. It is our capacity for empathy that makes trust possible, that makes cooperation possible, that makes communities possible. Without empathy, you have people who accumulate wealth and watch others suffer from a distance. With empathy, you have Dolly Parton — who saw her neighbors’ homes burn, felt their pain, and instinctively responded by trusting them with money, because she knew that’s what she’d want if it were her. The Golden Rule, actually lived by.

The Billionaire She Never Became

Dolly Parton’s net worth was reported by Forbes as being $450 million last year. She was not a billionaire. It has been widely speculated that she could have been one if she hadn’t spent her life giving so much of her money away — to wildfire victims, to children’s literacy, to COVID-19 vaccine research at Vanderbilt that helped fund the Moderna vaccine, to community after community that needed help.

I think if Dolly had ever crossed that 10-digit threshold, she would have seen it as a failure. She didn’t measure wealth the way seemingly most billionaires measure it. She measured it in books delivered, in families housed, in children who fell in love with reading, in people who kept going day after day because someone believed in them enough to hand them cash and say nothing more than: I trust you.

“Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life,” she said. She didn’t just say it. She lived it. She built a life that was about building other people’s lives.

There’s a word I keep coming back to in my own work on basic income: trust. UBI is not really about money. Money is the medium. The substance is trust. The message is: I trust you. I trust that if I give you what you need to live, you will use it to live. I trust you don’t need a caseworker checking up on you. You deserve better. Dolly Parton embodied that message more fully than any policymaker I’ve ever seen.

She grew up poor. She grew up sharing. She grew up in a community where people took care of each other. And she spent her entire life scaling that ethic up, not by building institutions that control people, but by building programs that educate and free them. Free books. Free money. No strings. No conditions. No judgment. Just trust.

Don Daily, one of the My People Fund recipients who lost everything in the Gatlinburg fire, put it this way in the documentary, choking up as he spoke: “That’s just not the way it’s supposed to work, and it did. It did — save people’s lives. If nothing else, up in their head where they could keep going on. Just take those next steps.”

Dolly Parton represented the absolute best of what we’re capable of as human beings. She was proof that empathy and trust aren’t naive ideals. They’re what actually work. She won. Not in the way billionaires win — by hoarding more than they could ever use. She won in the way that matters — by making the world measurably better for millions of people, and by trusting them to do the same for others.

The best way to honor her is to do what she did.

If you’d like to continue what Dolly started, you can support her Imagination Library at imaginationlibrary.com.

If reading this was worth your time, it’s worth sharing with others. Share it, subscribe for free, and if you can, make a monthly pledge or buy a paid subscription to keep this work going.

Thank you to my UBI Producer level patrons and paid Substack subscribers: Gisele Huff, Steven Grimm, Bob Weishaar, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, Oliver Bestwalter, Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, John Steinberger, Philip Rosedale, Frederick Weber, Tom Cooper, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Albert Wenger, Jeremy Wertheimer, Andrew Yang, Kimi Avary, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Paradigm shift, Miki Phagan, Draper Kauffman, Webmemo, Elizabeth Corker, Albert Daniel Brockman, Joe Ballou, Felix Ling, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Steve Roth, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, centuryfalcon64, Deanna McHugh, John Sullivan, Stephen Castro-Starkey, CodyS, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, bradzone, Tim, Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Nicolas Pouillard, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Karla Hagemeister, Mark Pierce, Fred Weber, Linda Hearne, David Allen, Janos Abel, Wendy Voahangy Ravano, Liz, and all my other monthly patrons for their support.