No phrase written by Lennon-McCartney has ever been truer. But in my case, I think we should add: and their friends and their friends and so on.
Let's go back a little before we get into it. This story is about shoes. Lots and lots of shoes. As a member of the parent board for my daughter's marching band, we were looking for ways to make money - ways that didn't require a lot of effort but yielded a nice profit. You see, many organizations are trying to bounce back after the pandemic forced regular fundraisers to be scaled back or cancelled. We needed to start thinking outside the box.
What do I do when I need to think outside the box? I go to Google. That is where, after typing in 'outside the box fundraisers', I learned about the shoe drive.
An organization based in Orlando collects shoes for distribution among 25 countries; countries like Haiti where 60 percent of their population live below the poverty line. The shoes help create jobs by giving people inventory to set up their own micro-business. Selling is a way for people, with limited education, to work, make a living wage and provide affordable footwear to people who need it.
So, collecting shoes would not only help our organization but also help others far away. Win-win in my book. Our band would get a check based on the number of bags of shoes collected calculating the exact figure per pound. Easy right? Well, wait...just how many shoes did we have to collect?
2,500
Yes folks, two thousand five hundred pairs of shoes in two months.
The Orlando company is great and assigns a coach to help each group. They send you marketing materials, bags, rubber bands and boxes to help with the collection of the shoes. They want you to succeed but you need to be willing to put in the time and realize this kind of fundraiser takes a village. Our band needed to go beyond our membership of 40 families and reach out to our entire school district.
We had collection bins set up at four local churches. We had boxes set up at both our elementary and Jr./Sr. high school. We also had a collection bin at our local municipal building. We used social media heavily to keep the word out about our shoe drive and those posts were shared by friends and their friends and so on.
To be honest with you, there weren’t many days I didn’t end up with a few bags of shoes in my van. Since I work at our elementary school, co-workers were pretty consistent with giving me shoes. The church and township bins were frequently full. Many of the donations came from people I never met. I had a local Brownie troop contact me to see how they could help out. But many donations came from my Facebook friends, my neighbors, and my family.
To say there weren’t days when I wondered if we could actually do this would be a lie. We had a bag check off sheet and my fellow board members and I felt like the little engine that could every time we marked off a filled bag. (Each bag needed to contain 25 pairs of shoes.) I think we can, I think we can.
We held drive thru events where people could pull up to the school and drop shoes off. These were very successful. People shared stories about having a kid in marching band a long time ago and remembering when they were the ones fundraising. Local businesses donated boxes of shoes that were discontinued and they couldn’t sell.
Our fundraising coach told us there would be two weeks when our donations would be the highest - the first week of the drive and the last. Well in our case, our last week was gangbusters. We needed to fill one hundred bags of shoes and we went over that by 11 bags. It seemed like the shoes just kept coming during our final week and we really felt the love.
I didn’t know what to expect when we first kicked off this fundraiser. I could not have imagined the way our community would come together to support our marching band. If I was having a bad day, finding one of our collection bins full of shoes was an instant mood booster. Finding a bag of shoes on my porch was like a visit from Santa.
What is my take away from all of this? Well, for one, people have a lot of shoes. People appreciated motivation to clean out their closets. But most of all, people are generous. People are good and want to help. So, if you have any challenge facing you always remember to get a little help from your friends.
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