This fall, the OHS Soles4Souls club has returned with exciting new plans for the year. Soles4Souls is a a global nonprofit organization that collects shoes from drives all over the world and partners with Zappos to send them to impoverished countries. They are then given to people living in poverty so that they can sell them and generate a sustainable income.
With the new school year, the Soles4Souls club at OHS introduced a new president, senior Graham Sherman. Sherman has been participating in Soles4Souls since her freshman year and has continued to help ever since.
“I was inspired to join Souls for Souls because I had a lot of friends that were in it and I wanted to be more involved in the community my freshman year. Coming out of Covid, I wasn’t involved in a bunch of things and most of the clubs weren’t back up and running yet and I heard about Souls for Souls and knew that was something I wanted to be a part of,” Sherman said.
Soles4Souls is introducing a new initiative this year, called Who Walked the Halls of OSD. Soles4Souls intends to use this initiative to further expand the program and help spread the word. The initiative should be up by the end of September.
“The initiative is going to target district alumni and what they’re going to do is they’re going to either ship, if they don’t live here, they can ship a pair of shoes to Central Elementary or they can drop them off there and they’ll write two to three sentences about how the district impacted their lives and take a picture with the shoes. It’ll be a good way to reach out to people that don’t necessarily have kids in the district right now, or don’t even live in Oxford and hopefully it will expand the drive and bring the community together to support an international cause,” Sherman said.
Soles4Souls plans to grow further year by year. This year, they plan to collect at least 350 pairs of shoes to be shipped.
“This year we are aiming to collect at least 350 pairs of shoes because for the fall drive, last fall we collected about 310 pairs. And so I just think 350 should definitely be the goal to just try and do even bigger than the last year because last year was our first time going to the other schools in the district and not just focusing on OHS. So definitely just getting the word out more this year,” Sherman said.
According to Sherman, Soles4Souls is a great way to be involved in the community, even if you don’t have much time to attend meetings.
“It’s a great way to be involved, especially if you don’t have a lot of extra time,” Sherman said.
