By: Cheney Hurley – Although Elizabeth Diffey is a new Civics and World History teacher at Southeast this year, she has already contributed greatly to the school by introducing the Sock Drive to Southeast.

“Essentially [the Sock Drive] is collecting new, used, mismatched, or holely pairs of socks to donate to the homeless or near homeless population of Lincoln,” said Diffey.

Diffey was inspired to get involved with the sock drive because of her student teaching experience at North Star High School. Her supervising teacher had been involved in it for a couple of years and Diffey wanted to carry it on at Southeast when she realized she would be teaching Civics here.

“The Sock Drive is something that is city-wide that goes on between the People’s City Mission of Lincoln and the Lincoln Realtors’ Association. They’re the ones that sponsor it, make all of the signs, and do everything for it and they bring it to the businesses,” said Diffey.

Diffey had her hopes set high for her students and the rest at Southeast with a goal of 1000 pairs of socks. They collected 773 pairs of wearable socks and of those, 124 pairs were brand new. In addition to the wearable socks, 268 individual socks were collected. Even though they didn’t quite make it to their goal, she was still proud of what they did contribute.

“The goal for the whole drive of Lincoln was about 10,000 pairs of socks and I wanted our contribution to be around 1,000,” said Diffey. “We didn’t quite get there, but we did get more than I thought by the looks of the barrels. It is still a really good contribution for the first year.”

You always hear of people donating clothes like shirts and pants, but socks are always less commonly mentioned. Many people don’t think of socks as being something they could donate and that would actually be helpful to other people.

“Socks are one of the most requested and most needed items at the Mission that people don’t really think to give,” said Diffey. “People don’t usually think of socks, especially if they’re really worn or have holes in them. They don’t think about giving those because they don’t think that anybody wants them. [The People’s City Mission] usually runs out of socks pretty fast.”

Those socks that are not deemed wearable can still be very beneficial to the People’s City Mission. They can basically recycle them and in return they get money back to spend on other things the Mission might need.

“The ones that are mismatched, have giant holes in them, or are just really worn are recycled and sent to the recycling facility. They give the Mission, essentially, the money for [those socks],” said Diffey.

Diffey ties the sock drive in with her civics classes. The whole concept of civic virtue is doing something good and being involved in your community, so this project was easy to tie in with the curriculum of the civics classes.

“I think the biggest thing that they’ve learned is that it’s relatively easy to make a difference in your community,” said Diffey.

Even those who didn’t contribute financially were able to help in other ways.

“[Students] came and helped count after school, or they helped put up the signs, or they told their parents about it, or they put it on social media. They helped really in any way they could,” said Diffey.

Diffey hopes her students will take something away from this experience and will find the deeper meaning in collecting the socks.

“[I want them to try] to tie [the Sock Drive] into a real world sense and [help] them to understand that they can practice civic virtue by helping out and donating other things beyond socks,” said Diffey, who feels that this process has allowed students to lead by example and have a positive impact on the community.

As for the future, Diffey says she will absolutely be continuing the Sock Drive and hopes to get the word out to more people so Southeast can donate even more socks next year. Be sure to look out for the Sock Drive next year during the month of February. Even if you can’t donate, there are always ways to help and to make a difference.