Prisons Donate Nearly 3,000 Pairs of Shoes to Haiti
By Chad Lewis, West Team Leader, Communications
Correctional Industries offenders sort and pair shoes for donation to Haiti.
State prisons this week will gather nearly 3,000 pairs of shoes that were worn by offenders to donate them to earthquake victims in Haiti.
“We’ve been looking for low-cost ways to help the victims in Haiti, and this is a good one,” Prisons Director Dick Morgan said. “What’s nice about this is that both the staff and the inmates work together on it.”
At Correctional Industries’ headquarters in Tumwater, offenders from Cedar Creek Corrections Center are sorting and pairing truckloads of use shoes from prisons from across the state. Correctional Industries will arrange for the shoes to be donated to a Tacoma-based nonprofit group, Friends of the Orphan, which will ship the shoes to Haiti.
The shoes otherwise would have been recycled or donated. For about a year DOC has bundled thousands of shoes and taken them to Oregon where they are ground up and used to build playgrounds in low-income neighborhoods. Some shoes are donated to St. Vincent de Paul.
The decision to this time donate the shoes to victims of the earthquake in Haiti was a popular one at DOC.
“Everybody is trying to think of ways to help out,” Sustainability Coordinator Julie Vanneste said. “The key is to find small ways that a lot of people and institutions can pitch in, and when you have an entire prison system those small donations add up quickly.”
Stephen Judy, Service and Delivery Division Manager at Correctional Industries, says this “small token” will let the earthquake victims know that people here support them.
“We are very pleased to be in a position that allows us to help the people of Haiti,” he said. “The shoes we are able to provide will hopefully ease a small amount of suffering. It will be a long and painful recovery from these tragic events."