We think these words and photos from Little Rock Christian students tell the story best:

“Samaritan’s Feet gave us the opportunity to serve the children of our community and to share the love and joy of Christ. We arrived with the expectation of providing companionship and joy to these kids, and we soon realized that they imparted blessings onto us abundantly. Serving those children was both a humbling and fulfilling experience, and I am sure that each and every person there saw the redeeming power of Christ and felt the abounding love of GOD”
-Christian Shewmake, 11th grade

“After I was on water duty, I took a break and went to wash feet. As I waited for someone to come, a little African-American girl came and sat down. I asked her what her name was, and she said it was Noya. As I washed her feet, I asked her questions about herself, like what school she went to, what her hobbies were and if she liked music. When I put on her socks, I asked her if she knew who Jesus was. She said no. as I put on her first shoe (before she had on an old pair of “Twinkle Toes”), I explained to her that He was the Son of God who died on the cross to wash away our sins. As I put on her second shoe, I told her, if she wanted, we could pray to God so she could get her name in the Lamb’s Book of Life and live forever in Heaven. “Do you want to live eternally in joy and happiness in heaven?” I asked. She said “yes”. I took her around the corner, and we prayed. I asked her if she accepted Jesus as her savior, if she believed He died on the cross, believed He exists as well, and believed He’s the Son of God. She said yes every time. As we wrapped up, we got up and walked to a “runner”. Feeling happy and content inside, I waved good-bye. THE END!”
-Grace Faulk, 7th grade

“Having the opportunity to participate in the Samaritan’s Feet distribution was in a way the greatest experience of my ‘life’. I will explain why…near the end of the book of John, John lays out the reason for which Jesus did all of the things he did and why John wrote the book. It says, “…so that you may believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name”(John 20:31). My life is not just simply the number of days I have lived, but it is the life Christ has given me to bestow on others. In this way, I should be like John, in anything I write, say, do, etc.-it should be for the purpose of letting other believe and have life as well. Samaritan’s Feet was an absolutely perfect place to do this. Because of the organization, the door to Christ’s gospel was swung wide open for many! I will not soon forget the faces and personalities of the kids whom I washed feet, but more importantly God will not forget them and their names will (with great hope) be written in the Book of Life for eternity!”
-Landon Trulove, 11th grade

See more photos here.

“The magic was not just in the children’s joy and appreciation – many said it was the best day of their lives – but, rather in some of the intimate moments. There was a 14-year-old girl who dreamed of becoming a chef. The adult washing her feet was Rusty Prudhon, owner of Napa Café, who invited her and her family to the restaurant for dinner and personal training. Her smile could have spanned the globe! Then there were countless kids who asked the Navy sailors for a picture, not just thanking them for their shoes, but for serving our country. Indeed, the day was about much more than shoes – it was about sharing love and hope!” – Jeremy Park, director of communications at Lipscomb Pitts Insurance and director of the Lipscomb Pitts Breakfast Club (read more in his article for The Memphis Daily News here)

Thank you for supporting the mission of Samaritan’s Feet and making incredible events like this one possible.

Check out these news features from the event at Yahoo! News and The Commercial Appeal.

Take a look at some videos and photos from the day:

See more photos here and here.

Twenty-three Central Bible College students traveled to Joplin, Missouri, to participate in the Martin Luther King National Day of Service on January 21, 2012.

Samaritan's Feet, a faith-based humanitarian aid organization, hosted a foot washing outreach to the needy of the community. During the outreach, students from Central Bible College joined other volunteers in washing the feet of those in the community who have found themselves underprivileged or impoverished. Once the feet were washed, each individual received a new pair of shoes.

"We washed people's feet and worked with little kids from bad situations," said Dave Leake, a junior at Central Bible College. "We just talked to them and asked them how their lives were going. It was awesome to be able to dig into their lives for a little bit and find out what we could pray for."

