A meme that will not die: Haitians still don’t want your old shoes

Apparently Nashville, T.N.-based charity Soles4Souls still ascribes to the Jessica Simpson school of aid. A recent press release from the organization touts a trip that a “game show host and life coach” made to Haiti with the organization’s founder, complete with link to obligatory video dripping in self-righteousness.

Soles4Shoes accepts donations of new and used shoes as well as other necessities and distributes them to “those in need.” Wayne Elsey, the group’s founder, started the organization in 2004 after watching watching TV coverage of the tsunami that slammed Southeast Asia.

I’m sure Elsey started the charity in good intentions, but eight years on, gift-in-kind aid is still terribly inefficient and often not needed or wanted.

As Charles Kenny puts it:

Here’s the trouble with dumping stuff we don’t want on people in need: What they need is rarely the stuff we don’t want. And even when they do need that kind of stuff, there are much better ways for them to get it than for a Western NGO to gather donations at a suburban warehouse, ship everything off to Africa or South America, and then try to distribute it to remote areas.

It seems that Soles4Shoes does have a “microenterprise” component by which its donations provide inventory for local vendors. Why not just go in whole hog and become a second hand t-shirt and shoe magnate? Probably doesn’t have the same sort of return on conscience alleviation.

Slate reported in 2010 that founder and CEO Elsey made $500,000 a year, a salary on par with that of the CEO of the American Red Cross, a $3 billion organization. In the same interview, Elsey called his organization an “$80 million business.”