Volcom: Give Jeans

By Nathan Morales

More than 20,000 people in the United States are homeless. Even worse, more than half of those people do not own more than one pair of jeans. Luckily, Volcom, an apparel company, has taken the challenge and created the Give Jeans a Chance Foundation.

In November and December of 2009, Volcom partnered with the National Coalition for the Homeless to help pick up and donate old pairs of jeans to the homeless across North America. The collection started in California, where trucks filled with Volcom employees went to stores, skate parks, concert halls, and surf and skate shops where they asked for donations of used jeans. During that period of time, they were joined by many professional skate boarders, who used their celebrity to encourage young teens and adults to donate clothing to homeless shelters.

A huge part of donations came from Volcom setting up skating contests at different skate parks, which featured skating pros the Lopez Brothers, Jake Duncombe, Chima Ferguson, and Darrell Stanton doing exhibitions and allowing demos to be filmed of them skating. The skaters also were part of the group that traveled around picking up jeans. At the end of the collecting, the team was able to gather more than 5000 pairs of jeans, which were distributed to more than fifty homeless shelters, the biggest shelter being Midnight Mission in California. The team gave more than 100 pairs of jeans to the men, women, and children who live at the shelter.

Because of this, the good people of Volcom have decided to continue to run the program and have collected over 100,000 pairs of jeans. With this in mind, Volcom hopes to spread the message of helping out your fellow neighbor and to help start a movement of love and compassion.

Go to the Volcom website to learn more.
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