Walking through the bustling streets of New York City, junior Ayan Somasundaram witnessed a harsh reality: people without housing living on the streets didn’t have shoes, and as the temperature dropped, they were left vulnerable to the freezing temperatures. Upon returning home to San Jose, he noticed the same issue in his own community.
Determined to make a difference, Somasundaram co-founded the ReSole Project — a nonprofit dedicated to refurbishing and donating shoes to homeless shelters. While Somasundaram primarily started by trying to find homeless shelters by himself, it proved to be a difficult task, which is why Somasundaram started working with co-founders junior Aurav Kapadia, junior Dhruv Manas, junior Ronak Prabhu and sophomore Nimai Pradeep. Prabhu says that as high schoolers, the team feels it’s especially important for them to give back to the community.
“We’re getting older,” Prabhu said. “We wanted to create a successful impact in our community, and I guess the best way to impact people is starting from the bottom up. We really wanted to help people that are less fortunate than us, especially since we’re grateful to have so many opportunities within our life and a lot of people don’t have that.”
To obtain shoes, the ReSole Project has partnered with local libraries to place donation bins in their lobbies and promoted the initiative through flyers and Instagram. Prabhu says the convenience of libraries makes them an ideal spot for the organization’s donation bins, collecting as many as 3,000 shoes in a month. Cupertino Library hosted a donation bin for the ReSole Project in October, which Cupertino Library Community Librarian Bryant Bao approved after receiving an email from the nonprofit. Bao says the ReSole Project’s initiative reflects the library’s informal policy of rotating through organizations, allowing a different organization to use the space each month.
“It wasn’t until very recently that I decided to make this more of an informal policy to allow use of our lobby space for such projects,” Bao said. “The lobby space is there. As long as the bin isn’t blocking people, it’s a service to the community, and it allows us to upcycle things that would have been tossed.”
With all the shoes collected, the ReSole Project uses the monetary donations they receive to purchase essential supplies needed to refurbish the shoes, including new laces and soles. From there, the ReSole Project sends the shoes to a local laundromat, cleaning them up and preparing them to be sent to the Montgomery Street Inn, a homeless shelter in San Jose. Since this shelter only houses men, they keep the men’s shoes and help the ReSole Project distribute the rest to other local shelters.
Although the ReSole Project has worked mainly with the Saratoga Library and more recently the Cupertino Library, they hope to expand to other local libraries and shelters and even to other cities. Though Prabhu acknowledges that this is an ambitious goal, he notes that they are backed by a growing number of volunteers, who are drawn in by not just President’s Volunteer Service Award-approved volunteer hours but also the unique opportunity of collaborating with friends in meaningful work.
“I’ve been a part of other nonprofits — it’s just not fun,” Prabhu said. “I felt like it was doing a nonprofit for the sake of college applications. But when I do this with Nimai, Dhruv and Ayan, we feel a real, tangible impact is being shown on the community. It’s motivating.”
Prabhu and Somasundaram agree that being able to impact the community has impacted them in turn, especially since they’ve been able to interact with people and parts of the community they would not have otherwise been involved in. Prabhu says this interaction makes him reflect on who he wants to be and the impact he wants to make, which he sees as the core of the project.
“What really opened my eyes was conversing with the people who actually work at these nonprofit homeless shelters,” Prabhu said. “Honestly, I feel a lot of respect towards them because they’re doing this very selflessly, just because they want to help people. I realized — do I want to be known as somebody that is selfish and greedy? Or do I want to be known as somebody who helps other people? And I chose that.”
