Two Chippewa Students have been awarded YMCA Peace Medals for a recent fundraising initiative. Tracy Wang and Abeni Flynn created the Sock-Tober campaign, in which they were selling socks at their school.

Wang says the proceeds went towards making prosthetics for people in third world countries. She says “there’s a huge number of amputees in developing countries who don’t have access to prosthetics. There’s only about four percent who do have access, and that’s one of the great limiting factors on development.”

Flynn says the initial idea of selling pairs of socks took their fellow students by surprise. “First they were kind of curious as to what we were doing. And this was part of a project at our school, so they were really supportive of that, because we were supportive of their projects, so they supported ours by buying socks.

In addition, for every pack of socks sold, another pair of socks would then be donated to a local shelter.