Toms what is it

Brighten up the holidays! Shop here. Yeti-print Alpargatas. Login or Create Account. New, faux-fur lined Alpargatas featuring custom holiday prints by Paper Source. Show More. Earn points Then put them towards exclusive offers. The more, the merrier. In , TOMS invested in a team of international development, health, and nonprofit professionals, now known as the Giving Team. Over the next 10 years, this team developed relationships with over non-governmental and humanitarian organizations in 80 countries worldwide.

Working hand-in-hand with these organizations, TOMS could better understand the needs of the communities being served. We could also help meet these needs by integrating TOMS resources into existing programs, like those supporting health, education, and community development.

In , we launched TOMS Eyewear, partnering with the Seva Foundation to help provide medical treatment, sight-saving surgery, and prescription glasses to those in need. Improving a poor child's well-being or clearing a young woman's path to education can be offered as a free gift with purchase, a sort of altruistic version of a McDonald's happy meal toy. And that's pretty exciting for the people doing the buying. They get to play the fairy godmother, telling poor children that they shall go to the ball after all.

An ordinary shoe-buying experience gets transformed into a magical fairy tale. It might be easy to miss, but there are two really big logical leaps in the story that products like TOMS tell you: that the hardships the poor kids were facing were due to their lack of shoes, and that giving them shoes was therefore the best way to address those problems.

Neither of these, unfortunately, is correct. When TOMS worked with an outside research team to evaluate the impact of its shoe donations, the researchers were unable to find a way in which the shoes had much of a substantive impact on poor kids' lives. The kids liked the shoes, and used them to play outside a little more often. But there was no significant improvement in their school attendance or self-esteem.

In fact, the data suggested that receiving the shoes caused the children to spend a bit less time on homework. Perhaps because they were too busy playing outside? It also made the children slightly more likely to feel dependent on outside aid — a learned dependency that can be damaging.

Similarly, when researchers ran a study in Nepal that handed out free period supplies to poor girls, that didn't improve their school attendance. The hard truth is that people's problems are almost always a lot more complicated than just the lack of an inexpensive consumer item. Poor girls do often miss school during their periods, for example, but that doesn't mean their problem necessarily comes down to a lack of hygiene supplies. They might be staying home because they're in pain, or because their schools lack private bathrooms, or because their communities believe that women should stay in seclusion while they're menstruating.

Problems like girls' lack of access to education or the cycle of poverty just tend to be complex. So trying to solve these problems with consumer goods often does not actually solve the real problem. And worse, it perpetuates a stereotype of poor people as helpless and passive — after all, if an inexpensive item can transform their lives but they're just waiting for a charity to provide it, then how much agency could they have? That attitude is a problem, not just because it's incorrect and insulting — though it is — but also because it can fuel programs and policies that are much more harmful than just handing out some shoes or menstrual pads.

Instead of giving shoes, why not give poor people cash? If shoes are really what the recipients need, then they can go ahead and buy them. But if not, their options are wide open: They can put the money toward medicine or a crop loan or school fees. Or they can use it to invest in some kind of income-generating venture, such as livestock or a small business. If you give shoes to a kid, then at least you know the kid has shoes. Take, for instance, a recent study by Columbia political science professor Chris Blattman.

He and his team ran an experiment that gave poor women in northern Uganda cash to start small businesses. One group got cash plus expert advice on starting a business, but a comparison group got cash alone.