Our First Event

By December 2018, I launched the From Hearts to Soles website and had a clear vision of the organization’s mission. All that was left was to carry out our first event. I was a new entrepreneur and was eager to fulfill the goals of From Hearts to Soles. I did not exactly know how and where to start with regards to fundraising. In addition, if I receive money, I would have to jump through a myriad of legal hoops and pay a variety of taxes; all these problems together led me to deciding that raising cash to buy shoes is far to much for me to handle.

Because of this, I knew I had to get creative; I knew I had to get shoes directly, but I did not know how I would get people to donate me shoes rather than other places like Goodwill. Coincidentally, I found out that my parents were having a houseparty early in February of 2019, and I knew that their friends would bring gifts like wine, potted plants, and candles. After a few talks at the dinner table with my parents, they agreed to tell guests to bring new and gently used shoes instead of traditional housewarming gifts, and the result was truly astounding.

In all honesty, I expected twenty or thirty pairs of shoes to come in at the very most. However, my parents’ friends loved the idea so much that their level of support was tremendous, with some guests bringing four or five pairs of shoes. Since I had announced that the majority of the shoes donated would go to underprivileged children in Iran, the support from the Persian community was particularly strong. The guests loved that I was going back to my roots and proudly helping children in need in Iran despite the fact that Iranian people were and are being demonized by mainstream media in the United States. At the end of the night, we had raised roughly 200 pairs of shoes, which is worth over 8,000 dollars. I was beyond grateful, and I feel like this fundraiser was an enormous success. Now, I have to figure out how to transport the shoes halfway across the world.