Is your church or school classroom looking for a great way to serve the needy both locally and internationally? Have I got a group for you!

Yesterday I was able to participate in a work-serve opportunity for Samaritan’s Feet, a charity organization that I’ve talked about before. A church group from Charlotte joined together for several hours to lace and sort thousands of pairs of shoes planned for shipment to Nigeria and South Africa. I went for the first couple of hours and it was fun to see adults and children alike participating, happily chatting away and diligently lacing all those shoes! What made it more special was knowing that even as we were lacing shoes bound for Africa, at the same time in Charlotte a church was spending time with our local homeless and needy, washing and adorning the feet of the less fortunate with new socks and shoes.

Samaritan’s Feet has a goal to provide 10,000,000 shoes around the globe to those who daily go without. In case you don’t know, having no shoes is a tremendous health hazard – especially in third world countries where living among trash and disease is the norm. The effort yesterday was to work on sorting through some of the 1,000,000 pairs of shoes that were donated by K-Mart earlier this year.

There are many more shoes to sort! There is also a need for many more shoes! If your school, civic classroom or church group would like to participate through a shoe sort or gathering shoes donations, please be sure to contact Samaritan’s Feet – all the work is done by volunteers and it is a FUN way to spend an afternoon helping people. And heck, it can also help teach your child how to lace their shoes!