Your gently-worn shoes can help pay for a center where children can visit with their parents and classes for families who are going through divorce.
Youth Connections has started their Happy Shoe Fundraiser in partnership with Funds2Orgs. Community members can drop off their gently used shoes at multiple sites across the county to earn money for the agency.
The agency will send donated shoes to be refurbished and redistributed and used in developing nations for impoverished people to start their own businesses, said Judy Duncan-Olds, executive director of Youth Connections.
“It is a win-win; we collect the shoes, they go to another country, they are refurbished and other folks can use those,” she said.
Youth Connections will earn 40 cents for every pound of shoes collected with the goal of raising $5,000, said Jamie Perry, office manager. The agency offers mentoring, custody evaluations, classes and a children’s visitation center. They also help teens who have found themselves in a crisis situation in Johnson and Morgan counties.
Money collected from the shoe collection will go directly to help Youth Connections, specifically for helping in the children’s visitation center, which offers court-ordered supervised visitation for families and helping supplement the cost of Families in Transitions classes, which is taken by parents who are going through a divorce and who pay on a sliding fee scale, Duncan-Olds said.
The donation drive runs through March 29. Shoes collected must be gently used, with no rips or tears and must not have an odor. All types of shoes, including tennis shoes, boots, baby shoes and children’s shoes, are collected.
“Anything you would wear again,” Perry said.
The fundraiser was attractive because it required little effort and no money from Youth Connections, she said.
And the fundraiser is unique, Perry said.
“Once I researched (fundraisers) I wanted to find something we had not done before and something other agencies in the county had not done before,” she said.
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Youth Connections is collecting new and gently used shoes as a fundraiser.
Here are the donation sites for the shoes:
- First Financial Bank, 1073 W. Jefferson St., Franklin
- First Financial Bank, 8925 Madison Ave., Greenwood
- Home Bank, 1472 S. State Road 135, Greenwood
- Home Bank, 59 W. Washington St., Martinsville
- Horizon Bank, 420 N. Morton St., Franklin
- Horizon Bank, 942 U.S. 31, Greenwood
- Horizon Bank, 151 Marlin Drive, Greenwood
- Youth Connections office, 1195 N. Morton St., Franklin
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