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Generous Culver City students, residents and businesses contribute thousands of shoes.
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Board member Rosie LaBriola is taking collected shoes to the Union Rescue Mission.
Such an uncomplicated, drivingly logical idea – you might think the need is so obvious that the market would be flooded. It isn’t.
Who are the likeliest members of society to be starved for footwear?
Shoes for the Homeless is a Culver City-based non-profit that, ironically enough, sprang from the mind of podiatrist Ira Diamond 22 months ago.
As you can see from an accompanying photo, through the generosity of friends and residents, the homeless are being shod.
Dr. Diamond invited two persons well known across the community, Christopher Patrick King, a mortgage broker, and educator Rosie LaBriola, former principal of Lin Howe Elementary, to form a three-person board.
The young and dynamic activist Mr. King tells the story of Shoes for the Homeless, weeks before its second birthday of accomplishment.
“This is a very straight-forward organization,” he says.
Shoes for the Homeless (www.shoes4thehomeless.net) employs human tentacles.
Among them, Dr. Diamond, Ms. LaBriola and Mr. King “reach out to individuals, organizations, businesses, the Chamber of Commerce, non-profits and schools. We have donation boxes at all schools in Culver City,” and this may be the most important and instructive of all depositories.
“We ask people to do shoe drives for us,” Mr. King said. “We ask them to place the shoes in a box that we collect once the box is filled up.”
Collecting and Ordering
Every month, volunteers are summoned, and Dr. Diamond holds a shoe-sorting event – men’s, women’s, children’s – when their latest collections are organized and compiled.
More than 4400 shoes have been privately and otherwise donated this year.
“We bag them into bags of 10,” Mr. King said. “From there, we reach out to local homeless service providers. We give the shoes to them, with only the stipulation that they give them to their clients free of charge. We want to make sure the people in most need of shoes don’t have to pay for them.”
Shoes for the Homeless supplies 11 different groups, mostly in downtown Los Angeles, with badly needed footwear.
“We also work with the Long Beach Rescue Mission,” Mr. King said. “In Culver City, we have Upward Bound House. And although it’s basically Santa Monica, we have the St. Joseph Center.”
Shoes for the Homeless is planning a fundraiser this autumn. “We want to highlight the donor to whom we give the most shoes,” Mr. King said, “Union Rescue in downtown. Midnight Mission and the L.A. Rescue Mission are at the top, too.”
You read about homeless persons going hungry. Their clothes resemble second-hand store inventories or family hand-me-downs.
But who ever ponders the state of their feet?
Mr. King may be contacted at cpk@cpkmortgage.com
