Today was my fourth visit to
Dress for Success Lexington, and nothing has improved since my first visit. Paige,
Nikki, and I arrived around 2:55 pm, five minutes prior to our scheduled
meeting time. We rang the doorbell and waved through the glass windows at
Analisa, the volunteer coordinator. As we were waiting for her to pause what
she was doing to let us in, we noticed an unmistakable look of surprise come
upon her face. She awkwardly greeted us with “Oh, I wasn’t sure if you all were
going to come in today or not.” We have found this to be a typical response to
our arrival at the boutique seeing as though the scheduled dates and times of
our “volunteering” seems to escape Analisa’s mind.
As we entered, I immediately observed
that Analisa was wearing a navy skirt, a black suit jacket, and a pair of black
heels. This is definitely not something someone would do on purpose, but usually
this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Nonetheless, Dress for Success promotes appropriate
and presentable business attire, and mixing navy and black is definitely not
setting a good example for their clients. Also, Analisa and Sue, the other
Dress for Success employee, have made multiple negative remarks regarding what
their clients have worn when they would come for a mock interview. Sue told us
a story of a woman who came in with a yellow stain on her shirt. She explained
that the woman experienced difficulty in washing her clothing because it was a
far walk to the laundromat and it was very expensive. Sue went on to make a mockery
of the woman saying how stains on clothing is ridiculous and embarrassing. This
made me extremely upset. The ladies Analisa and Sue work with come from low income
and underprivileged areas; they are clients of Dress for Success because they
cannot afford appropriate business attire. These clients are in difficult
situations and they are trying their best. The employees who are supposed to be
“changing their lives” should not be putting them down, especially when they don’t
dress perfectly every day.
A few minutes of anger had
passed and I noticed that the “boutique” and “career center” were more cluttered
than normal. There were random hangers, shoes, bags of unsorted donations, and
various racks stuffed to the brim with clothing everywhere. The place had
looked as though a tornado had passed through. While I was looking around, Analisa
was trying to think of what should be done first. It became uncomfortably silent
not including the sporadic murmurs coming from Analisa. Finally, she decided
that she had three “important” jobs for us to complete. She had Paige go
through a box of random make-up donations and sort them by product type, Nikki was
told to separate usable hangers from those which needed to be donated, which is shown in the figure below, and my
task was to go through and hang up a pile of clothing that had been thrown on and
around a chair. In other words, we were told to pick up after them. I
understand that not all volunteer work directly corresponds with working with
others or doing something entertaining, but I don’t think what we have been
doing is worthy volunteer work.
