Community Partner Spotlight on Promising Pages

By: Elysa Graham

Kristina Cruise Goeke, a Junior League of Charlotte, Inc. (JLC) sustaining member and the founder of Promising Pages, started collecting book donations in her garage to curb high school dropout rates and improve childhood literacy. This dream had a domino effect on the hearts and actions of the Charlotte community to impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.

Promising Pages’ mission to break the barriers to literacy, improve high-school graduation rates and long-term success for the youngest residents of the Charlotte community has been unwavering since the nonprofit’s inception in 2011. To date, it has provided more than 1.2 million books for children and that number continues to grow.

I met with Promising Pages’ Executive Director Eric Law, to learn more about the organization’s commitment to serving children and feeding the dream of book ownership for all. One of their goals is to eradicate areas termed book deserts, which are defined as locations with less than 10 books total in the home of any type or reading level. Eric explained how their limited staff of four did not slow down during the pandemic, but instead increased operations as community partnerships expanded to help get books in the hands of primary school students who were learning remotely. Partnering with CharlotteMecklenburg Schools, Promising Pages had books processed, cleaned and sent out with school lunches. The local literacy rate for primary public school students is still below 25%, with the pandemic complicating the way forward. The Promising Pages team has doubled down on its effort to erase book deserts by the year 2025 through their programs like:

1. Bookseed – working collaboratively with the housing authority to provide mini-libraries called Reading Resource Centers, to children from birth to fifth grade.

2. Feed the Body, Feed the Mind – which supports a dual need of food insecurity by providing books along with groceries.

3. Books on Break – the flagship summer reading program to send five books home per child in over 23 Title I schools. Today over 250,000 books have been gifted to students to prevent summer learning loss.