Photo by Yuvie Styles.
JESSE ACOSTA AND ALEJANDRA ZENDEJAS played the high-end sneaker market for the benefit of Oak Cliff kids.
Acosta, 26, is a teacher at Kimball High School, and he is also an alumnus of that school. Every now and then in his early teaching career, he would overhear a student making fun of a classmate’s clothes and shoes. And in his first year of teaching, he had one student whose soles were coming loose from the bottoms of his shoes, but he was unsure of how to approach the situation.
“Those same students who were picked on for the shoes they were wearing, they tended to sit at the back of the class,” he says. “Quiet, no confidence. So I decided I wanted to do something.”
He and his girlfriend, Zendejas, are both “sneaker nerds,” who collect rare Nikes, mostly.
In August 2020, they started Pasos for Oak Cliff to raise money and buy shoes for kids who need them.
Instead of doing straight-up crowdfunding, they had the idea to give away a highly sought pair of sneakers to one person who donated.
Their original goal with that first fundraiser was $1,050 to buy 35 pairs of shoes. They were giving away a pair of Air Jordan 1s in University of North Carolina baby blue, a shoe that retails for about $160 but can go for $600 on the resell market.
The giveaway wound up raising over $4,600, and they bought 150 pairs of shoes. But they still had a waitlist, so they started working on the next one.
“I feel like it was God and luck,” he says.
The person who won a pair of Yeezys in the second giveaway in September donated them back for another giveaway.
In four months, they raised enough to buy 577 pairs of shoes for kids in Dallas.
“It was a very quick come-up, I guess you could say, and we were definitely not expecting this to happen so fast,” Acosta says.
Now they’re filing for nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service.
They buy shoes themselves at Nike outlets and other discount stores, paying around $30 per pair.
“If it’s a shoe that we wouldn’t wear, then we’re not going to buy it,” he says.
Acosta’s interest in sneakers began when he was made fun of in middle school for wearing Shaqs, Shaquille O’Neal’s shoes for Sketchers, to school.
But it was after meeting Zendejas, a sneaker connoisseur since childhood, when he became more serious about the hobby. They own about 600 pairs of shoes between them.
Acosta graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and then did a year with AmeriCorps.
After that, he was accepted to Teach for America, and that’s how he wound up back at his alma mater. He’s now in his third year at Kimball, where he teaches U.S. History.
“I really wanted to teach students the history they didn’t find in the book and teach students to get involved in their community,” he says. “And I wanted to give back to the school that I went to.”
He and Zendejas, 25, both grew up in Oak Cliff but never met until after college. Her home school was also Kimball, but she went to Trini Garza Early College High School at Mountain View.
Then they both went to UT at the same time, where she was the president of the campus LULAC chapter. He once messaged her about the chapter on Twitter, but he could never make it to their meetings.
Then a few years ago, she replied to his Twitter comment about local Dallas politics, and their friendship grew from there.
After a story about them aired on WFAA local news, Acosta and Zendejas received a call from the Drew Barrymore Show, which featured them in an episode in December (watch below).
Earlier this year, they received $5,000 from Amazon to buy shoes for kids in Dallas, Austin and San Antonio.
They plan to give away at least 500 pairs of shoes this summer and 500 more in December, but so far, it’s looking like they will exceed the goal.
“We acknowledge that shoes are not the most important thing in the world,” he says. “But we definitely see how they change students’ confidence just by having a new, good pair of shoes.”
