I've always seen myself as the kind of person to carry out plenty of charitable activity later in my career, and my experience at Dress for Success has certainly helped me narrow down how I want to do this; I do not want to spend my time at a place like this, but rather in creating my own opportunities. Dress for Success does a fair amount of good for the community, but is extremely inefficient in doing so. The return (of good) on investment (of time and effort) is extremely low, because of the terrible bureaucracy of this institution. I recently spent four hours as a volunteer at Dress for Success, and ended up using that time to just update the website and occasionally accept some donations. This was the case because, as I found out, on most days they don't see any clients. That applies to a lot of days at Dress for Success actually, where the focus seems more primarily to be on making public appearances and getting ready for their sale of many of the clothes that are donated.
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| Fayette Country, outlined, is a fairly poor part of Kentucky |
I think that the drive and passion of the people involved in this organization are in the right place, but they've created a system that prevents them from doing the good that they set out to. Dress for Success only helps people that are referred to them through other community outreach organizations in the region, which has appeared to me to be a very inefficient way of finding those in need. The Lexington location of Dress for Success is in a very poor part of the city. Coming and going from service, I see lots of people that are clearly part of the disadvantaged populus that the organization has set out to help in the first place. I'm sure they have reasons for doing things the way they do, but it's hard to bring justification to seeing all sorts of good resources just going unused for so much of the time.
