Two sprightly teenage girls walk into a 50,000-square-foot warehouse and are immediately lost.

Before them lie enormous piles of shoes – Adidas, Dr. Martens, roller blades, Barney slippers and even Gucci heels – sprawled across a gravel floor. White walls behind the shoes carry homemade signs reading “Large,” “Medium” and “Small.” In the distance, other lively teenagers move tennis shoes from disheveled piles to organized stacks as familiar hip-hop rhythms blast out of a boom box on the floor next to them.

And the two girls remain lost.

In a fenced office to their right they see a woman – tall, tanned and brown-haired – who they can only hope is the “shoe Messiah.” With some shyness and hesitation, they walk over to her, but not before the tall woman reads their thoughts and asks, “Are you guys here to volunteer?”

“Um, yeah,” says the taller of the two friends.

“OK. Make sure you sign your names on the sign-up sheet and we’ll give you a tour of the place before you start.”

The girls, happy to be found and ready to help, sign their names on the sheet and are quickly guided by a middle-aged volunteer around the spacious warehouse. The tall woman then joins the other teenagers and begins packing sandals into boxes.

For the “shoe Messiah,” better known as Mona Purdy, 40, this is a typical Tuesday afternoon at the Share Your Soles warehouse. To volunteers she is a hero who dedicates her life to help children – not only those who happen to wander into her warehouse, but thousands across the world who are too poor to afford shoes.

Purdy is the founder and executive director of Share Your Soles, a non-profit organization based in Palos Park, Ill., that collects thousands of shoes and delivers them to needy children in Third World countries. Last month alone, Share Your Soles delivered more than 25,000 shoes to impoverished children in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guatemala and Mexico. The organization also donated about 13,000 shoes to New Orleans residents who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. Purdy says its next trip will be to Haiti, where it will donate as much footwear as it can.

In the past six years, Share Your Soles has donated more than 250,000 pairs of shoes to more than 25 countries all over the world. The not-for-profit organization also has given shoes to American Indian reservations and poor communities across the United States, including residents in the Appalachian Mountains and homeless shelters in Chicago. “We allow anyone to get shoes,” Purdy says. “I know I’m not worthy enough to choose who gets shoes and who doesn’t.”

Sole Origins

In 1999 Purdy traveled to Peten, Guatemala, on a cycling trip and was shocked by what she saw. The life-long runner entered a half-marathon made up of two different categories – one for children and one for adults. Waiting for her turn, Purdy noticed that many of the children weren’t wearing shoes, and watched as they painted hot tar on the soles of their feet to run the race without hurting themselves. “I thought about giving them my shoes, but mine were too big,” she says. “I thought someone had to do something.”

On the plane home, Purdy sat next to an orthopedic surgeon from Guatemala who treated the frail feet of kids who were too poor to afford shoes. He told her that if these children had shoes to wear, he would not have to amputate their limbs.

Purdy and her family were moved. Back in their Palos Park home, Purdy’s daughter, Hannah, then 8, gave Purdy her shoes and asked her to take them back to the kids in Guatemala. “She told me, ‘I’m almost going to be too big for them,’ and that kind of inspired me to take those shoes (to Guatemala),” she says. Purdy visited neighborhood churches, scout troops and schools and asked families to donate any used shoes they might have.

She initially wanted to collect 1,000 pairs. She ended up with 5,000.

Purdy took that first batch of shoes to an orphanage in Guatemala in what she thought would be her only shoe-delivery trip. But when Purdy was about to leave, one of the workers at the orphanage asked her if she was coming back. She didn’t know how to answer.

The minute she returned to her Palos Park home, the shoes kept on coming. “I never thought I’d do this again, but people kept e-mailing me and asking me if I was still collecting shoes,” she says. Within weeks schools, churches, clubs and individuals started leaving bags and boxes of new and gently worn shoes in her front yard every day, sometimes with notes of encouragement. Three weeks after her trip to Guatemala, Purdy traveled to Honduras, beginning a new mission to shoe the world. “After that, we started going pretty much everywhere,” she says.

Purdy placed tarps all around her house and brought in volunteers – mostly friends, neighbors and family members – who spent hours each day sorting, cleaning and polishing the thousands of donated shoes they received every year. As more shoes poured in, Center Point Properties, a Chicago-based industrial property company, donated a 30,000-square-foot warehouse in Alsip, Ill., in 2003. “Without (Center Point Properties) I wouldn’t have a home,” Purdy says. By the next year, Mike Gaits, CEO of Center Point Properties, offered Purdy a 50,000-square-foot warehouse, also in Alsip. “I told Mike, ‘Honey, you give me that warehouse, and I’ll fill it up,'” Purdy says. “Now we can’t even drive the golf-cart around in here.”

The Demand for Shoes

Experts and doctors agree that children in Third World countries are in desperate need of footwear. According to a UNICEF report titled “The State of the World’s Children 2005,” half the world’s children can barely afford to eat, much less acquire shoes.

