Beth El Congregation sponsoring shoe drive
Looking for a new home for those shoes that seemed dazzling in the store but uninspiring once you got them home?
Or those shoes you haven’t slipped on since the 1990s?
The Beth El Congregation of the South Hills in Scott Township is giving area residents a chance to create some additional closet space, lend a hand to less-privileged people far from this area and raise funds for the synagogue through its first-ever shoe drive. It is, in the words of DeAnn Baxter, the co-chair of the fundraiser, a “win-win” for everyone involved.
All the donated footwear will go to locales like Haiti, Ghana and Cambodia. The congregation is working with the Florida-based organization Funds2Orgs, which assists organizations in the United States with shoe drives. The site for Funds2Orgs said it has worked with more than 18,000 organizations, has raised more than $11 million and has rescued 32 million shoes from being dumped into landfills.
In fact, Funds2Orgs reports that more than 600 million pairs of shoes are thrown away each year, and that chemical compounds within shoes can create health hazards if they are allowed to slowly deteriorate years on end in a landfill.
Beth El Congregation is accepting shoes of any and all stripes during the drive – cowboy boots, baby shoes, sandals, steel-toe work shoes, you name it. They have been taking new and gently worn shoes since the drive started earlier in August. So far, the response has been good, Baxter explained, and they hope to collect 2,500 pairs of shoes by the time the drive wraps up on Thursday, Oct. 6.
“We’re cautiously optimistic,” according to Baxter. “We’ve never done anything like this before.”
Shoes can be dropped from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday at the synagogue located at 1900 Cochran Road. For additional information on Beth El Congregation, go online to bethelcong.org.