Madeline Huff: Books are magical

(Republished with Permission from Society Magazine)

              The first time she heard Kristina Cruise speak at her Charlotte country day school campus, Madeline Huff (L) looked back to her own childhood experience. Huff, 17, sat in the audience during Cruise’s presentation on Promising Pages and thought of how many books she had when she was younger and how important that collection was to her.         

                She applied to the summer intern program and spent of June, July and August working with the organization. She and the other interns immersed themselves in a few of the five events that the nonprofit hosted on average each week. They attended wrapping parties and book drives, sorted and cleaned books at the warehouse before wrapping them and them branding them with the Promising Pages stamp, and transported the books to the elementary schools where the Magic Book Parties were taking place.
                “I really liked being able to go to the Magic Book Parties because I was putting in a lot of work behind the scenes,” Huff said.  “But being able to go to the Magic Book Parties and hand it to the kids in person – it was really rewarding because I got to see the direct impact.”
                She loved to see the children’s enthusiasm toward the magic. “Because they’re so young,” Huff said, “they’re trying to figure out how things work. They’re just so easily influenced.”
                She was influenced by her own work and by Cruise’s ambition as well. She said: “One of the biggest things I learned from this was, when you’re really passionate about something, you can make it happen, whatever it is. That’s what Kristina has taught me because she’s the best example of that.”