Opus 2026-055: The Shoes of Poverty

One of the ladies our church is heading up a fundraiser and initially it sounds painless and helpful.  She has found some organization that will take used sneakers and donate them to Third World countries that need shoes and in the process generate a donation for the local church that gathers the shoes.

On one point this is painless.  It’s a good way to get rid of a lot of those old shoes that you have in your closet that are still in good shape, but now are the wrong color, they might be the wrong size, or they’re a style that just isn’t cool anymore.  It could be there’s nothing wrong with them, but you just kept buying new stuff and wearing the new ones.  So it’s painless to you.  It cleans out your closet for a good cause.  It doesn’t cost the church anything.  All it takes is a person who will put out a collection bin and then put the shoes in a shipping bag and drop it off.

The question I would have is how helpful it is.  Somewhere in the past, I touched on this before.  There was a basketball coach whose name escapes me, but he was collecting shoes for people in poor countries who didn’t have any.  It all sounded really good until you stopped to think about the effect this has on the big picture.

When you donate free shoes to a Third World country you get to feel good and there are a certain number of poor people that will get shoes who might not have had them.  How much they needed them is always a question.  I don’t think you have to go back very many generations in our country to find out that many people could go without shoes all summer.  That might not work too well in the winter, but in the summer, it was just fine.  A lot of of these Third World countries are areas where it’s possible to go without shoes and still function.  But that’s not the issue.  The issue is that if you flood a market with free shoes, you put local shoemakers and shoe sellers out of business.  In many parts of the world there is a business of taking old worn out tires and repurposing them into sandals.  You’re probably many other aspects of the business too, but it’s really hard for a local businessman to compete with free.

We often don’t see the long-term results of the things that we like to do to feel good and to help people.  There are times when help is necessary.  There are times when help is destructive.  We’ve seen that in the welfare system in our own country where entire cultures have been lowered to underclass simply because they’ve stopped learning how to provide for themselves.

Be generous.  The best place to be generous is close to home where you can get personally involved with the people and not just write a check.

homo unius libri