Some 18-year-olds who take time off from their studies after graduating high school head off to travel, learn a new language or gain employment. Augustus Holm gathered some friends, gave away more than 21,600 pairs of shoes to families in need and set a world record that he hopes lends even more credibility to his future philanthropic efforts.
The 7 December footwear drive that Holm had a major hand in organizing in his home town of San Diego clinched the Guinness World Records mark for largest donation of shoes in 24 hours. But the story neither starts nor ends there, he said in a recent interview.
For Holm, it largely began in 2019, when he was 13 and his mother asked him to help her out with a fundraising gala dinner of which she was the chairperson.
Holm and some of his buddies got some pointers from his mom, Pat Salas, and others in the field of philanthropy on how to convince people to donate to them. They realized they had an advantage being children and siding with a good cause: supporting a local community clinic named San Ysidro Health.
Their pitch – in person and by phone – yielded results. As he has also told the San Diego Union-Tribune, Holm’s group raised $130,000 in the months leading up to the gala. Then they ginned up another $100,000 at the gala itself.
“We loved what we had done so much that we were like, ‘Oh, well, we should continue,’” Holm said. “But why don’t we make an actual group?”
And that’s exactly what Holm and his supporters did, establishing the Youth Philanthropy Council (YPC) with him as president of the non-profit.
The YPC in 2020 focused on a footwear drive that collected 5,000 pairs of mostly new shoes donated to San Ysidro Health, Father Joe’s Village (an organization dedicated to supporting unhoused people) and others. They later raised $40,000 for a school built in Kenya in 2021, with Holm and his allies attending the campus’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, as the Union-Tribune noted.
Such projects taught Holm there was more than fundraising to philanthropy. Holm remarked, “Logistical planning … public speaking – a lot of those skills were really valuable for myself and all the other co-founders,” including James Farrell, Alex Ozarski, Bruno Perez and Emilio Perez.
That all especially came in handy for the venture that caught the attention of Guinness World Records.
The YPC had gotten into the habit of challenging itself to beat its prior bests with its shoe collection. The 5,000-pair drive gave way to one that collected and distributed 13,000. For 2024, the YPC partnered with a Los Angeles-based, female-founded footwear brand named Jellypop and set a goal to donate 17,000 pairs of shoes – worth about $1.1m in all.
Then the group realized the Guinness world record for most shoes donated in 24 hours was 17,526. So they resolved to surpass that mark.
The YPC ended up collecting about 3,000 boxes containing a total of 21,604 pairs of shoes. Volunteers had to go to donor Evolution Design Lab’s warehouse in LA and pack the boxes into trucks. The trucks, including one driven by YPC, then brought them to the site of the giveaway: San Diego’s Spectrum Center. Volunteers then arrived at the giveaway site the evening before to receive the donations, begin unpacking the boxes and organizing the shoes so they could be distributed to families who needed them.
“It was probably the hardest all of our members have physically worked in their lives,” Holm said. “It was two days of just straight, hard labor that we knew if we failed the whole event would go under.”
Go under it did not. Each of the pairs were given away to people who drove or otherwise got a ride to the event. Many described relief over not having to spend potentially hundreds of dollars on footwear for their loved ones, for their jobs, to exercise or to just be more comfortable getting around.
One woman whom Holm encountered at the giveaway told her she cleaned houses for a living. She said she went to the event, dubbed St Nick’s Kicks, to get shoes to replace the ones she had worn through cleaning for her clients – as well as to get children presents for Christmas that she otherwise could not afford.
“That’s why everybody loves to volunteer,” said Holm, who added that he exchanged a hug with the woman.
Ultimately, the process to be verified by Guinness and its globally renowned database of 40,000 records was complicated. It involved email records, written statements, photos and videos of the shoes being trucked in and two rotating witnesses who worked overnight. Holm, the rest of YPC and their supporters nonetheless earned their verification.
The effects of breaking a Guinness World Record were immediate.
As word spread on social media, the YPC quickly picked up an extra $3,000 in donations meant to facilitate its future endeavors. Those funds have been earmarked to assist with carrying out a social innovation competition named YPC Labs, a school supply drive and a companionship initiative pairing youngsters with senior citizens, Holm said.
Holm recently graduated high school and has paused his studies through what would have been his first year in college in part to develop an app aimed at making it easier for people to navigate Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people aged 65 and older or with disabilities. The app, CheckRx, has attracted $750,000 in investment on a valuation of $8.8m, Holm said.
He hopes the cachet that the public often gives to Guinness World Record holders enables him to propel the YPC, CheckRx and other enterprises – along with those they try to benefit – to the next level.
“It’s a little selfish, right, that I’m doing this because it makes me feel good,” Holm said. “But I love to be able to help out my community, and I’m not going to be dropping that anytime soon.”
