When she sent her son’s shoes to Africa, CJ Bowry didn’t intend to lead a quickly-growing charity, but here she is; thriving and at the helm of a quickly expanding charity, as Melissa Moody finds out.
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I have to admit that until the 2024 Charity Times Awards, Sal’s Shoes wasn’t an organisation on my radar. But after seeing the team win the award for Charity of the Year with an Income of Less Than £1m, I started to take notice. After speaking to CJ Bowry, the charity’s chief executive, I’m convinced others will too.

Bowry spent her formative years abroad. Her father was a civil engineer, and she trained as an anthropologist, studying anthropology and international development.

“In those days, and thankfully it has changed, you couldn’t get a job in the charity sector if you didn’t have experience...I’d end up temping half the week and then volunteering at various charities,” she explains.

Bowry initially worked in international development and consultancy work. “I never envisaged that I would end up doing what I do now,” she admits.

A single pair of shoes

Her ‘big break’ as it were, was initiated by a pair of shoes. “I distinctly remember taking [my son] to get his first pair of shoes and the cost of them,” she explains. “They were this big” – she holds her fingers apart to indicate the size of a child’s first shoes. Sal, her son, outgrew the shoes in a few months; a cycle that repeated over and over.

“I don’t know why I didn’t just stick the shoes in the loft or pass them to a friend… it was a couple of hundreds of pounds worth of shoes and I wanted another child to have them.”

At the time, she called a few charities, but she wanted them to be free for the child. A couple said the shoes would be sent abroad, but they couldn’t tell her for sure where her son’s shoes would go. “That didn’t rest easy with me.”

Having grown up overseas, Bowry had friends “all over the place”, so she sent the bag of her son’s shoes to a friend in Zambia, where she had spent some of her primary years.

“I thought ‘good deed done for the year’, until a few weeks later I received an email.” That email explained how much the shoes meant to the kids who were barefoot, or in very worn shoes and attached some photographs. “One of the photos was a little boy and he had on Sal’s very first pair.”

She shared the story on her personal social media and the next day was inundated with messages from people asking how she did it. From there, Bowry organised another collection of her friend’s kids’ shoes. She sent them elsewhere and received more images, which were again shared on social media. The photos were quickly shared amongst friends of friends and by the end of the week, she had 150 messages from people.

“I remember saying to my husband: ‘I think I need to do something, I’ve had all of these messages.’ He looked at me and said: ‘Cool, do it. What are you going to call it?’ I said: ‘I don’t know, Sal’s Shoes?’ And that was it.”

Nothing is a challenge

That was 11 years ago. Now, the organisation has distributed over six million pairs of shoes across 65 different countries.

The journey hasn’t been without its hurdles, but “nothing comes across as a challenge,” she says. When you set up a charity from scratch, “nothing is a challenge because there is no master plan”, she says. “If you start something, you don’t know how its going to go.”

One of the skills that has aided Bowry is her lack of issue in asking for help. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get. The worst thing someone can do is say no.” Bowry believes that the more direct you are in asking for help, the more likely people are to help.

“If you speak to a friend and they say they’re not very well, the chances are you’ll think of them. But if you speak to a friend who’s unwell and they say: ‘Could you walk my dog at 9 tomorrow morning’’, straight away they’re giving you an opportunity to help. Chances are, if it’s in your capacity, you’ll say yes.

“We’re very specific about what we do, and what we’re asking for and how you can help us.” And it works. The week the charity launched, Bowry contacted three places to host Sal’s shoes collections and since then, they’ve never had to ask again. Word of mouth has been a strong force in this case.

She has also been aware that the need for the charity can be close to home. “We have always worked in the UK,” she explains, adding that helping children in the UK was always very important to her. “It’s very well us sending goods to countries that are less privileged then us, but there are children in this country going to school hungry and there was 11 years ago when we started.”

Last year in the UK, Sal’s Shoes distributed over 300,000 pairs of shoes. “At the moment, we get emails every day,” including on a Sunday evening from head teachers across the country. “There’s a head teacher sitting at home thinking, ‘what do I need to cross off for this week? Oh my goodness we have X amount of kids and their shoes are falling apart’.”

Bowry points out that shoes are mandatory in the UK and some £20 in the supermarket – £20 that, if you’re living hand to mouth, is being swallowed up by the increase in food, or utility bills. It’s obvious Bowry has a knack for finding the specific needs of those they work with, and responding in the right way. This is evidenced by the charity’s ‘toe to toe’ campaign.

“There’s a direct correlation between poverty and education,” Bowry states. Most countries have state-run education, where school is free to attend, but uniform is mandatory. If you cannot afford a pair of school shoes, you cannot go to school.

That’s where ‘toe to toe’ comes in. Bowry borrowed the concept from Africa where, when children finish their last secondary school exams, they take off their shoes and leave them on exam tables to pass on to other children who need them.

Two weeks before the end of term, she asked one school to send a letter to parents asking their children to leave their school shoes if they were likely to get a new pair in September.

“They donated 300 pairs of shoes, and by the time they went back in September, they watched the footage. They kitted out three rural schools in Ghana.”

That footage was also shared thousands of times on social media and by the next summer, 650 schools had contacted the charity asking how to get involved.

Award winners

The success of the charity meant that in the 2024 new years honours, Bowry received an OBE. “It’s a bizarre one. Working in the sector, the same with an award, I think it’s quite uncomfortable to receive any sort of acknowledgement, because we’re being recognised for the less fortunate position of others,” she says. “That said, it highlights the work we’re doing and the need for the work we’re doing.”

The honours were followed by the charity’s win at the 2024 Charity Times Awards. “We were super chuffed and really quite honoured,” Bowry says. “We’re stil a relatively small charity in monetary terms, and there’s so many small charities and community organisations picking up the load at the moment. They don’t often get the recognition.

“The recognition a small charity receives can have a quite transformational impact on what the small charity can do. If people hear about the charity’s work and get more support, more funding and more donations that enables you to do even more when there’s clearly a need for it.”

The need is evidently therel; not only for school shoes but others too. “There are a million different type of shoes… I can remember the first time someone donated some pre-loved ballet shoes and thinking ‘this is ridiculous’.” But they kept coming: ballet, jazz and more. “And then in the middle of Nairobi we found a ballet academy.”

It’s the same for football boots: “We can only begin to imagine, if you’re passionate about a sport but you don’t have the correct footwear.” “We get hundreds, thousands of girls glittery party shoes and they’re not practical, they don’t last forever… but I figure glitter is a universal thing. They love it.”

And that what it’s about, isn’t’ it? By sending a box of school shoes, sports shoes or even party shoes – it can help to change a child’s life. A gesture that many of us do anyway – donating to a charity shop or a friend – has turned into a transformative project. Simply because one mother wanted to see her son’s first shoes go to a someone in need.

Bowry’s work goes to show that an idea can be far more transformative than is ever imaginable. Doing something for others is what the sector stands for, and Sal’s Shoes embodies that. I expect this is just the beginning of what’s to come for this small but mighty charity.

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