SOLE WORK

Laced in Full Circle

Cleaning kicks for #JeffsShoeChallenge, 06.27.26—just one day after we turned two.

I’ve always loved sneakers.

Not just wearing them. The stories behind them. The design. The culture. The way a shoe can somehow become attached to a specific season of your life. In 2019, that love took me to Portland for the first time.

I had the opportunity to visit Nike World Headquarters, tour the campus, walk through the Jordan Building, and experience a place I had only known from a distance. As someone who loved sneakers, movement, sport, and everything surrounding the culture, I left inspired.

I had no idea Portland would eventually become a city I knew so well.

Seven years later, I’ve made nearly 20 trips to Portland in this year alone. And on one of those trips, a story that started years ago in Detroit found its way back to me.

Two years ago, City Sweat Club was still leading our Community Run + Walk from the front porch of Nike Detroit. We didn’t have a space of our own yet. We gathered people, hit Woodward Avenue, came back to the porch, and kept finding ways to move community with what we had.

Ahead of our first annual Back-to-School Fest, Nike Global Leader Kris Young visited Detroit. Somewhere in our conversations, she told me about #JeffsShoeChallenge, a giveback initiative making an incredible impact throughout the Portland community.

I remember hearing the story. What I didn’t know was that I was being introduced to something I would eventually have the opportunity to experience for myself.

Sometimes a conversation is just a conversation. Sometimes it’s a seed. And you don’t always know where it will take root.

tied

Exactly one year after our very first run on Woodward Avenue, we stepped inside the building that would eventually become our home.

That summer, we began preparing the space to host our second annual Back-to-School Fest alongside Hill Harper. Afterward, we got to work.

For the next nine months, we continued making additions, reimagining and physically building the space to embody the vision we had carried long before we had a place to put it. And we didn’t build it alone.

The same hands and feet that stepped alongside us on Woodward showed up inside those walls. People from our community painted, assembled furniture, hung wallpaper and ceiling foliage, cleaned, created, climbed ladders, and gave hours of their own time to help us build. The people we moved with became the people who helped us build a place to keep moving.

And exactly one year ago today, we moved our community inside of that space for the very first time.

Today, that is where we spend most of our time. We’re no longer gathering from the front porch of a store. We have a home shaped by our own vision and built by the community that grew alongside us.

Naturally, some relationships changed along the way too.

As a nonprofit organization, our responsibility is to the people we serve. When organizations and brands are willing to place meaningful resources into our hands that can go directly into the hands of our neighbors, we welcome that support.

Earlier this year, adidas donated items that we shared during our fifth Community Closet. Around that same time, I began to feel a noticeable distance in the relationship City Sweat Club once had locally through the Nike Community Store in Detroit.

I won’t pretend I didn’t feel it.

There had been years of time, energy, relationship-building, shared experiences, and genuine care invested there. To experience that local relationship change took some time for me to process. Not because I believed City Sweat Club was entitled to a partnership. But because I valued the relationship. There’s a difference.

Then, in the middle of processing that change, something unexpected showed up at my door.

For Global Running Day, Nike Running sent me a pair of Pegasus, thanking me for representing the running community and recognizing the way I continue to move people through it.

That meant a lot to me.

The recognition from beyond the local relationship was comforting. It reminded me that what I was experiencing in one place did not necessarily represent how the work—or even I—was seen everywhere.

I never posted the shoes. Not because I wasn’t grateful. I simply needed time to understand how I felt about being recognized by one part of a brand, on a global leadership level, while simultaneously watching a relationship with another part of it, at home, dissolve after so much effort.

Both things were true.

I was grateful to be seen, and I was disappointed by what had changed. But somewhere along the way, I had to remember something important:

The mission has to remain bigger than the logo.

stepping in FULL CIRCLE

Two years after first hearing about #JeffsShoeChallenge from the front porch of Nike Detroit, I found myself in Portland with the opportunity to support Jeff’s 11th Annual Shoe Challenge.

And I didn’t come empty-handed. I traveled from our city carrying 100 backpacks from City Sweat Club’s Back-to-School Fest.

There was something special about that alone. What started as a conversation about how another city was serving its community had somehow come full circle—and now I was able to bring a piece of what we had built in Detroit to pour into Portland.

The first time I came to Portland, I was a sneaker lover walking through Nike World Headquarters, completely inspired by everything around me. This time, I was back in the same city not only seeing what those shoes could mean when placed into the hands of someone who needed them, but bringing something of our own to give too. And considering everything I had been processing back home, one part of the experience struck me even more.

Nike was there. adidas was there.

Two brands that compete fiercely in the marketplace stepped into the same initiative to support the same community. Sneakers from every brand that exists lined up the tables to be handed over to youth. There was no conflict of interest. Impact was the interest—and the intention behind every move that made the day possible. Brand leadership from both swoosh and stripes stepped in to serve, passing out all of the various kicks, and helped collect and contribute pairs of their own because they knew the impact. That families in attendance could benefit from the confidence of being equipped for the new school year by a community that cares.

There were people who needed shoes. And there were people willing to help provide them. That was bigger.

Sneaker culture teaches us to pick sides. Nike or adidas. This release over that release. We debate silhouettes, colorways, collaborations, athletes, designers, and which brand is doing what better.

I love all of it.

But community has taught me something different about sneakers. At the end of the day, the most important thing a shoe can do is move someone forward.

The work becomes so much bigger when we stop asking who gets the credit and start asking who gets served. My first trip to Portland in 2019 inspired the sneaker lover in me. This one inspired the community builder.

Kris probably had no idea she was planting a seed when she told me about Jeff’s Shoe Challenge. I certainly didn’t. But that’s the thing about seeds. You don’t always recognize them when they’re planted. You don’t always know where they’ll grow.

Sometimes you just keep moving. And years later, you look down and realize just how far your feet have carried you.