Soles for Souls

Soles for Souls

Soles for Souls. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

I have a pair of cowboy boots that I pretty much live in. They will soon need some TLC or I face a difficult decision. The back of my closet is the final resting place for several other pair of shoes and work boots that have gone to that great foot rest in the sky. But wait…there may be some hope!

ELSEY: You know we are a simple charity. We get and give shoes from people all around the world. We give away a pair of shoes every 17 seconds to hurting people whether it be here in the United States or in developing nations all around the globe.

That’s Wayne Elsey, CEO of Soles for Souls who urges everyone to take a look in your closet.

ELSEY: You know what’s cool is American’s can make a huge difference. We have all these idle shoes in our closet that are sitting around and doing nothing with. We put on our same shoes everyday, we go to work, we buy all these extra pairs of shoes. We can clean our closets out, recycle what we have sitting there and make a difference in somebody’s life with that.

Elsey says they are looking for just about any kid of shoes including those tired steel toed work boots and cowboy boots.

ELSEY: There’s two ways you can get involved; you can go to our website and under giveshoes.org and you can enter your zip code and it will tell you local locations around the country that are collecting shoes. You take them to that location and drop them off.

If there is not a location close by Elsey says you can also box the shoes up and mail them to their warehouse location. They will mail you a receipt for your taxes. They have a number of partners that help repair and distribute the gently used shoes.

ELSEY: We put gently used in there but we don’t throw anything away. 100% of everything we get in is either fixed, repaired, refurbished and redistributed. About 3% of what we get in cannot be worn by somebody. We actually sell those to a recycler that uses those for playgrounds and other materials that they grind it into. So the ideal thing would be a great pair of athletic shoes, a great pair of work boots, a great pair of cowboy boots, hiking boots, any gender, any size. What we do is we get those in, we fix them up, we clean them up a little bit and we package those accordingly by size and by style and distribute those to people around the globe.

While I hate to say goodbye to an old pair of boots, knowing that someone else may get some use out of them is a great consolation and of course that allows me to go shop for a new pair of cowboy boots!

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

 

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