Chelsea Philebaum, a CBC senior, commented, "It was such an awesome experience. We worked mostly with younger kids, foster children. But there was one older lady there who was standing off to the side. I asked to wash her feet and she refused at first. After some convincing, however, she let me. She was a Christian, but she had lost so much in the Joplin tornado. When I had finished washing her feet, she just began to encourage me, saying that I was special and that God was going to use me. It was so humbling to just wash someone's feet and be that servant to them."

The Samaritan's Feet Organization estimates that there are 300 million children who go without shoes every day. One million are estimated to die each year from foot borne diseases. Through their work, Samaritan's Feet hopes to provide 10 million pairs of shoes for 10 million impoverished children in the next 10 years.

Since their establishment in 2003, Samaritan's Feet and their team of 70,000 ambassadors have been able to provide more than 3.5 million children with shoes in more than 60 nations. While in Joplin for the day, Phil Gocke, director of Student Ministries at Central Bible College, estimates 115 children were given shoes.

For more information about Central Bible College, see its website.

Source: AG News

Thank you to everyone who supported this fundraiser. Because of you, we raised over $12,000! That means that 1,200 people will have shoes on their feet and encouraged smiles on their faces. What a beautiful picture. Seth Crawford, a UNC student and the event organizer, is off to Haiti in a few weeks to help us distribute some of those shoes!

Thank you to Ashley and Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated for making this event possible.

Enjoy a few photos from that morning:

Click here to see more photos from this awesome event.

Coach honored for his work in Haiti, Africa with Samaritan’s Feet

Scott Nagy is among the best at what he does. He just notched his 300th victory as head coach of the South Dakota State University basketball team – the all-time leader in men’s basketball coaching victories at SDSU. He has been chosen for conference Coach of the Year honors no fewer than five times. SDSU has claimed four conference championships under his direction.

For 17 seasons, Nagy’s been known as the spokesman for Jackrabbit basketball.

He’s also become known as the barefoot coach.

This year, on Jan. 9, Nagy will step out of his coaching shoes once again when he becomes the recipient of the Dorothy & Eugene T. Butler Human Rights Award.

The SDSU coach is the 2011 selection of the City of Brookings and its Human Rights Committee, and he’ll be honored on that date at an open house and award ceremony at the Brookings library.

Nagy is being recognized for his work with Samaritan’s Feet, a Charlotte, N.C.-based charity whose goal is to put 10 million pairs of shoes on the feet of 10 million orphans and impoverished children around the world.

Once a year for the last three years, Nagy has coached a game barefoot to draw attention to Samaritan’s Feet. Since 2009, he has raised thousands of dollars and collected thousands of pairs of new and gently used shoes for kids in Haiti and in Africa.

Nagy wasn’t the first shoeless coach around, and he isn’t the only one now. More than 300 coaches across the country are involved with Samaritan’s Feet. The SDSU chief says he first saw IUPUI’s Ron Hunter (now at Georgia State) coach a game shoeless in 2008, and “there were several other coaches in the league who were doing it.”

“The charity just matched up well with our lives,” Nagy explains, speaking for himself and his wife, Jamie.

Though he began to raise funds for Samaritan’s Feet in 2009, it was in 2010 – after the earthquake that ravaged Haiti – that Nagy became a full-fledged partner in the mission.

Scott and Jamie Nagy had four children of their own when they adopted their fifth, Naika, as a 2 1/2-year-old. Her home country is Haiti.

Both the Nagys were adopted as children – Jamie as a newborn and Scott as a teen –“and we had talked about (adoption) for a long time, even before we were done having our own kids.

“I just know that we both had a desire to do it,” Nagy recalls. “On my own, I wouldn’t have, so I know that God placed it in my heart.”

God had a plan for Naika, too, Nagy says.

Naika’s birth mother was still living, but she was unable to feed the child and placed her in an orphanage.

Nagy knows that the mother survived the earthquake, but he has no information of her whereabouts or about the status of her other children, Naika’s siblings.

