Wolverine donated 2,000 boots to students at trade schools all over the U.S. as part of the third edition of its Project Bootstrap, Wolverine’s way of giving back to hard-working trade workers across the country.
This year, Wolverine teamed up with the television show This Old House to recognize the students from the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, South Carolina.
“We are hard-working people, and take pride in work that most people don’t take much time to notice,” said Jacob Jackson, a high school junior with a focus on timber framing at the American College of the Building Arts. “It’s not every day someone walks up to you and tells you they appreciate you.”
Wolverine also donated $50,000 to This Old House’s Generation Next initiative, a charitable movement toward empowering people to join the skilled trades. Meanwhile, all contributions to the Generation Next initiative support mikeroweWORKS Foundation’s 2017 Work Ethic Scholarship Program.
“The skills gap is a real problem, and we need brands like Wolverine to make significant efforts to help fix it,” said Mike Rowe, CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation and executive producer and host of Facebook’s Returning the Favor. “If we don’t invest in our future, the skills gap will continue to widen and we won’t have enough trained workers to meet the demands.”