Monday, December 7, 2015

Dress for Success - Overview

Dress for Success was founded in 1995 by Nancy Lublin shortly after she graduated from Brown University. The primary objective of this organization is providing disadvantaged women with employment assistance services and workplace-appropriate clothing, and they've done this in nearly 150 cities in 20 countries. So far they've worked with over 850,000 women. I think that this is a fantastic organization because there is a distinct double standard in the way that men and women are expected to dress for the workplace. It's very easy to be a man and simply interchange pieces in the shirt + tie + dress pants equation, but for women, there is no such simple equation. Workplace-appropriate attire can range between all sorts of different styles at varying degrees of formality. Dress for Success does a great job of helping to level the playing field that begins as a very slanted one when it comes to entry-level positions in the business environment. The organization currently relies on donations for clothing, and receives its clients via referrals from other community outreach organizations.


In social media, Dress for Success goes out of its way to associate itself with other successful women, seemingly as a way to encourage donations, associating its services facilitating success with women who have had a great deal of it. This is admirable if it helps lead to more donations, but it really is a shame that none of their social media outlets focus on the people they help. Their Instagram account has some mentions of people that have benefited from the organization, but this seems fairly low considering the number of 850,000+ women that they say they've worked with on their website, and the amazing places that they work. Dress for Success is involved all over the world, including places like Nigeria, Burundi, Jamaica, and India.

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