Barbara and Leib Lurie are co-founders of Kids Read Now (KRN), a nonprofit organization working to eradicate the summer reading slide for K–3 students. Expanding nationwide, KRN will deliver 700,000 books to nearly 100,000 students from New York to Alaska in 2020.
A serial entrepreneur, Leib Lurie helped take two companies public, then started and sold five others. The most recent was One Call Now, the nation’s largest notification service delivering millions of messages that matter every day.
He pioneered and managed the development and global deployment of wireless handheld systems and applications for over 2,000 companies while holding senior positions at divisions of Cisco, Honeywell, Motorola, and Pitney Bowes. Leib Lurie holds multiple patents in communications and logistics systems. He earned both bachelor's, in 1976, and master's degrees, in 1981 from the Barney School of Business, studying communication, marketing, and finance.
Barbara Lurie attended The Hartt School (1974–75, 1978–79). She subsequently received a master’s in Pedagogy from Trinity College, with endorsements for reading, gifted and special education.
She taught K–12 students for many years: introducing musical theatre, humor, and rhyming elements to scaffold fluency to comprehension: the pedagogical backbone for Kids Read Now.