During the COVID Shutdown in April 2020, I started reselling and trading profitable streetwear, just as a hobby to utilize the free time I had. Six months, and many late nights, risks, and wild ventures later, I established myself as a well-known member of the reselling community, with many major corporate connections, such as software owners, group owners, etc. During this time, I had been learning virtually, and became aware of the effects of the pandemic on my peers, teachers, and community. In my area alone, many families had suffered from unemployment, financial crisis, and more. Across America, people were struggling. This realization on a late night after Thanksgiving made me realize that I had the ability to make a difference.

At around 1 in the morning that very night, I connected with Ishaan, who at the time was just a friend in a similar industry and offered an opportunity to impact others around the holiday season. He and I came up with an idea to host charity auctions within the sneaker community. Over the course of two weeks we reached out to more than 150 companies for auction donations.

The program took a lot of planning. Putting together a team of volunteers, we spent hours recruiting and reaching out to our professional connections for donations, and then organizing the highest value items into bidding categories, staging them similarly to a concert -- each day had a "headliner," top items to get the people in, and they'd end up sticking around for most of the items as well.

Marketing the event also took effort. We partnered with most of the companies that were supporting us to post about the event on their social media platforms, which had gained hundreds of thousands of followers through engagement and PR/media teams. Using this attention, we funneled interested bidders into a massive discord server, reaching up to 10,000 people during some events.

The auctions themselves were tricky at first. We ran into issues with managing and tracking our funds. Oftentimes, we would be on calls well into the night with frustrating questions to answer. Some days we would find an answer right away, while others we would spend hours figuring out a simple workaround. We learned a lot about how to operate and run a large scale event in a short amount of time. While no major mistakes went wrong, we were often racing around the clock to correct for minor mishaps that threw us off schedule.

Aside from just auctions, we also had raffles, for prizes that were not of enough value to be placed in an individual bidding event. This proved to be an excellent idea, as many companies were interested in providing their support, but were unable to give as much as they'd like to. As such, we offered raffle prizes daily, with a small 10$ buy in, drawing at the end of the day for about ~50 prizes per day.

Ultimately, we raised more than $70k for homelessness charities across the nation and in our own communities. The money was shared between multiple organizations we partnered with, and we decided that, after such a major success, we wanted to use our platform to grow and foster progress for all. With that, our first organization, the SNKR Foundation was formed, and the journey began.