‘The Shoe That Grows’ expands to needy world

Little things can escape our notice — a tiny blossom gaining purchase in a concrete path, a miniscule ant resolutely at work, an infant’s waking smile in the morning light. All are a fleeting glimpse of life easily missed.

But sometimes a small image can catch the heart unaware, hold its attention and take root.

“At first I didn’t notice their footwear,” Kenton Lee of Nampa, Idaho, said about his volunteer work at an orphanage outside of Nairobi, Kenya, in 2007. “Then a little girl was walking next to me on the way to church and I noticed her shoes were too small. They had cut open the front of the shoes to let her toes stick out.”

The child who caught his eye wore a delicate white dress and shoes she had long outgrown. For the Northwest Nazarene University graduate, it was a “Kodak moment” that captured his mind — and stayed there.

“When I finally saw it, it kind of bugged me — annoyed me more than anything — and why do they even have them on?” Kenton said he had asked himself before questioning the orphanage directors.

He soon learned that a huge number of shoes had been donated a year earlier, but no more had come since. By cutting out the toes of outgrown shoes — no matter how uncomfortable they might still be — it gave wiggle room and kept the children’s feet from parasites in the soil.

Top priority for the 140 orphans was enough food, not shoes. So while the children grew bigger on meager resources, the shoes did not.

“And that’s when I thought, ‘What if there could be a shoe that grows?’ ” Kenton said about his quirky idea, one he wrote down. “It kind of made sense for donors to not have to give year after year, but just once.”

The 23-year-old kept the thought in his “back pocket” while he spent six months at the orphanage exploring the idea of a career as a missionary.

“I still remember seeing their really small place — and the kids slept everywhere,” Kenton said, thinking back to the orphanage that housed children left without parents lost to AIDS. “There was barely any food or toys, but they were smiling kids and so happy to play with me.”

Besides entertaining the children, the young man taught English and math to the older children during the hot, dusty days, helped with meals and then led the group in evening song and devotions. Kenton said he lost more than 30 pounds from the heat, sparse provisions and a bit of culture shock.

“It was tough the first few days, then it got better,” Kenton said, recalling the stifling heat, dirt, and the immense poverty; a huge contrast to his Northwest hometown. “It’s a whole different world … a whole different world over there.”

Thoughts of the children and their too-small shoes followed Kenton home to Nampa, urging him to find a solution.

“I didn’t know anything about shoes,” the college business major said, reflecting on his dearth of knowledge but deep desire to impact kids in severe need. “My friends thought it was a good idea, but they didn’t know anything either. So we contacted all the big shoe companies — and nobody was interested.”

Kenton took a step back, and reassessed his marketing attempt. He then put together a video using $500 of his own money to illustrate more clearly the idea of a shoe that could expand in size. Still, major shoe producers like Nike rejected his concept.

“I just knew it was a good idea and part of my calling, my ministry,” said Kenton, who was working full time. “It was a smaller thing in my life, but I wanted to keep pushing it forward. I didn’t like people telling me it couldn’t happen.”

For more than a year, Kenton and his friends tried to find someone who would work with them on the project. Still, the rejection letters came, but Kenton refused to give up, the Kenyan kids ever so close in his heart.

Then one day came a “yes.”

“I remember working pretty hard to follow a networking trail — a little bit of God’s leading,” Kenton said, reflecting on the serendipitous path. He had decided one day to attend a Nampa Chamber of Commerce luncheon — the only one he had ever gone to — and connected with an NNU grad who linked him up with another NNU grad who pointed him to a person in France and then to a shoe company in the Northwest. “I was finally able to connect with Proof of Concept, a company in Portland.”

After about a year’s process, the prototype for The Shoe That Grows was designed. Kenton then took 100 pairs of shoes to Kenya to test in four schools: urban, rural and in between, he said. With the children’s eager feedback, changes were made in the footwear that expands five sizes and lasts at least five years. The first batch of 3,000 was made about a year and a half ago.

Unexpectedly, a little Internet story about the shoes turned into a big thing.

“Last year, we accidentally went viral and it snowballed from there,” Kenton said enthusiastically about a surprising response to the shoe that can help a child in extreme hardship. “In the last nine months we’ve gotten out 40,000 pairs to kids in over 40 countries. It’s been wild!”

The Shoe That Grows is the first project of Because International, a nonprofit founded and led by Kenton that is committed to practical compassion. The organization looks for innovative ideas that can help impoverished children.

“I’m just a regular guy from Idaho and I’m not going to solve the big things,” Kenton said humbly. “But I can do the small things that can make a difference.”

Like noticing ten little toes suffering in a shoe long outgrown.

This story was originally published May 15, 2016 at 2:54 AM with the headline "‘The Shoe That Grows’ expands to needy world."