BioPed North Bay has received some national recognition for its shoe drive.

Owner Crystal Kaufman says they collected the most shoes of any bioped clinic in the country.

That’s 75 in all.

She says everyone who contributed their shoes to help people in Haiti should be congratulated.

“We live in a great city and that award really shows it. A lot of BioPed clinics are in cities with populations of hundreds of thousands of people and North Bay won that. It says a lot about the city that we live in, ” she says.
She says the idea of donating old shoes to help someone else is a great way of paying it forward and 11,000 shoes were donated last year alone.

Kaufman says there are economic benefits too as they set up micro enterprises when they they down there and delivered the shoes.

“Those used shoes are in Haiti creating jobs, providing for families, putting food on their table and sending their kids to school. It’s amazing what a simple thing like used shoes to us can actually do in these developing countries,” she says.

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