Today’s the day to go bare.

Barefoot, that is.

Today is National Barefoot Day, which kicks off National Barefoot Week, a series of events that will involve donating more than 325,000 pairs of shoes to people in New Orleans, Atlanta, Detroit, Miami and Taylor, Ariz., an Indian reservation. At the center of the effort is Soles4Souls, a Nashville-based footwear charity.

Soles4Souls is the brainchild of Wayne Elsey, a 43-year-old Nashville man who has worked in the shoe industry since he was a teenager. One night in late 2004, a news broadcast hit him hard. “I was sitting on the couch during the Asian tsunami, watching CNN, and I saw this shoe float up, and it bothered me,” Mr. Elsey said in a phone interview. He contacted executives in the footwear industry, and they banded together to donate a quarter of a million shoes to tsunami victims. Months later, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Mr. Elsey went to the phones again.

This time, more than a million pairs of shoes were donated to people in need. “The sad fact is that there are 300 million children in the world who have never owned a pair of shoes, while the same number of shoes were tossed into American landfills last year,” Mr. Elsey said.

After the positive reaction of the shoe industry, Mr. Elsey turned his efforts into a nonprofit organization, and Soles4Souls was born. It was important to him, he said, to be able to help during times other than headline disasters. The philosophy is simple: Change the world one pair at a time. The modus operandi: Stick to shoes and be a role model in the nonprofit world. “Walk outside without a pair of shoes and see how you feel,” Mr. Elsey said. “I challenge you that.” Celebrities including Scarlett Johansson and Lauren Conrad are helping promote National Barefoot Week, which Mr. Elsey said is designed to get people not just aware but involved. “I’m so tired of this (being called) an awareness event,” he said. “It’s a participation event.”

For more information on Soles4Souls and National Barefoot Day, visit www.soles4souls.com.