Today’s post is from Soles4Souls’ CEO, Buddy Teaster:
We recently had the opportunity to work with the National Shoe Retailers Association at their annual meeting. The NSRA provided more than 120 volunteers to hand out shoes to homeless adults in Washington DC during a shoe distribution at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. The NSRA folks were amazing, helping to put shoes on the feet of about 400 people in two hours. It was my first chance to participate in a shoe distribution and I was impressed by how well the Soles4Souls team managed the event, how well prepared the NYAPC was and how much energy and compassion the NSRA volunteers brought to the morning. It was a very inspiring day.
That’s only half the story, of course. Because at the end of our two hours, there was a still a long line of people who needed shoes. We had to leave dozens more waiting outside on a cold Washington D.C. morning with at least a three day wait for a chance at new shoes, when New York Avenue would open their doors for church the upcoming Sunday. For me, that tempered the good feeling of the work we had just done. And it was good work – we did our part to improve the lives of a lot of people that day. But in all actuality, we had hardly made a dent there. The metro D.C.area has more than 13,000 homeless people (many of them families), so the scope of the problem is much bigger than what we could do in just one day.
And that’s something I think about every day. What is the appropriate response to the overwhelming need in the US and in many places around the world? I read and hear the mind boggling statistics, like the ones we talk about at Soles4Souls. We tell our donors that there are 300 million children without shoes, while Americans throw more than 1,000,000,000 (that’s a billion!) pounds of shoes and clothes into landfills. Thousands of people die every year from diseases that are preventable with basic footwear. Those are large and overwhelming figures.
But what I am learning every day is that those numbers aren’t the ones that matter most. What connects me, and I would imagine of you reading this, to work that we do at S4S is that it matters to an individual. It mattered to the nicely dressed but dazed and embarrassed woman who lined up for shoes because she and her husband have just become homeless. She had to swallow very hard to come to the church that morning. And it mattered to the guy seemingly tormented by the conversations with people we can’t see or, I’m sure, even imagine. When I remembered to look each one in the eye and treat him or her like a human with a story, that’s when I knew that any progress we made is a step forward. To quote the great Pablo Casals, “To the whole world you might be just one person, but to one person you might just be the whole world.”
That’s why I love what I’m doing to help Soles4Souls reach more people -to reach more boys, girls, men and women who need shoes and clothes. I love that I am working with an organization that helps those who want to be in business for themselves and earn a living for their families, rather than simply taking a handout. The way we solve the “300 million kids” challenge is really simple. We help one person at a time.