Dolly will give a keynote address to the 2010 Rotary International Convention in Montreal, Canada, the service club announced here Tuesday. Dolly’s speech will come as part of the event’s June 23 morning plenary session, which will also feature an address from the CEO of Boy Scouts of America. She will discuss the importance of early childhood reading and how the Dollywood Foundation’s collaboration with Rotary International has impacted her literacy program, the Imagination Library. The Library, which sends one age-appropriate, expert-selected book each month to any child birth to age 5 in more than 1,100 participating communities in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain, was selected as a Rotary International project earlier this year, with the organization officially encouraging all of its more than 10,000 Clubs in those three countries to support the program in their local communities. With more than 160 individual Rotary Clubs already supporting the program locally prior to that partnership, Dolly delivered a video-taped address to the international convention held in 2008.
