Networkfour will be using the funding to establish our community and city project to reach 200 vulnerable lives and tackling increasingly dire child poverty, crisis families' hardship and hard to reach adults needing footwear and other complex support needs.
Our project will recruit and employ a part time Children & Families Intervention Support Worker tackling and supporting burdened schools and academies, crisis families and vulnerable individuals to get the help they need to turn their lives around.
Over 100,000 men, women and children in the UK wear footwear that is wholly unsuitable, ill-fitting or worn out. And over 500 homeless people in BIrmingham have limited or no shoes.
The problem is serious: over 2 million shoes are thrown into landfill every week. On average, a pair of shoes (man-made fibres and textiles) takes over 1000 years to biodegrade. Birmingham Shoe Aid is helping to avoid this environmental disaster for shoe manufacturers and distributors - similar to supermarkets now being blamed for food waste.
Birmingham Shoe aid is tackling the problem, and will educate over 400 pupils each year in more than 30 schools on the importance of recycling and re-purposing footwear.
At the same time, we will be distributing over 5,000 new or good quality shoes to schools, academies and giving support to vulnerable families, channeled through West Midlands Police and Ambulance Service across the city. “Shoe Aid is reducing the number of shoes being thrown away to landfill by harnessing our city supporters and will set up a series of collection points and recycling points to re-purpose these old shoes”.
Birmingham Shoe Aid is STEPPING UP to address footwear poverty, supporting the 9 out of every class of 30 children that go to school each day in worn out or ill-fitting shoes and your funding will help us make a real DIFFERENCE to change LIVES.