Bengaluru girl wins prestigious award for footwear activism

Sia Godika started Sole Warriors at the age of 13 to donate footwear to the underprivileged

Sia Godika, a 10th standard student from Koramangala, won the Diana Award for social action and humanitarian efforts, for her initiative ‘Sole Warriors’, which supplies footwear to the needy.

Established in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, the award is considered one of the highest honours a young person can achieve for social action or humanitarian efforts. It is given to people in the age group of nine to 25 years and was conferred on 400 people globally this year.

The 14-year-old Bengalurean started the initiative two years ago, to support the labourers and their families in her locality. “One day in 2019, I noticed how most of the labourers in my locality were working barefoot and even their children were roaming around with no shoes. The images of the barefoot migrant labourers stuck with me, and I wanted to help them,” says Sia.

She soon decided to start Sole Warriors, by first gathering spare shoes she could find in her own house. “I went around my house and found all the footwear that my family and I had never used or didn’t require. I refurbished them and started distributing them among local labourers,” she adds.

Soon word spread and Sia was added to many WhatsApp groups consisting of several volunteers in the city, which helped her magnify the initiative.

In collaboration with various volunteer groups in Bengaluru like Ploggers Army, Rotary and Robin Hood Army, Sole Warriors has collected 15,000 shoes from 4,000 households and distributed them among underprivileged communities in the city.

Sia believes the pandemic has made the community more empathetic, “It really opened our eyes to the pain and suffering of many that we might have been oblivious to before. During both the first and second wave of Covid, we had large numbers of donations and many even came forward to volunteer and help us set up collection drives,” she adds.

The initiative accepts all kinds of footwear. After collecting the footwear through collection drives, they are then taken to the cobbler to get refurbished. Once the shoes are refurbished, they transport them to NGOs who in turn distribute them among people who need them.

“Thousands in our city don’t have shoes and suffer from foot diseases and allergies as a result of it. But there are also many who throw away shoes, which are in a usable condition or they store it at home and never wear them. If one helps the other, no one will have to work or go to school barefoot ever again,” she says about her initiative’s tag line ‘Donate a sole, save a soul’.

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