Local non-profit ships shoes to orphans

A non-profit organization based in Rexburg is collecting and shipping shoes to third-world countries.

Wednesday night, Dando Amor filled a tractor-trailer with an estimated 40,000 pounds of shoes. The organization’s Shoes For Love campaign collects shoes throughout the country and gives them to orphans in need in Ecuador Haiti, and Burkina Faso, Africa. Travis Gugelman, the president and founder of Dando Amor, said over 680 million pairs of shoes a year are thrown away in the U.S., while there’s 1.5 billion people in the world who’ve never owned a pair.

“These shoes right now, they’re going to go on a semi down to Salt Lake, from Salt Lake they’ll go on a train car and the train car will take them to Los Angeles,” said Gugelman. “It will then go down to Haiti on a boat.”

Dando Amor found a way to give shoes to those in need, but also help orphans create a living with those shoes as well.

“We set up little micro-enterprise businesses and they get to learn about profit, loss and cost,” said Gugelman. “A portion of that money goes back to them to help them get an education, so after high school they already have a fund set up for them.”

Dando Amor also opened up its own orphanage in Ecuador last year. The 5-year-old non-profit goes on several trips to orphanages, bringing local volunteers like Chad Erikson.

“We went there and we had a major eye-opening,” said Erikson. “We’ve never seen poverty like that before, its just really humbling and to even see tears come to my 16-year-old son.”

Erikson’s other son, 13-year-old Ryan, incorporated his Eagle Scout project into his volunteer efforts, pairing and packing the shoes that came from as far as Maryland.

“It’s been over the course of three months, and it’s probably been like 100 to 200 hours,” said Ryan.

If you’d like to learn more about Dando Amor, click here.