ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Around 100 children at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southcentral Alaska received a new, free pair of shoes through the Seattle Seahawks’ Kicks 4 Kids program.
During a ceremony on Wednesday afternoon, the club welcomed Seattle Seahawks mascot “Blitz” to their Northeast Community Center Clubhouse to pass out the shoes.
“Getting shoes from Blitz today is amazing,” Susan Anderson, the CEO of Boys & Girls Clubs of Southcentral Alaska, said.
“It’s a real opportunity and the kids, you can just tell, were having a fantastic time. And it was a real gift of people caring about them.”
The donations came just over a month before the Anchorage School District starts its first day of school. Back-to-school season is a time of year that can be expensive for families. Last year, the National Retail Federation reported that the average family was spending $875 per student in K-12 grade, with national spending hitting $39 billion total for students going back to school, a small dip from 2023.
These shoes, the Seattle Seahawks said, help ease part of the burden some families might be feeling during the season.
“We all know kids grow [at an] exponential rate and replacing their tennis shoes is sometimes something that’s a little difficult for parents. So we get to provide this new pair of shoes for the kids and kind of take that off the plate of the parents, and then it just gives the kids a little bit of confidence,” Shawn Christopherson, the mascot director for the Seattle Seahawks, said.
This was the first year that the Seattle Seahawks partnered up with them for the shoe donation, the Boys & Girls Club said.
However, the Seahawks told Alaska’s News Source that in the past, it has donated roughly 3,000 shoes across different Alaska communities.
“It’s awesome,” Christopherson said. “As someone who attended Boys and Girls Club growing up, and used to go play basketball at the Boys and Girls Club every day after school, it kind of like, full circle .... now we’re in a situation where we can give back to something that provides just an awesome base for kids.”
The Boys & Girls Clubs of Southcentral Alaska also received a $100,000 donation towards nutrition from the Safeway donation.
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