Cee Cee Ponicsan dedicates Shoes for Kids program to her loving, single mother

“When you give someone a gift card it protects their dignity. I never wanted it to feel like charity,” says Ponicsan|

When Cee Cee Ponicsan was a little girl her mother would buy her shoes two sizes too big and stuff newspaper in the toes so they would last longer. Then, trying to help their mother, Ponicsan and her brothers would pound tin cans flat and wrap them around the soles, clanking their way to just outside school, where they’d stash the extenders in the bushes until the long walk back home.

So Ponicsan knows full well that school shoes can be precious – which is why she wanted to create a way to provide new shoes to underprivileged kids. First she went to Payless Shoe Source and bought 30 $30 gift cards, and then she went to La Luz and shared her story with the nonprofit’s Executive Director Juan Hernandez, asking his help in getting the gift cards distributed.

La Luz partnered with Ponicsan to launch the Shoes for Kids program. In 2015, the original 30 gift cards were given out on a case-by-case basis, mostly to single mothers with more than one child. “That was my Mom,” Ponicsan said, tears coming to her eyes. She and her husband Darryl then decided to up their commitment to Shoes for Kids in honor of her mother.

This year they financed more than 200 of the $30 gift cards, which were purchased by La Luz directly from Payless headquarters in Kansas at a 10 percent discount.

Most of them were distributed at the Back to School Health Fair last August, when parents received the cards along with backpacks and school supplies donated by Staples. Veronica Vences, who directs the Shoes for Kids program at La Luz, said the parents were extremely grateful. “What a difference it makes for kids to go to school in new shoes. It creates self esteem, which leads to being more successful in school,” Vences said.

The Ponicsans also provided gift cards for shoes to the Valley of the Moon Children’s Home, which were used when the Cha-Chas, a group of women volunteers, took the children to buy new outfits, and this year shoes, too, for back to school. Now they are looking to extend the Shoes for Kids program to include sports shoes. “No kid should not play a sport because they can’t afford the shoes,” Ponicsan said. She is hoping that others in the community will donate to the Shoes for Kids program. “If people would do that that would be great. And we could look into how to get athletic shoes.”

Thus far, Ponicsan has gone about her “shoe fairy” ways quietly. But she’s talking about it now in the hope that others will be interested in joining the Shoes for Kids effort. “I am a Catholic Buddhist. I do things quietly and expect nothing back,” she said. But she would love to see the program at La Luz grow.

“When you give someone a gift card it protects their dignity. I never wanted it to feel like charity. This way they can choose their own shoes,” she said. She decided on the $30 amount after noticing that the majority of the shoes at Payless cost $19.99, leaving $10 to put toward socks, or to save for when a new pair is needed, or to use with the $10 coupon Payless sometimes offers with a shoe purchase to buy a second pair.

“I remember what a struggle it was for my mother to keep us in shoes,” she said about the mother she so loved and admired who died in a car accident when Ponicsan was 23. “My mom worked six days a week, but she always made us Wheatena in the morning. And even though we had so little, we never felt sorry for ourselves. We never felt less than.”

Ponicsan’s father abandoned the family when she was 5, and she, her mother and two brothers lived in their car for a brief time. “Mom taught us to forage. She made it fun,” she remembers. When her mother got work as a picker they lived in migrant housing, until eventually her mother became a waitress and they moved to an apartment. “She was such a hard worker the owner would send food home with her for our dinner, and after church on Sundays we would get to go to the restaurant, sit at the counter, and order whatever we wanted. We thought we were rich,” she laughs now.

Now, she said, she can afford to buy shoes wherever she wants, but she often buys hers at Payless. She has not forgotten her roots, or the mother who taught her it is always important to be appreciative and to give back. So Ponicson has decided that giving away shoes is one way to show she remembers the lessons she learned as a child. “This really came from my mom,” she said.

To donate to Shoes for Kids contact Veronica Vences at La Luz, 938-5131, or mail a check to La Luz, 17560 Greger St., Sonoma CA 95476.

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