I think it’s important to say that aid specialists are very reluctant toward such initiatives.

TOMS doesn’t seem to be the worst offender but I still think it’s important to say that this is not really a great model for what aid should be about.
Helps that works is more complex than just bringing shoes (or any other gift in kind). Very frequently it’s not shoes that are actually the most needed, nothing garanties that TOMS’s shoes model are the most appropriate (durability, relative price, maybe what’s needed is real walking shoes, is the transportation price for those shoes competitive ?, etc.).

Sometimes even, real bad shit happens with badly thought initiatives. Like killing the job of the locals that were working for shoemakers by sending massive amount of free shoes. One of the worst case EVAR of such a failure is ONGs putting local clinics and doctors out of a job in Haiti, pushing them to exile themselves because during monthes they did not get a single client, everybody was getting free health care from the ONGs, so why pay a doctor ?

I see that TOMS apparently tries to avoid such problems, « making sure there aren’t adverse socioeconomic effects » on their site seemes to refer to that, but still, avoiding aid that is *defined* by the fact you’ll bring such or such device is the best long term solution.

I’d prefer to see TOMS give the money that corresponds to the price of making an additional shoe directly to the local organisations (and letting them order the number of shoes they need at manufacture cost), rather than binding themselves to bringing one specific solution.