Dress for Success draws crowd to downtown Butler venue
The line for Dress for Success stretched from the Penn Theater down the block on Tuesday morning, Aug. 20, for the agency’s first distribution event to take place at the recently opened event venue.
More than 70 people registered to get clothing at the distribution, marketed as a back to school prep event. Leora Flax, client experience lead for Dress for Success, said the agency’s distribution events used to take place at Butler SUCCEED, Slippery Rock University’s community outreach arm for Butler on Main Street. Since Butler SUCCEED moved out in June, the agency has had to find other locales for its events, like Robin’s Home, which hosted a distribution event in July.
While the agency currently only hosts one distribution per month — on the third Tuesday of each month — Dress for Success is looking for a permanent home for its stock of clothing, which Flax said would open up opportunities.
“What we need is just a closet; a place to keep our racks,” Flax said. “We could do more if we had it all in one storage space.”
Although the Dress for Success distributions are no longer hosted at Butler SUCCEED, Flax credited its administrator, Josette Skobieranda Dau, with finding other places to get professional clothing to people who need it.
Skobieranda Dau, now with the community engagement office at SRU, said it was important to her to help Dress for Success continue on in Butler, where the need for professional clothing was evident by the amount of registrations Tuesday.
“We started hosting Dress for Success in September of 2022, and basically there is such a need for women in Butler County,” Skobieranda Dau said. “Some people have been saying, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’”
Mary Danielson, manager of the Penn Theater, said the venue is open to being a home for community events, in addition to the paid events it plays host to, usually in the afternoons and evenings. Danielson said the theater is open to being a “pillar supporting the community.”
Skobieranda Dau said Dress for Success is not only a place for clients, who are mainly women, to get clothing, but for those clients to connect with one another and people who they can turn to in the future.
“It’s about resources, it’s about women connecting and also just filling in some gaps,” Skobieranda Dau said. “Not just for the clothing, not just for the toiletries and jewelry, but just as a means of connecting with one another, getting resources.”