The high-profile South Dakota coach understood that his bare feet could raise awareness of the grinding poverty in Haiti: “It was definitely not a publicity stunt. But it was a good way to support Haiti, and I wanted my daughter to know that her parents would do whatever they could for her country, that they were not leaving Haiti behind.”

Close to home

In Brookings, the 2010 earthquake hit close to home. Naika, who came from an area near the epicenter of the quake, understood that something terrible had happened, and Nagy says he found it difficult to discuss it with her.

“She’s very intelligent,” Nagy said at the time. “She doesn’t say a lot, but I know it’s heavy on her heart. … At first she thought everybody was dead in Haiti.”

In Nagy’s first year as a shoeless coach, “we raised a lot of money and collected something like 2,000 pairs of shoes.”

Times have changed since then. For one thing, says Nagy, “it’s easier to raise money than to store and ship shoes,” so he’s de-emphasized the shoe collection aspect of his mission.

“I still have people bringing me shoes almost daily,” he says, and he gratefully accepts them. But now, instead of shipping them to Samaritan’s Feet, he turns them over to a Sioux Falls charitable group organized to send shoes to Haiti.

The emphasis has changed to raising cash, not because it’s easier but because “Samaritan’s Feet has its own shoe factory,” Nagy explains, “and they can make a pair for about $5.”

His cash collections have brought in $5,000 and $6,000 over the past few years, and in 2012, Nagy has his sights set on collecting more than $10,000 for Samaritan’s Feet.

Building organization

Several years of exposure have helped Nagy build a “shoeless” organization. Area high school coaches have signed on to the project, and community and regional organizations are starting to line up as sponsors. Sanford Health, for example, gave Nagy $2,500 last year.

And Nagy’s efforts are no longer confined to Haiti. In late July, he accompanied Samaritan’s Feet founder Manny Ohonme to Zimbabwe, where they not only put up steel shelters for rural schools, but Nagy conducted basketball clinics for kids in the capital city of Harare.

The trip was funded in part by Nagy’s home church, Brookings Wesleyan.

“The school buildings were basically wooden shacks with dirt floors,” Nagy reported in his blog from Harare.

During the eight-day visit, the Samaritan’s Feet team put up the buildings but weren’t able to pass out shoes – that part of the mission was held up by government red tape. The shoes ultimately found their way to the youngsters.

Nagy said some of the kids who came to his basketball camp were shoeless – and they worked out for three hours, barefoot, on the hot concrete courts.

A scheduled safari was also a casualty on his Zimbabwe trip, but Nagy was philosophical about it. “I was disappointed, but I figure I can go to the zoo in Sioux Falls if I need to see animals.”

Barefoot again

Nagy and his coaching staff will be barefoot at courtside once again on Jan. 14 when the Jackrabbits host University of Missouri-KC.

“This will be a whole big weekend for us,” says Nagy, whose Jackrabbits also take on the University of South Dakota on the 12th.

That Sunday, the 15th, the coach will take part in a day of service with Samaritan’s Feet in Sioux Falls, washing people’s feet and giving away 300 to 400 pair of shoes.

Nagy is a modest man, and though he’s about to receive a human rights award for his work, he doesn’t wear the “humanitarian” label well.

“Humanitarian?” he says. “It makes me laugh when I hear that. Probably the people closest to me would not consider me a humanitarian, and my basketball players would certainly not consider me a humanitarian!”

To hear him tell it, his charitable work is “not that big a deal, really.” And he doesn’t want publicity, even though he grudgingly cooperates to get more attention for the program.

“That’s not why I do it,” he says.

“If anyone has been helped, it’s been worthwhile. If there’s any kid, because of Samaritan’s Feet, who knows there’s somebody who cares about them, it’s worthwhile.”

“But,” he adds, “any time you help others, you get changed more than the people you help do.”

A reception an open house will be held from 5:30-7 p.m. Jan. 9 at the Brookings Public Library. The human rights award presentation will take place at 6.

