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To help children become more active, GoodBodies is launching Laces 4 Love campaign to buy shoes
March 30, 2012
Imagine children with toes curled under because their shoes are too small. Or a child with the toes of his shoes cut out because his feet have grown beyond the size of the shoe. Or a child who doesn’t even own a pair of basic athletic shoes.
You might imagine that these children live in a Third World country.
And while this is true, most of us don’t have to look any further than our own communities to find thousands of children who wear ill-fitting or worn-out shoes because their families can’t afford new ones.
But Laces 4 Love, which began in North Augusta, S.C., was launched to provide new athletic shoes to low-income children living in Georgia and South Carolina. The program began about 11 years ago and has distributed approximately 5,000 pairs of shoes and more than 15,000 pairs of socks to students at 25 elementary schools and six Head Start pre-school programs in South Carolina and Georgia. Laces 4 Love also has delivered shoes to needy children in Nicaragua, Jamaica and Peru.
The GoodBodies Program at the Arnold School of Public Health will launch a fund-raising campaign on Monday, April 2, during Public Health Week to raise funds to purchase new athletic shoes through Laces 4 Love for children in the Midlands. The fund-raising efforts will continue throughout the spring and summer, and a school will be selected and shoes delivered in the fall.
Barbara Cuevas, director of the GoodBodies Program in the Arnold School’s Department of Exercise Science, said the cause is a perfect fit with GoodBodies’ mission.
“This fund-raising campaign will enable children to have shoes so that they can be physically active. We want children to develop healthy lifestyles to encourage fitness and prevent childhood obesity,” she said.
“But without having the right shoes, many children are not able to realize the health benefits of playing and being active. Laces 4 Love offers us the opportunity to make a difference in children’s lives.”
For the launch of the fund-raising campaign, the GoodBodies Program will have a table on Greene Street and will collect funds from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday, April 2.
Information on making donations to the Laces 4 Love campaign will be provided by going to http://www.sph.sc.edu/exsc/goodbodies/.
“Laces 4 Love began because we saw a tremendous amount of need,” said Virginia Dickert, one of the organization’s founders. “The level of need has increased with the nation’s economic problems. For many families, shoes become a luxury.”
Shoes are purchased wholesale and also through local shoe companies, said Dickert.
“We buy new shoes from brand-name companies, such as Reebok, Skechers, Adidas, Nike, New Balance and others,” said Dickert. “We want children to have quality shoes because this may be the only pair of shoes that they will own during the year.”
The organization gets lists of needy children from the schools and writes the parents or guardians to request permission for their child or children to participate in the program. They also ask for shoe sizes.
Then, they arrive with hundreds of boxes of shoes to fit children on the day that the school has set aside for distribution.
“All of us are volunteers,” said Dickert, “and it truly is a labor of love. You cannot imagine the joy that children have when they receive a new pair of shoes that fit them. For many of them, these are the first new shoes that they have ever owned.”
For more information about the program and how you can contribute to Laces 4 Love, contact Barbara Cuevas at cuevas@mailbox.sc.edu or Samantha Brewer at brewersd@mailbox.sc.edu.
Keep up to date on fund-raising activities for Laces 4 Love through Facebook. Check out http://www.facebook.com/Laces4Love.GoodBodies.
