Passion Projects, student-driven research projects based on a guiding question, relating to the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel: Mrs. Rachel Rauch, English teacher introduced the idea of the passion projects to her third hour Honors English 9 class for the Night unit. The students picked a topic, researched their topic and presented their topic using multimedia or web presentation tools.

Katie McCarthy and Andrew White, freshman took their passion project to the next level. “We wanted to make a positive impact on today’s world while still remembering the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust,” White said.

Despite already choosing a topic of her own, McCarthy wanted to help her fellow classmate choose one as well, “We thought about what we remembered from our trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and one of the most prominent images that we still remember is the huge pile of shoes that prisoners were forced to give up,” McCarthy said.

White and McCarthy then decided to conquer the topic of lost possessions during the Holocaust together. In class, they watched a video about a girl who said that her warm ski boots saved her life when she was forced to march through the snow watching many other prisoners die because they did not have shoes.

“That idea of shoes being the reason for someone’s survival stuck with me,” McCarthy said. “I decided that I wanted to make sure other people’s lives wouldn’t be negatively affected because of a lack of shoes.”

After some research, White found the organization, Soles4Souls. “We chose this organization simply because it was the best organization for the shoe donations to go to,” White said.

According the Soles4Souls mission statement, the organization advances its anti-poverty mission by collecting new and used shoes and clothes to distribute to people in need and by provisioning qualified micro-enterprise programs designed to create jobs in poor and disadvantaged communities.

From April 13 to May 1, a shoe drive led by McCarthy and White was held at Homestead to benefit the Soles4Souls mission. According to McCarthy, 78 pairs of shoes were collected along with $20.00 for shipping.