Source: The Brookings Register

Georgia State Taking the Right Steps

Ron Hunter will always be known as the barefoot coach, the one coach who decided to draw attention to a cause on his own rather than be a contributor or worse simply a bystander.

There shouldn’t have been any doubt about his coaching ability, though.

He consistently had IUPUI as a contender in the Summit League or at the very least a pest to put out.

But he may be on the verge of doing something more noteworthy on the court.

Hunter has Georgia State atop the Colonial Athletic Association standings in his first season after knocking off two of the top three favorites to start this week — Drexel and at VCU — with a third on tap Saturday when the Panthers go to George Mason.

“This is my 25th year in coaching and I’ve never had this much fun,” said Hunter. “There were low expectations and this has been an incredible ride. I’ve been to the NCAA tournament. None of these kids were recruited by me. We walked in and accepted each other. No one expected this.”

Hunter is known nationally for drawing attention to an organization called Samaritan’s Feet. He started a trend by coaching barefoot and other coaches have caught on during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. He has helped raise hundreds of thousands of shoes to be put on the feet of impoverished or disenfranchised children in the United States, Africa and South America.

Hunter will take his team to Africa this summer, just like he took IUPUI so they could experience the unmatched joy of seeing a child receive something that is such a basic necessity. His players at IUPUI bought into Hunter early and saw his genuine passion for his cause. It translated into their efforts on the court.

Hunter hasn’t had to take this team abroad yet for them to believe in him.

The Panthers lost the first three games of the season at a tournament at Washington, including opening up with a loss to the Huskies.

Georgia State hasn’t lost since falling to UW, Portland and Florida Atlantic Nov. 12-14. That means the Panthers have won 11 in a row and have a 3-0 start (they played William & Mary in early December) in the widely respected CAA.

This same collection of players finished 12-19 under Rod Barnes a year ago.

“We had a bunch of older kids that had never won in their life, the program hadn’t won,” Hunter said. “But I thought we could win right now. But I had to fit what I wanted to do with these kids and once I realized that we haven’t lost since.”

Hunter said he came into the season assuming he could play the same pressing, matchup zone system he had in the previous 17 years.

But it didn’t work.

“I got back to the hotel at Washington and realized no one was having any fun,” Hunter said. “So I brought in music to practice to relax the kids. It was like we were coaching in a morgue when we started. Everyone was depressed. I had to lighten up the mood. Since then everything has changed. There is a swagger about this group. They think they’re pretty good now.”

Hunter credits Barnes with instilling the desire to defend. Barnes, now the head coach at Cal State Bakersfield, was a defensive-minded coach when he was at Ole Miss, too.

“I didn’t take over a bad team,” Hunter said. “There are older kids like St. John’s last season but they didn’t know how to win.”

Two of the top three scorers –Jihad Ali and Eric Buckner — are seniors with the leading scorer being sophomore Devonta White.

“They keep you off with their pressure and zone,” Drexel coach Bruiser Flint said. “They’re an older team with guys who have been around. Ron is doing a good job with those guys.”

Georgia State still has to get through GMU. The schedule actually has one break in that the Panthers get Old Dominion at home instead of going on the road. Still, it’s a little early to start printing title T-shirts.

“Most people recognize me for the shoe thing but we won games at IUPUI,” said Hunter, who will go barefoot Jan. 12 against UNC-Wilmington. “We were picked near the bottom. But we’re loving this. I’m coaching with a chip on my shoulder. This team is playing like that.”

Source: ESPN

This event is a great opportunity to give back while enjoying the night out with friends, neighbors, family, or your business team. For more info and to RSVP visit www.safecollegefunding.org.

December 31, 2011
7:00 P.M. to 12:30 A.M.
Palmetto Grill & Bakery located in Mint Hill, NC

Admission: $55 person
Includes: 3-course dinner, toast, DJ, charity auction, door prizes, and more!

Read more here about Seth Crawford, the event organizer who is devoted to changing the lives of children in Haiti.

The first step is to register. Do it today! DETAILS >>