Walking on dirty soil without shoes can prove lethal for these children. “(It) exposes children’s feet to the dangers of infection through accidental cuts and to severe contusions, sprains or fractures,” says Dr. Joaquin Brieva, a dermatology professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine. According to the American Podriatic Medical Association, plantar warts – painful growths on the soles of the feet – occur most often in children between 12 and 16.

Children in poverty-stricken countries also need shoes to get to school. Although school may be free, many children aren’t allowed into a classroom if they aren’t wearing clean uniforms and shoes, according to the UNICEF report. “Education is the only thing that will free (these kids from poverty), but they need shoes to go to school,” Purdy says. “How they get to school is their shoes. Their shoes are their transportation.”

Shoeing the World

Now, Share Your Soles collects 45,000 to 50,000 shoes a month. The Share Your Soles warehouse, 5619 W. 115th Street in Alsip, is open on Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday and welcomes anyone to volunteer or drop-off shoes. The organization has expanded to 22 states across the United States, where volunteers collect the footwear and then send them to the Alsip headquarters.

More than 100 people show up to help every Saturday, the busiest work day, Purdy says. Volunteers – who find out about the non-profit through word of mouth, local media outlets or the Internet – include Girl and Boy Scout troops, church groups, senior citizens, families, members of synagogues, schools, college students and some people with disabilities. But Purdy says she favors child volunteers because the program can train them to be kind. “I like the idea that kids come out and help because those are the privileged kids that can make a difference,” she says. “Doing something for someone is something that they should cherish – that’s the reward.”

Volunteers perform a variety of tasks, including determining what shoes are in good shape. More than half of the shoes collected are thrown out because of heavy wear and irreparable tears. “We only take shoes that are in good shape because we want to respect the dignity of the kids,” Purdy says. “We do not want to give them garbage.”
Volunteers wash acceptable shoes with hot water, bleach and detergent in washing machines at nearby laundromats. It takes four to seven hours to wash 2,000 pairs of shoes, Purdy says.

After being air-dried, the shoes are labeled and separated by type and size. Tennis shoes are sent everywhere, but snow boots are usually sent to regions in the Appalachians. Sandals are sent to warm places like Africa and South Asia, slippers to local hospitals and cleats to South America, where soccer is popular. Volunteers then package the shoes into recycled boxes and load them into trucks to be transported. “I work harder here than at my own regular job,” says 50-year-old Ken Franz, an electrician from Alsip who volunteers at Share Your Soles every Tuesday. “But if it was easy, then you wouldn’t be really doing anything.”

Most of Share Your Soles’s expenditures are covered by donations. American Airlines ships 25,000 pairs of shoes a year, and FedEx delivers the same amount to major international cities. The organization also receives pro-bono services from Navigant Consulting, a Chicago-based consulting firm, and donations from other utilitarian companies, such as Hunt Printing; Chicago Game and Gourmet, a wholesale food company and Nexus distribution, a trucking company.

Purdy relies on connections she makes while visiting each country to donate shoes. “What I try to do is go into the country and set up the locals,” she says. “They know the land, they know the language, they know where people are the most needy.” And to establish a personal connection with impoverished children, Purdy herself puts the shoes on their feet. “When I put shoes on the kids who have never owned one shoe in their lives, their spirits soar and they look taller,” she says. “I feel like Oprah giving away cars.”

The Shoe Messiah

Since her trip to Guatemala in 1999, Purdy has dedicated her entire life to shoe-collecting. Although the Chicago native works as a hair-stylist and as a dog-sitter, she spends most of her time supervising the warehouse or speaking at schools, churches and convalescent homes to promote her non-profit organization.

Purdy, who has been divorced for 13 years, is a single mother of three; Morgan, 16; Christopher, 14; and Hannah, 13. All three children are active with Share Your Soles and accompany Purdy on most of her shoe-delivery trips. “I always tell my kids that no matter how much we have, we’ll always do something for other people,” Purdy says. “They know the routine.”

Purdy’s friends say they admire her time-management skills. “I’m always wondering what time she sleeps and what times she eats,” says Valery Curran, 44, a friend of Purdy and a volunteer for Share Your Soles. “Just thinking of all the things she can get done – with her two jobs and her kids and the warehouse – is really inspiring.”

The Future of Footwear

Share Your Soles has plenty of room for growth, Purdy says. Her top goal is to document more of her trips in order to make the organization more educational for child volunteers.

Purdy knows this requires extra money – a reason for the increase of fundraising events in the past months. Last summer Purdy organized several fundraisers, including a golf outing, an art auction and rack sale, where dress shoes that are too fancy to be of any use in Third World countries were auctioned off to the public. She will hold a black-tie benefit at Chicago’s Beverly Country Club, 8700 Western Ave., Nov. 19.

But Purdy has no doubts that Share Your Soles will continue to thrive. “I feel like I am on a chariot taking off with a team of horses,” she says. “It’s definitely a calling. No way would everything go so great if it wasn’t.”4

Medill junior Allan Madrid is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected].