Soles4Souls Inc. announced that it was sending more than 50,000 pairs
of new shoes to victims of the Southern California fires. The shoe
charity is coordinating the effort and partnering with several
other relief organizations and government agencies to ensure the
delivery process remains smooth and people who need the shoes receive
them.

“You can''t watch the news reports on this tragedy without being
affected by it,” said Wayne Elsey, the founder and CEO of Soles4Souls,
in a statement. “Some people might think that everyone in Southern
California is rich and can replace anything they've lost with an easy
insurance claim, but that''s just not true. Not everyone lives in
Beverly Hills — there are hundreds of thousands of middle and working
class people who have been evacuated, and many of them don''t have a
safety net of any kind. They can''t quickly return to their homes
because they were renters or lived in trailer parks and don''t have the
security that homeowners do.”

“We are working with several other relief organizations, including
Operation Compassion, which sent three trucks from Birmingham today,”
said Elsey, former president of Kodiak-Terra USA. “They will be
arriving in the affected areas on Monday, October 29. We are extremely
grateful for their help in this effort and invite everyone to donate
their shoes or a few dollars at http://www.giveshoes.org to help us
ship more shoes out there.”

Dave Lorency, President of Operation Compassion, an international
relief agency based in Cleveland, Tennessee, said that people could
help most by donating shoes and cash to Soles4Souls so that his
organization could continue to deliver free shoes to people in need
around the world. “We work in places all over the world, like Romania
and Indonesia, and when something like this happens in our own country,
it''s important that we step up and help those people with the same
amount of compassion,” he said. “Soles4Souls is an invaluable resource
for people all over the world, including right here in the U.S.,” he
said.

Since being in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, Soles4Souls has donated more than 3 million pairs of shoes.