Steps of Kindness 2023 :
When my family traveled to India for the first time in March of 2023, we noticed that a lot of the children lacked proper footwear (worn down and torn up sandals). We were shocked to learn that more than 250 million Indians living below the poverty line consider footwear a luxury. 10’s of millions of children have no shoes in India alone, and by contrast, roughly 300 Million pairs of shoes are discarded in the US every year. While we obviously couldn’t fix the problem for all of the kids, we focused on the city where I was teaching (Ahmedabad). We partnered with a local sneaker company in India, where each pair of shoes came out to be around 5$ USD. After fundraising, we ended up raising another 15,000 dollars on top of the amount for Roboreach, which gave us leeway to buy over 3000 pairs of shoes for the kids.
Steps of Kindness 2024 :
When we visited India through Manav Sadhna, we had the opportunity to serve lunch to the children, and it was there that we noticed many of them were using worn-out or poorly made lunchboxes. This reminded me of a similar observation from last year, when we saw that many of the children had shoes that were badly worn or torn. Seeing the children’s need for basic essentials sparked a sense of urgency to help. Just as we successfully fundraised for new shoes last year, we decided to extend our efforts this year by fundraising for new, durable lunchboxes. Our goal was to provide the children with better tools to keep their meals safe and to ensure they have what they need to thrive, both in and out of the classroom.