News · 10.6.2008 Wayne Elsey and Soles4Souls Featured in Runner's World Magazine
As Printed in November 2008 Edition:
Green Leader, Wayne Elsey CEO, Soles4Souls
Watching news coverage of the tsunami that devastated much of Asia in 2004, Wayne Elsey thought to himself, I wish there was something I could do to help. Then an image of a single shoe washing up on the shore flashed across the screen, and it hit him. He could give these people something he knew a lot about - shoes.
So Elsey, a former top executive at several major shoe companies, founded Soles4Souls, a nonprofit that gives shoes to people in need all over the world - refugees in Sudan, children in Haiti, victims of domestic hurricanes. In four years, Soles4Souls has shipped 3.5 million pairs of shoes to needy recipients - saving all those shoes, it's worth noting, from a lifetime sentence in a landfill. But there's much more work to be done; Elsey says that a quarter of the world's population lacks proper footwear and that at least a billion people contract diseases from walking barefoot on contaminated soil.
These days, Elsey, 43, takes his very personal crusade to marathon finish lines. "I've asked runners for the shoes off their feet," he says. "I get a few strange looks, but sometimes they give them to me."
Story by Julie Beer