LS teen’s tireless work with this nonprofit earned her SevenDays kindness scholarship

Not every little girl would appreciate collecting donations for strangers in lieu of birthday gifts. But Chloe Christensen, now a high school senior, says it wasn’t a bummer at all for her 8-year-old self to ask for new and gently used shoes for poor families in developing nations.

She recently submitted an essay about the experience to a scholarship competition themed “Make a Ripple, Change the World.” The competition draws youth into events sponsored by SevenDays, a nonprofit that evolved after the 2014 deaths of three area residents by a white supremacist with hatred for the Jewish community. The nonprofit group works to overcome hatred by promoting kindness and understanding through education and dialogue.

Christensen’s long-ago birthday week of collecting for another nonprofit, Soles4Souls, has turned into nine years, and counting, of devotion. The global organization, based in Nashville, collects and delivers shoes to Honduras and other developing countries to assist poor women in starting small businesses.

For them, shoes mean children can walk safely to attend school, and they mean mothers can work and sell the donated shoes. Since its inception, Soles4Souls has distributed more than 83 million pairs of shoes and articles of clothing.

Seeing a Disney Channel ad when she was a child inspired Christensen to take up the cause, which then expanded in all directions.

“It turned into something a lot bigger,” she said.

Donations soared from 80 pairs the first year to approximately 75,000 pairs to date, arriving from Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Christensen, who lives in Lake Lotawana, eventually created her own Soles4Souls chapter and is now a monitor of fundraising in the region.

Locally, funds rolled in from anywhere Christensen had a connection. Her elementary school and other local schools, her sports teams, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts troops, a restaurant, a “Little Miss” pageant and a University of Kansas sorority were among her partners in shoe drives. Once a storage unit is full, she and a few friends load the shoes onto a semi-truck, which will deliver them to Alabama where Soles4Souls will ship and distribute them.

There’s nothing difficult about supporting the mission, she said. People can get involved easily and immediately.

“It’s such an easy way to give back and get involved in your community.”

Last year, Christensen witnessed the bigger picture — the effect of her small ripple in changing the world — as part of a shoe distribution trip to Honduras. She learned that Hondurans live with the highest poverty rate of any Latin American country. A constant threat of violence and gang extortion in Latin America has created what’s called a “Northern Triangle,” which includes Guatemala and El Salvador. Political instability and corruption make it nearly impossible to promote any social programs.

“When we arrived; I could not believe my eyes,” she wrote in her essay. “The things I experienced have changed my perspective. The communities shared 5-by-5-foot tin bathrooms, slept without a roof over their heads, had no access to clean water, and had little food or basic medical care. The challenges are something I have never considered.

“The first child I saw was barefoot, wearing a cloth diaper, holding what looked like a dirty dog toy, standing in a metal box with a dirt floor. She was malnourished, her hair a mess, had a runny nose, but the biggest smile. We were told the kids were sick and since we were in the middle of the pandemic, we didn’t know exactly what ‘sick’ meant. The kids also had scabies and lice so we were not to get too close. Impossible. My instinct was to pick them up and hug them. And I did.”

Back home, she now spends time several days a week handling the shoes at a local storage facility, in addition to school and working 30 hours a week as a manager at Petland.

Christensen’s efforts to make an impact globally have sweeping benefits, she said. Recycling shoes takes countless tons of trash from landfills. Her own family has a new-pair-in, old-pair-out policy now.

“We used to have a lot of shoes, my mother, especially,” she said. Now there’s a limit. Sometimes she’ll expand her influence and tease a friend, “Oh, you got a new pair of shoes…”

They know what she means.

After graduating from Lee’s Summit North High School this spring, Christensen is headed to Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, where she will apply her $1,000 award to help fund her education. She’s not abandoning Soles4Souls, however.

“I think I’m always going to be involved with it,” she said. “I don’t see myself ever stopping.”

A storage facility at Attic Storage, 27901 E. Colbern Road, is the Soles4Souls collection site in Lee’s Summit. Residents who want to donate to Soles4Souls should call 816-739-4972 to arrange a drop-off time, or they can make contact through chloessoles4soulscampaign.org.

Other area high school seniors who earned scholarships are Claire Joseph, Blue Valley High School; Sydney Bohachick, Winnetonka High School; Jackson Rees, Blue Valley Southwest High School; and Natalie Goldman, Blue Valley High School. The students will be recognized at a Seven Days Kindness Breakfast April 5 at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection Leawood campus. A Kindness Walk is set for April 16 there. For more information go to www.sevendays.org.