When Jeannette Kendall graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, she began working as a clothing designer for one of America's top brand name marketers. Yet, Jeannette had begun thinking about the many disadvantaged women who lack basic fashion instincts and social skills needed to gain entry into the business world. Jeannette believed she could bring her special skills to help these women get a 'leg up' in the world. To accomplish this, Jeannette Kendall founded a unique charity, Success In Style (SIS), to help disadvantaged, lower-income women looking for work.
SIS operates its own showroom where clients can come for consultations. SIS provides mostly donated apparel, but the organization frequently purchases some of the pieces, particularly for plus-size clients. Jeannette spends countless hours ensuring that each client personally feels and looks like a million, in spite of the fact that she may be poor or similarly disadvantaged. Every year, SIS provides up to 200 clients their own individualized, one-hour professional fashion consultation with a trained volunteer. The clients then receive four outfits, as well as shoes, a handbag, hosiery, undergarments, jewelry, coat, makeup, a haircut, and basic job-interview skills coaching -- all at no charge.
SIS follows up on its clients through its connections with 100 referral organizations, including social service organizations, churches, law offices, crisis hotlines, and job placement companies. Additionally, SIS provides the students of the nursing program for low-income women at Howard Community College with two sets of scrubs, lab coat, and nursing shoes (twenty to forty a year). Some of SIS’s clients come from the ranks of the recently incarcerated. Others include refugees, victims of domestic violence, homeless, displaced, or the unemployed. SIS has twenty volunteers and a fifteen-member Board of Directors to keep it running and expanding its reach annually.
Jeannette runs Success in Style, edits its newsletter, writes a bi-monthly fashion column in a Maryland-based magazine, and then finds the time to raise and nurture a family of nine children, ranging from two to twenty years old, with her husband, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney (their second oldest has just entered The Cooper Union School of Engineering, New York, on a full scholarship). For all of the work and extra hours Jeanette puts in for Success in Style, she is rewarded in the success of her clients -- they leave motivated to succeed, and their success rate is fabulous. At the organization’s annual banquet, the women who have come through Success in Style tell moving stories of their personal transformation, bringing tears to the eyes of many of the event’s guests. And this is Jeanette’s greatest contribution: she helps her clients begin thinking of and presenting themselves in the most beautiful of styles: dignity and self worth.
To learn more about Jeanette and her cause, and how you can make a difference, please visit:
www.successinstyle.org.
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