HIGH Wycombe primary school student Chace Harvison recently started an initiative to collect football boots to donate to underprivileged kids from remote WA communities who can’t buy their own.
Chace has played AFL for multiple years, in High Wycombe, and wanted other kids to have as much fun playing as he did each weekend.
“I play for the High Wycombe Doggies, I love playing footy, and I wanted to make sure other kids could play too,” he said.
Chace said when he started the idea, which was originally part of a school community service project, he didn’t expect such strong support from the community.
His mum, Marika Harvison, agreed.
“The whole community has just been amazing, they’ve really gotten around it and have all said how great they think the initiative is, which is really great to hear,” she said.
Chace and Ms Harvison designed fliers to put around town, encouraging people to drop off their old boots.
“We made fliers and put them around school, and mum posted it on Facebook,” Chace said.
“We’ve got drop-off buckets outside our house and at school, and around the footy club as well.”
In the first collection, 44 pairs of boots were collected, all well-loved but also well-looked after, and in perfectly useable condition.
Ms Harvison said many kids grew out of their boots before they were broken or worn through.
“They do grow so fast at this age and as they get a little bit older, people are throwing away perfectly good boots just because they’re too small,” she said.
The first collection of boots was sent to Broome with the WA police citizens’ youth club to kit out kids for a charity footy carnival.
The next package is headed to Warburton, an Aboriginal community on the edge of the Gibson desert, 920km North-East of Kalgoorlie.
Chace said he hoped the new boots would encourage more kids to get involved in playing footy.
“More kids can play because they’ve got new boots, and it’s great if more people can go and have fun on the field,” he said.
“I hope their team wins a game with their new boots.”
