Bowling Green Rotary Club donates 100 new shoes to children at Dishman McGinnis Elementary

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – On Monday afternoon, the Bowling Green Rotary Club held its sixth annual shoe donation drive, visiting Dishman McGinnis Elementary to hand out 100 new pairs of shoes to students in need.

The Rotary Club will visit five Bowling Green Schools and hand out hundreds of new shoes to local kids.

For members of the club, the best part of the drive is watching the reactions of the children receiving these new shoes.

“And just putting shoes on kids feet, like their eyes just light up you know. It may seem like a small deal, but it makes a huge difference in our community,” said Mitchell Berman, the Shoes for Kids Chair at the Bowling Green Rotary Club.

The Rotary Club partnered with Shoe Station to provide these kids with new shoes this holiday season.

The drive is important because shoes are a need that often get overlooked but are still a necessity. After all, you need shoes to go to school.

Some of these children may have never had a new pair of shoes in their life. Through the drive, they can finally have a pair of shoes to call their own.

“So I had a little girl that I opened a box of pink sparkly shoes. And she just jumped up, and she’s like, this is the first pair of shoes I’ve ever had of my very own. She had been wearing her brother’s shoes since kindergarten that were two sizes too big,” Leda Berman, one of the event organizers told us.

The community has benefited greatly from this drive over the years. It has helped lift a burden off of families and provide them with with the assistance that they need.

Leda Berman was someone that the Rotary Club helped in the past through the shoe drive and is now giving back by helping provide even more kids with new shoes.

“I have a daughter. When I was a single mom, she was six years old, and she came home with a pair of shoes that the Rotarians had provided for her. And now she’s 17 and she still has that pair of shoes,” Berman said.