Wilsonville Spokesman Online

Xerox suit drive results were 'overwhelming'

Wilsonville campus brings nearly half of all donations

• By: Michelle Te  
• Published: 3/18/2010 9:51:56 AM

Send One Suit
A Dress for Success clothing drive at Xerox's Wilsonville campus netted more than 30 suits, as well as many other clothing accessories.

Call this dress a true success.

A recent Xerox clothing drive to help women re-entering the workforce fully exceeded expectations, said Renee Bates, president of the Pacific NW chapter of Xerox Women’s Alliance.

“It was overwhelmingly great,” she said.

With just a modest goal of collecting 10 suits for a nationwide Send One Suit clothing drive, members of this women’s group, called TWA,  at the Wilsonville Xerox campus were astounded by week’s end.

They collected 35 suits, 18 jackets or blazers, 11 sweaters, 18 pairs of pants, 29 blouses and 17 dresses, as well as shoes, skirts and scarves.

“It was nerve-wracking,” Bates said of the week’s early results: zero donations. But overnight, the clothing rack hanging in the company’s café overflowed with donations.

“My mid-day Thursday, I had to carry them out to my car just to make room on the rack for more donations,” she said.

She didn’t anticipate much more after that, but was shocked when she came in Friday morning and found the rack full again.

“People even stopped by my cubicle and started bringing things to me,” Bates said. “It was amazing, that’s all I can say.”

One male employee brought in several of his wife’s suits and other business attire now that she no longer needs them.

The clothing was donated to Dressbarn, a women’s clothing store that is gathering items across the country for the Dress for Success program.

Bates, along with two family members, sorted the clothes and packed them into Xerox printer boxes, before taking them to the Dressbarn at Cascade Station in north Portland.

Some of the donated items, which were not “interview appropriate,” were boxed and donated to the Mount Angel homeless shelter. One donated men’s suit was given to Step Into Success, a program like Dress for Success which focused on men.

Even more amazing, said Bates, is that Xerox’s donations equaled nearly half of all donations for TWA.
“When I saw the list, there were 354 donations, and our campus made up 162 of those,” she said.

The mission of Dress for Success, according to its Web site, is “to promote the economic independence of disadvantaged women by providing professional attire, a network of support and the career development tools to help women thrive in work and in life.”

Since 1997, Dress for Success has served more than 500,000 women around the world. A non-profit organization, it offers services designed to help clients find jobs and remain employed. Each Dress for Success client receives one suit when she has a job interview and can return for a second suit or separates when she finds work.

This mission works well for Bates, whose TWA chapter took on the project to “help give women a leg up.”
“One of the major tenets of TWA is that we want to make Xerox a better place for everybody,” she said. “But specifically, we’re focused on women’s issues. So the idea of helping women who have been out of the workforce for a long time, or maybe never entered the workforce, really meshes in with our idea of improving the workplace for women.”

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