When Lindsay Sobel was 12, she participated in a basketball game at the Staples Center in Los Angeles and was impressed by the large number of homeless people in the area. “I realized that many of them have very bad living conditions and no one should be alive.

Most importantly, I noticed that many of them don’t even wear shoes,” remember. “When I was 12, I thought, ‘Wow, don’t people have shoes? For me.” This experience started a journey for the 17-year-old.

She donated more than 30,000 pairs of shoes to people in need throughout Southern California. ——She said this is an amazing achievement.” It made me happy with the fact that “I can help others.”

After playing basketball, Lindsay found out that he had a lot of shoes that he had never worn while tidying up his wardrobe. Over. “Oh, my goodness, I haven’t worn half (shoes) yet,” he recalled. “Donating shoes will be a great way to give back to the community.”

Inspired, Lindsay decided to start collecting new and rarely used shoes in 2016 as part of her Bat Mitzvah project. She founded a charity called “Shoes for Souls” and started donating shoes to friends and classmates.

Now a high school junior, Lindsay has continued collecting tens of thousands of shoes over the past several years, but when the coronavirus pandemic struck, collecting donations got harder — even though she knew there were more people in need than ever.

She used Nextdoor, the social networking app for neighborhoods, to coordinate with her school, her volleyball team, and the wider community to arrange contact-free pickup for shoe donations. When two Los Angeles City Council members reached out to ask her,

if she could provide more shoes, she was ready; within weeks, she was able to donate over 4,000 pairs. “I was so honored they thought of me to help,” she says. “It was really great being able to see my work pay off.”