A Step Forward picking up shoe donations from Fox Elementary School in Belmont, CA
Our second newsletter for A Step Forward comes at a time of transition for our organization into the summer season. We are currently shifting our focus to reflect on what we can achieve during the few months that schools are out.
A few weeks ago, we coordinated shoe drives with individual classrooms and entire schools, specifically Central Elementary, Fox Elementary, and Arundel Elementary, in Belmont and San Carlos, respectively. Following up on that, in the last few days of school in early June, we visited each school to collect the shoes donated. We talked to the teachers and administrators who helped us plan the donation drive, and we are very grateful for their time to help us gather more shoes from their students.
Furthermore, during these few months of summer, we have set up shoe donation boxes at summer camps and youth centers around the peninsula, including the Sandpiper Youth Center and San Carlos Youth Center. We also plan to hold shoe drives for summer camps such as Camp Soar, the DECA summer camp, and the Bay Club summer camp. These measures have marked our progress and slight changes in the process of collecting shoes compared to our methods in our first few weeks of operation.
Regarding the donation of shoes, we continue to donate our collected shoes to the Redwood City Catholic Worker House. We hope to continue our trend of donating 100+ shoes to the Catholic Worker House weekly and expanding to distribute to other homeless shelters or to those who need shoes directly.
In addition to our continued donations, our director of digital marketing recently had an in-depth video interview with Larry, one of the directors of the Catholic Worker House. Check out his video, coming soon on our newly completed website. We’ve spent many hours of hard work and lessons from our team of mentors in order to build the best functioning and highest-quality website possible, and we hope you like the finished product.
Finally, our primary goal for Summer 2023 is to become an established non-profit to have an even more significant impact in the community and gain a reputation within the Bay Area for assisting people in need with our contributions. However, in order to do so, we need the help of the community to raise money to become a non-profit, as well as to support transportation costs and to purchase better-quality materials, such as shoe collection bins. We would be extremely grateful if you would donate to our cause, which we will coordinate if you contact AStepForward2023@gmail.com.
Overall, this is the second of many newsletters we will publish, updating supporters and readers of our progress to collect more shoes, donate and give back to the community, and expand as a non-profit organization into more of the Bay Area. Thank you for supporting us so far, and we look forward to continuing to grow with the help of community members.
Sincerely,
Myles Hu and the A Step Forward Team