When he was a child, Eliot Middleton played on a youth soccer team that went undefeated for seven years. The team wasn’t a powerhouse with plenty of depth and all the training resources they needed.
“We were always the underdog,” he said. “We always had just enough players. We never had subs.”
But Middleton credits those youth coaches with instilling in him the importance of perseverance and teamwork.
“With small numbers, you can still do great things,” Middleton said.
As an adult, Middleton is still doing things he considers small, but that have a huge impact on his community.
He organized a food drive in 2019, where 250 food boxes were given away. There were many people still in line when the food ran out, and Middleton noticed that those at the end of the line were on foot.
“The people who walked lost out because they had no car,” he said.
Middleton had experience as a mechanic, and he was also running a mobile food truck at the time. So, he posted on Facebook and offered to swap barbecue for a donated car that he could fix. He received a car in January 2020, and began working on it in his backyard.
“When I would have a good week at the restaurant, I would set aside a couple hundred dollars for tires,” he said.
By the end of the summer in 2020, the car was repaired, and he was able to donate it to a neighbor in need. Word of this good deed quickly spread, and Middleton was honored with
WCIV | ABC News 4’s Jefferson Award in October 2020. It’s an award given by the station to someone who is “multiplying good” in their community. More local and national media attention followed, and so did the donations (both cars and cash) and requests for help.
Middleton and his sister established the
Middleton’s Village To Village Foundation to help manage the donations and the requests. At one point, they had 800 cars offered to them, and 500 requests for help. With only a 2002 Toyota Sequoia with a homemade trailer and one other mechanic helping him, Middleton was not able to collect all the cars offered – some of which were in distant states. But to date, the foundation has repaired and given away 64 cars, including a 12 Days of Christmas giving bonanza.
He is now looking for a larger space where he can store and work on multiple cars so that he can help more people, more quickly.
For Middleton, whose family has been in the Awendaw and McClellanville area for generations, it’s important to keep his focus on his rural hometown and build a family legacy.
“When people hear about rural areas, I think they think we’re uneducated, or under-educated, and poor,” he said. “That’s just not the case. You have people with good educations who have helped their family obtain land and build wealth.
“I think that rural areas show a sense of community, a sense of family, and always wanting to help someone in need.”
