“Mom, my sneakers are worn out,” my son said. He was deployed to Afghanistan and worked out regularly to meet the Army’s fitness standards. I told him his dad and I would send him a pair and asked if the men in his platoon needed anything. He said they needed sneakers too.
An idea popped into my head: sneakers for soldiers. How could we get soldiers the right shoes and to a particular location? My husband and I spoke to community groups about donations and found a running store willing to sell us shoes at a substantial discount.
After a local news station did a story about Sneakers for Soldiers, we got more shoe requests and more donations. We have points of contact overseas who collect personalized information on sizes and other features from troops. So far we’ve shipped more than 600 pairs of sneakers.
The soldiers send us incredibly touching thank-you notes. One, whose team received Gore-Tex shoes to get them through the winter, made clear to us how much our motivation meant: “The shoes arrived just before Veterans Day and were a great reminder of how much support we continue to have back home.”
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