Soles4Good Mission

2019-2022: El Salvador

At the end of 2019, Soles4Good traveled to El Salvador for its second year of giving. Our eight days in El Salvador, December 28th - January 5th, were eye-opening and moving. We were able to empower eleven women to found their own micro-businesses selling used shoes that we collected through shoe drives.

Through listening to their stories, we created an educational program that was tailored towards their needs. We provided training in basic accounting and inventory management, emphasizing the importance of data collection and organization. We taught principles of saving and business reinvestment, with the goal of long-term sustainability rather than reliance on short-term donations of shoes. To this end, our program will give the women ongoing access to additional supplies of shoes that they can buy at very low cost, which will encourage them to reinvest some of their profits, just as all successful businesses do. We also connected them with a local wholesaler of used shoes to create additional opportunities for sustainability and financial independence.

In the first two weeks of the program, the women had sold 68 pairs of shoes, and eight of them had purchased additional inventory to expand their enterprises. It was great to see what an immediate impact Soles4Good could have on the women’s lives and communities. We are looking forward to continuing to support them!

2020-22 update:

The beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, created a serious challenge to running shoe drives in schools.

During the 2020-21 school year, however, we remained in contact with the S4G microentrepreneurs and were pleased that the initial shipment of approximately 2000 pairs of shoes delivered during our initial visit were completely sold out during a very economically challenging time in the S4G community in El Salvador.

During the summer and fall of 2021, we were able to plan and run 19 shoe drives in 15 schools. In the spring of 2022 we shipped over 8000 pairs of shoes to our El Salvador partner, and we grew the number of microentrepreneurs from 8 to 33. We were pleased to hear how several of the women had used their experience selling S4G shoes to begin selling other items such as handicrafts, household goods, and even chickens!

Additionally, we learned that the profitable economics of used shoe sales in El Salvador allow for the microentrepreneurs to pay for the cost of shipping the shoes, which is an important part of making the S4G model sustainable for the future.

Meet the Women

Get to know some of the people we helped during our 2019-22 mission for Soles4Good to El Salvador. We listened to each of these women, gave them a basic business and accounting education, and received feedback from everyone. Hearing their stories, and many of the hardships they endured, gave insight to the work we were doing at Soles4Good, and its effect on the community we helped.