Service Project #27 – Donate Your Old Shoes

This was an absolutely amazing project!  On our list of potential service projects, Tyler had suggested “donate our old shoes”.  I thought it was a very cute idea, so I found an organization called Donate Your Old Shoes that took shoe donations and shipped them to 4th world countries.  Their concept was so simple, and it was family run with virtually no overhead and absolutely no payroll.

I told Tyler about this, and he was really excited!  Then I started thinking, and my thinking got bigger.  What if I were able to help Tyler really see his vision grow?  I asked our Pastor if we could do a shoe drive at church, and he was all for it!  Our Pastor is so wonderful, he let me put flyers in the bulletins and even did his own online research about the organization so he could write about it in the e-newsletters.  He really got behind Tyler’s vision!

The shoe drive went on for several weeks, and the response was OVERWHELMING!  In fact, all I kept thinking was…how am I going to pay to ship all of these shoes to California???!! This is where they are stored by Donate Your Old Shoes until there are enough to send overseas on a container ship.  But I didn’t worry about that as the shoes continued to fill up the church lobby.  At the left are the first two boxes I shipped, and on the right are the rest of what was collected.  I have now shipped all but the great big box.  I did not count them  all yet, but I know we have at least 150 pairs of shoes.

Tyler could not believe how many we’d collected, and it was so neat for him to see the generosity of our church family.  So far, I’ve shipped three boxes.  I’m shipping a few at a time to spread out the cost. 🙂  It is all worth it though, because Tyler will always remember the shoes he helped put on the feet of those who needed them.