by Cassie Escriture

Created on: May 16, 2009

After you've logged the miles on your running shoes, and they're showing four hundred miles of mud, sweat, blood, and dust, what good are they? Well, they could be recycled. Maybe they could be turned into a new track at your local middle school. Or perhaps they could be used to make new shoes for you or other local runners. But the question is how to do that?

FIND A DONATION LOCATION

A few different organizations run shoe collection and donation centers, including Nike, Soles4Souls, and HopeRuns. While some organizations allow you to donate at a specific collection site (e.g. Nike outlets, factory stores, and NikeTowns), others allow you to send shoes in. (www.solesforsouls.org lists places to mail shoe donations, for example.) In addition, many gyms and schools have shoe drives. Choose which donation location works best for you based on convenience. For instance, if you'll be at NikeTown picking up a new pair of shoes, they provide an easy way to drop off your old, used shoes.

CHOOSE YOUR CAUSE

Each company or non-profit organization to which you can donate your shoes has a different cause, so consider which causes are most important to you before you donate. Nike gives it's shoes to build new running tracks at local schools. HopeRuns empowers AIDS orphans in Africa through athletics and social entrepreneurship. And, for newer shoes, "One World Running" sends new or barely used shoes to Third World countries in order to enable athletics teams and activities. (For more information and a comprehensive collection of places to donate your shoes, Runners' World magazine has compiled a list of all organizations accepting used running shoes: http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-240-32 3-10041-0,00.html.)

TAKE YOUR WRITE-OFFS

While donating shoes is primarily a purely philanthropic event, it also provides you an opportunity to write-off your donation. Tax law differs based on state, but shoes are a reasonable donation to claim, depending on the shape in which they're in. For instance, a pair of clean, used shoes could be valued at $20-$25. If you donate a couple pair of shoes each year, or if your whole family donates, the write-off could be useful for you.

Once you're finished with your running shoes, it is a simple action to donate them and improve someone's life. Your donation could help children and adults around the world, and it will get those old shoes out of the closet.

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