Kristina Cruise is the Founder and Executive Director of Promising Pages, a non-profit organization based in Charlotte. At Promising Pages, they collect new and gently-used children’s books, clean and wrap them as presents, and distribute them in a revolutionary way to kids in the community with few, if any books at home. One in 3 students in our public schools read below grade level. (CMS 2012 Report 3-8th grade.) There are an estimated 60,000 kids in the Charlotte area alone growing up without books to call their own. According to the US department of Education, if a child is not exposed to books by the time he or she enters kindergarten, the child is three to four times more likely to drop out of high school. One in four CMS students will not graduate. Promising Pages helps fill that void and turn these kids into excited young readers, laying the foundation for their future education and healthy self-esteem.

While Cruise is focused passionately on children, she is a broadcast journalist by trade. A 2002 graduate of the University of Florida School of Journalism, the award winning reporter has covered a wide array of news stories during her time as an NBC affiliate news anchor, field reporter and even weather anchor. It was on one of those reports where she got the idea for Promising Pages. She was covering a story about an inner-city food bank when she saw a young girl standing in line with her mother. The girl had such a sad and blank look about her. Kristina was captivated by this girl and was hoping she could find a gift of some sort to cheer the girl up. The word "books" stormed into her head. Later that week, Kristina heard a radio report about a scientific study analyzing the brain scans of thousands of toddlers. Kids who had no access to books had scans that mirrored people who had suffered strokes. Sections of their brains were not “lighting up” and synapses were not forming at the same rate as their book in hand counterparts. Something as simple as access to books on a daily basis had such a profound effect on these kids, yet so many grow up without. Kristina knew something had to be done.
In February of 2011, Kristina put her broadcasting career on hold to pursue Promising Pages full time. In the spring of 2011, in conjunction with Classroom Central, they held their first city-wide book drive and collected thousands of baby, toddler, and elementary books. In 2012 nearly 55,000 books cycled through the Promising Pages wa