Dr.Kim, Candece Roanoke, Jackie Kim. Photo courtesy of Kim Holistic Foot & Ankle Center
On Sept. 11, Kim Holistic Foot & Ankle Center celebrated its 28th annual shoe drive.
More than 30 years ago when Dr. Don Kim was training to become a podiatrist, he used to go down to Baja, Mexico with medical missionaries to perform surgeries on children with foot injuries and deformities.
“We had a clinic down there and then I would go down there to perform surgery and take care of all these kids,” Dr. Kim said.
One day in the late 1980s, he came out of the surgery room looked outside, and noticed all these kids playing soccer without shoes.
“So I said, maybe we can start like a shoe drive and collect shoes and bring them down here when I got my practice going,” Dr. Kim said.
Kim Holistic Foot & Ankle Center was the practice he started in 1990. In 1997, he started the shoe drive and collected a lot of shoes and brought them there.”
After a while, Mexican border patrol agents kept charging him exorbitant fees to transport the shoes there.
Dr. Kim still goes to Tijuana. He just returned in July from doing a children’s ministry. But what happened was that the several years, they started charging us to bring down shoes.
This led Dr. Kim to look for other ways to help those in need, including conducting free foot clinics in downtown Long Beach, near Pine Avenue.
“I was doing a clinic there and then I came out to take a break along an alley next to a church there were all these homeless people, who pretty much lived there. I looked down and they didn’t have shoes either. So I said well, I think it’s great to bring those shoes down to Mexico but I think we should bring shoes down here to Long Beach.
This led him to start donating to the homeless ministries based in the Long Beach area.
“At the height of our Shoe Drive, before the pandemic, we had about ten different nonprofit and Christian ministries that were involved with our shoe drive,” Dr. Kim said. “We used to collect about 10,000 pairs of shoes a year. And then the pandemic happened. So it’s kind of in the recovery stage now, but people are still not donating as much.”
To help, whether to donate time, money, or your old or unused shoes, call (562) 426-2551.
Details: https://kimfoot.com
Address: 701 E 28th St #111, Long Beach, CA 90806
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