HEART & SOLES
“A God Thing”
Foster Care Awareness Project
6,000 pairs of shoes on
The Alabama Foster and Adoptive Parent Association,
kids to Love Foundation,
did a project May 1,
National Foster Care Month to bring awareness to the 6,000 children in foster
care.
We have advocated for years for our children in our
state government and it always seems our children come up short at the end of a
session.
It seems our state leaders see numbers and dollar
signs. We wanted them to see the faces
of our children.
We came up with the idea if we can’t show our
children’s faces we can show their feet.
This project was born out of frustration, an email
went out stating, we can take 6,000 pairs of used
shoes and put on our state capital steps to represent
each child in foster care. I
received an email,
saying” let’s do it” and the story goes on.
This project grew from one email to many hundreds
across our state.
We partnered with Kids to Love Foundation. Lee Marshall is a news anchor in
The start and finish of this project were exactly
two months.
We started out with an awareness project and Lee
said why not give the children shoes. We asked for new or gently used shoes.
In a 2-day period we had more than 1,000 pairs of
shoes donated from all over our state. We have to thank all of Alabama’s
Children policy committee’s all over the state and Voices for Alabama’s
Children helped with the email influx and did a spread sheet to help keep us on
track.
We had citizens, business’s,
agencies all over the state collect, donate shoes and money.
.We had the drop off spots where different groups
emailed they wanted to help.
A group that does mission work got in touch with us
a couple of weeks into our project, Souls 4 Souls called and said they would
swap every used pair of shoes for a new pair for our children.
They would also give each child a pair of house
shoes and flip flops.
We decided National Foster Care Month would start
May 1 so that was our day of displaying our shoes to our state leaders. We
planned a rally and invited all child advocates to our state capital steps. We
invited media, the Governor and Commissioner of Dhr.
We had a former foster child speak, Mike Ball, he is
a state legislature.
We had a former foster teen, now adopted, Miss
Springville, Rachel Isley
Our secretary of State, Beth Chapman also played a
major part in offering her warehouse and office for anything we needed.
It was awesome, every time we saw a need to make
this event happen a volunteer would know someone that could help.
This project was a success in many ways.
1. Brought awareness to our foster children
2. Celebrated National Foster Care Month
3. Brought the people of
4. We received great media coverage. Lee Marshall
did her whole show
At our
shoe rally.
5. We had newspapers do pieces for us.
6. Our legislators mentioned our project on the
house floor during a debate.
7. We received more than 16,000 pair of new and used
shoes for our children.
8. Our foster children received three pair of new
shoes
9. Kids to love Foundation took the new shoes and
bagged each bag with three pairs of shoes for our children for back to school.
They also gave school supplies to 50 of our 67 counties.
How we did this event
Call to action:
Emails were sent out asking for donations, to help
pick up shoes asking anyone for warehouse space, trucks etc.
Most child advocacy organizations jumped on the
idea. We started out with just used
shoes to put on the capital steps, the idea changed quickly when we saw new and
good shoes being donated.
We ask for volunteers to help sort, collect shoes.
We put 20 pairs of sho9es to a garbage bag. White garbage bags were new shoes
and black were used.
We asked people to make sure shoes were tied or
rubber banded together, ly soled and size put on
bottom of shoes.
The deal was we would give used shoes to Souls 4 Souls
and we would keep the new ones. This made it easier.
For anyone wanting to do this project you can get
enough used and donate them back to a thrift store or get them to your foster
children.
We picked the 1st day of National Foster Care Month.
We wanted to bring awareness, but also celebrate
anyone that had a part in
foster children’s life from beginning to end.
It was also the beginning of the week for state
legislatures in the session.
( Another wonderful piece to this
project came with ILP teens being Pages in the state legislature for the week.
It was a celebration of foster care month and also putting a face to our foster
children ) Details later.
We had warehouses donated in three different parts
of our state.
We separate shoes there and we were also blessed
with a phone call wanting to donate a semi to get our shoes to the capital.
We ended up with two big trucks donated.
We called the Capital and let them know what we were
going to do.
I met with the capital grounds person and got the
proposal.
We set the date, time and let them know at
We were told by the capital people nothing had ever been done this
big before, I think some feared what we were going to do.
We put an
We started at
Souls 4 Souls came with their 18,000 pairs of shoes
to take to the big warehouse.
We had a rally with music playing shoes everywhere.
We know we got the attention to our foster children
that day. Many people donating didn’t know much about foster care or
adoption. We were able to educate them.
We had many people want to be on a list to help in
any other project we do.
Volunteers bagged the shoes back up,
we even had school children helping while they waited to get in the capital for
a tour.
We will be happy to share out projects with anyone.
We also took more than 600 pairs of flip flops to
We had one flip flop for each person in congress. We
had a picture of a former foster teen saying they could make a difference in
the life of a foster child. The other side we had how many children were in
foster care nationally.
Linda Williams AFAPA Legislative Chair