by Ben Hoppenworth

    A local high school senior at Denver High School, Sam Shumacher, has been collecting shoes for a shoe charity called Soles4Souls since he learned about it while attending a leadership conference at Wartburg this past summer.

    Shumacher says there are multiple reasons that he got involved with Soles4Souls as well as multiple reasons why kids are in need of shoes.

    "Let's say a place like africa. Many of the kids don't have shoes, so they're not aloud to go to school. Because they have to walk a long distance to go to school and they aren't aloud when they don't have shoes. shoes also protect from many viruses and diseases. So having a pair of shoes could in turn save the life of a child," said Shumacher.

    Throughout the entire project, Shumacher has collected over 700 pairs of shoes from many different places. Before bringing his service project to Wartburg, Shumacher had already set up donation boxes at his church as well as at his school.

    He was having success there before he brought it to campus, but that success wasn't coming as quickly at Wartburg.

    " At first there wasn't a great response from wartburg and I was afraid that maybe it wouldn't be the case, we wouldn't get a good response because at Wartburg you only  have one set pair of shoes that you need here and you don't have all kinds of old ones laying around," said Shumachers leadership conference mentor, Lauren Hills.

    To find a faster way to collect shoes, Shumacher looked to get some help from people who tend to through a lot of shoes. He and his mentor contacted the Wartburg cross country team to see what they could do to help.

    "It's a way that we could give the gifts we've been given to someone else through our own use, which is perfect," said cross country runner, Emily Eimers.

    Even though he has had such great success so far and he is happy for it, Shumacher is still wishing to collect more than 2,000 shoes by the end of his project.