Back to School in New Shoes: A Simple but Powerful Way to Support Kids Experiencing Homelessness

Every kid wants new kicks for the first day of school, but that’s not an option for many of the 1-million-plus children in the U.S. who experience homelessness. One Nashville school official told Jaime Ellis, vice president for strategic communications at Soles4Souls, about a little girl who came to school wearing a flip-flop on one foot and a cowboy boot on the other.

“We hear from schools, ‘We have some resources for homeless families, but the one thing that we really can't help kids with is quality footwear,’” Ellis said.

That’s where Soles4Souls (S4S) comes in. The organization collects clothing and shoes to distribute to people in need — those living in poverty as well as people experiencing a human-caused or national disaster — in the U.S. and beyond.

Soles4Souls’ 4EveryKid program provides new shoes for children experiencing homelessness. This year, S4S teamed up with the Dallas Independent School District’s Homeless Education Program to provide shoes for the district’s unhoused students. S4S hopes to provide more than 20,000 pairs of shoes and socks to underserved kids over the next five years. The program is supported by Lyda Hill Philanthropies, the funding vehicle for the entrepreneur and oil industry heir, which supports scientific and medical research, environmental conservation and women in STEM, among other causes. Funding also comes from Dallas-based Cambridge Holdings, a real estate firm that develops and manages healthcare facilities.

“Hearing about 4EveryKid’s work brought back memories of world travels for me — seeing shoeless children on the streets and not knowing how to help,” Jean-Claude Saada, Cambridge Holdings founder and CEO, wrote in an emailed statement. “I never understood the implications that not having a decent pair of shoes could have on a kid’s self-esteem and confidence until I got close to it. For me, supporting 4EveryKid is such a small down payment with such a big impact; the leverage is enormous for these children and their futures.”

A number of U.S. funders support students experiencing homelessness, as IP recently reported. The Raikes Foundation is targeting programs focused on the link between youth mental health and homelessness, as Tricia Raikes wrote in a IP guest post. Other funders support programs that address hunger and homelessness among college students. A number of funders are addressing homelessness by targeting the issue of housing, as IP’s Martha Ramirez reported, while others are working to sever the link between homelessness and incarceration (see IP’s report on Giving for Housing and Homelessness).

Soles4Souls’ approach is more basic — but just as essential. It serves as a reminder on the first day of Homeless Youth Awareness Month that, as complex as problems like child poverty may seem, there’s a role for philanthropy to meet straightforward, daily needs that are often overlooked. The impact of closing such gaps can be bigger than you might expect.

“Without a good pair of shoes, kids feel embarrassed, discouraged, or left out — simply because they lack something most of us take for granted,” as the Soles4Souls website points out. “In short, they feel limited today, which can limit their tomorrow.”

“Free world” shoes

Ashley Marshall, the homeless liaison at Dallas Independent School District (ISD), says that for the families she works with, brand-new shoes are a luxury they can seldom afford.

The federal McKinney-Vento Act of 1987 requires local education agencies to have a homeless liaison and to ensure that children experiencing homelessness receive equal access to an appropriate public education. Ashley Marshall has a small budget to help families, and also receives donations, including food and gift cards and items — including ramen, deodorant and feminine hygiene supplies — on her office’s wish list. But quality shoes are typically outside her budget.

“Before we started getting the shoe donations from 4EveryKid, we’d hear about kids who were, say, on the basketball team and didn’t have the right shoes, or their shoes were old and falling apart,” she said. “We’d scramble: ‘Where are we going to get shoes?’ We’d try to scrounge around for a gift card or something. With these [4EveryKid] donations, kids get so excited, they stop and put on their new shoes right away. Most of these students have only ever had hand-me-down shoes. For our littles, they especially like that the shoes come in a box. They’ve never had that before.”

Some of the kids Marshall works with call their new shoes “free world” shoes. “Free world shoes are shoes that you wear out in public, because they're nice shoes,” she said. “So we're able to give them their free world shoes and they’ll tell us, ‘Now I don’t have to wear my brother’s old shoes or shoes my mom got me at Walgreens.’”

“Someone has my back”

Tennessee-based Soles4Souls was created after a group of shoe industry leaders teamed up to provide shoes to survivors of the tsunami in southeast Asia in 2004 and to survivors of Hurricane Katrina the following year. The organization was founded in 2006 by Wayne Elsey, who left the organization in 2012 after investigative reporting by The Tennessean raised questions about the organization’s finances. Soles4Souls’ current president and CEO, Buddy Teaster, who took over in October, 2012, helped restore morale inside the organization and improved its external reputation, as well.

Today, the organization distributes shoes in countries like Haiti and Ukraine, and provides entrepreneurship and employment opportunities across 53 countries and five continents through its 4Opportunity program. The organization’s other funders include U.S. and international footwear and apparel industry partners, corporate partners, and foundations including the Finish Line Youth Foundation, Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation, Caleres Cares Charitable Trust, and the Voya Foundation (see Soles4Souls 2022 Annual Report).

According to Soles4Souls’ 2022 Impact Report, its 4EveryKid program has provided new shoes to over 61,000 students since it was launched in 2020. The report includes evidence of the difference a pair of shoes can make: Schools saw a 92% increase in attendance after children received shoes; 98 percent of students said they felt more confident in their new shoes, and 4 in 5 reported feeling “more equal to their peers after receiving new shoes.”

The organization has an ambitious goal: to provide shoes for all of the 1-million-plus homeless children in the U.S. “Our first year, 2020, we provided 40,000 kids with pairs of shoes, and we’ve progressively scaled up from there,” Jaime Ellis said. “We’re hoping to get to 200,000 kids this fiscal year. We've got a long way to go, but we’re started on a good trajectory.” (Note that it is difficult to pinpoint the exact number of children who experience homelessness; according to a report by the National Center for Homelessness Education, public schools identified 1,280,886 such students in the 2019–2020 school year.)

Ashley Marshall remembers one Dallas high school student, a senior who was living on his own in a shelter. When he got back to the shelter one night after work, it was past curfew, and all his belongings had been thrown away. Marshall was able to provide him new shoes and socks, as well as other personal items.

“It’s a small thing, but new shoes and socks lets kids know, ‘Someone is thinking about me, someone has my back. I can do this,’” she said. The student, who graduated last year, received a full scholarship to college.

The fact that so many people, including children, don’t have a place to sleep at night in the wealthiest country in the world represents a tremendous systemic and moral failure that, as Matthew Desmond argues in his book “Poverty, by America,” is immiserating everyone. Desmond points out that the tools to alleviate poverty already exist, and that all of us have a role and a responsibility to work for its abolition. Whether we’ll summon the moral and political will to meet that challenge remains to be seen, but in the short term, meeting basic needs — like making sure that every kid who needs them has a pair of shoes — is a good first step.

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