Mom said yes to teen's demand of 17,000 pairs of shoes

When Mackenzie — adopted from Arizona foster care at 17 after more than half her life in state care and 26 different placements — told her adoptive mother she wanted 17,000 pairs of shoes, the answer was yes.

The number wasn't random. It was one pair for every child in Arizona's foster care system. Mackenzie's idea: lay out 16,990 pairs of empty shoes in rows, a visual people couldn't ignore, showing the magnitude of foster care in the state. Then donate the shoes to foster children.

The project was personal. When Mackenzie first arrived at her adoptive family's home, weeks before her 16th birthday, she owned exactly one pair of shoes — old tennis shoes split at the sides, two and a half sizes too small. She wore them everywhere: to meet her forever family, to church, to school. At one point she had no shoes at all, walking barefoot to school from a group home while teachers looked the other way.

"If I lived with my birth parents and came to school with no shoes every day, they would have called the hotline to report neglect," she told her mother, "but no one calls to report neglect or abuse on a CPS group home. They just expect it and ignore it."

Foster children need good shoes, her mother wrote — shoes that fit, shoes a kid can be proud of, shoes good enough to join a sports team or make friends at a new school. What better way to show what nearly 17,000 kids in foster care looks like than 17,000 pairs of empty shoes?

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Based on the family's account via Fostering Rights, March 2015.