Maia Mariner is a teenager on a mission. She wants your sneakers. Those perfectly good ones in the cupboard you never use - she wants to give them to families that can't afford them - so everyone can enjoy sports and stay active.
Maia has set up a social enterprise called Lazy Sneakers, she told Bryan Crump she got the idea when she was playing basketball with her friends.
Photo: supplied Lazy Sneakers
“I noticed that some of my friends didn't have the proper footwear to participate, they struggled to play, because they didn't have the right footwear.
“So I went home to my parents, and I talked to them about it and I realised this was a bigger issue than just my small basketball community and my friends, and we thought about how we can help my friends and the bigger community so we thought of a sneaker bank.”
She says a lack of appropriate footwear is a bigger problem than many of us realise. It’s particularly a problem for families with children who quickly outgrow their shoes.
“It can be hard to replace them with bigger sizes, especially when they're expensive and you can't even find these bigger sizes, because we have kids coming to us whose shoe sizes like go up to maybe 13.”
When she realised there was a need, Maia got onto social media to ask for help.
“We started networking and using social media to reach out to other people and from that, we've managed to get in touch with sports clubs around Wellington or cultural clubs. And we set up collection points and we let people know that if you have a pair of sneakers, you can drop them off there, and we'll come and collect them.”
Some donated shoes are brand new, others need a little TLC, she says.
Sometimes it's about replacing the soles or the laces … most of them are white so you actually have to scrub them clean. So I do that by buying toothbrushes and just putting toothpaste on them and scrubbing them. And it's really efficient and it works really well.”
And there’s plenty of demand, Maia says.
“Some people contact us and sometimes we contact schools, we've dropped off 200 pairs of sneakers to a school in Porirua and that was really cool just to see all the kids smiling.”
So far Lazy Sneakers has distributed over 700 pairs of trainers, and Mai says there are plenty more in storage – they’ve collected over 100 pairs.
We have the storage unit, this really small storage unit, and we've got these boxes to store the shoes in and they just pile up. They've just been stacked to like the roof of the storage unit.”
Although currently focussed on the Wellington region, she hopes to expand to Auckland in the future.
And it’s not just the young in need of sports shoes, she says.
“Elderly people who want to be more active in their life and get out and do more sports, they've come to us for pairs of shoes.”
