Schedule a Field Trip

Bring your school, club, civic organization, or company!

First, please contact us with your contact name, school or company name, address and phone number by email at info@shareyoursoles.org or by calling us at (708) 448-4469.

There is a required donation of $5 per child and $10 per adult to ensure your experience with Share Your Soles results directly in someone in need receiving shoes. If your organization cannot afford this cost, but would still like to participate, please do not hesitate to contact us. If you call by phone, we're happy to explain the levels of participation for a day at Share Your Soles. We will also mail you a packet containing an introductory letter, posters for your drop-site and shoe-drive, as well as brochures and a whole selection of recent news and media articles describing our work -- we invite you to use these materials to engage students and employees before their visit. We also cover the overall field trip and shoe drive process with your contact person. We explain the responsibility of getting shoes sorted, boxed and delivered to us in Alsip (IL) or to the Allentown (PA) location. We encourage schools to do a shoe drive first, then during their field trip to our Alsip processing location, they can assist in processing the shoes that they have collected. We ask that each school has a basic ratio of 1 adult to 5 students.

This is the fun part: We schedule a day for the field-trip well ahead of time; Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday are volunteer days. After the bus arrives at the office, at a pre-arranged time, the kids tour the main educational and office space. It's full of cool stuff from the countries we deliver shoes to. They'll get to see all of the awards and newspaper articles. SYS Executive Director, Mona Purdy*, talks about the challenges of creating the foundation in her garage and transitioning to a world-wide operation before welcoming the group to the processing center. Staff then reviews emergency plan, restrooms, lunch room, and other basic logistics of the day. SYS Executive Director, Mona Purdy, leads tour of facility telling group what happens at each processing station and explain why it happens/how it's done. During lunch, a video presentation of last shipments where the shoes went and who received them. After lunch, before breaking up into groups to do the different tasks, we provide a question and answer period. We then divide group into smaller groups to complete the tasks.