You’re on your way home for Thanksgiving, excited to fill your stomach with lots of turkey and mashed potatoes to last you till next year. When you get home, you drop a huge pile of laundry right at your mom’s footsteps. She hasn’t done your laundry in months, so you tell yourself that she won’t mind doing all of the laundry you purposely forgot to wash since Columbus Day. But now you have no clean clothes to wear until your laundry is done, so you go into your room, which is surprisingly clean compared to your dorm room at school. You turn to your closet and see lots of empty hangers. But when you look closer, you see all those tops and dresses you consciously decided while you were packing for school back in early September that you know you will never wear again. So why exactly did you keep them…?
I’m just as guilty as anyone. The clothes that I don’t bring to college are usually the things that I never wear, but I claim they will fit or I’ll grow to like them again. Wrong. It’s a shame that these clothes sit in my closet all year with no one to wear them. Guess what girls? We have a solution!
All of us went to middle school and high school dances when we were younger. Don’t deny it! You wanted that boy you’d had a crush on for months to ask you to dance. And even though you went to every school dance, he never asked you. But don’t fret ladies, because those days are in our past. The dresses that we wore, however, are still in our closet. And now that we’re grown up Boston College students and wearing tighter and shorter dresses when we go out, we can get rid of those old ones.
Donate My Dress is an organization that collects gently worn dresses, cleans them, and gives them to girls who need them for their special occasions. Belle of the Ball, sponsored by Anton’s Cleaners in Eastern Massachusetts, donates these formal and semi-formal dresses to high school junior and senior girls in need of prom dresses, who would not have the opportunity to attend their prom without a little help. A group of BC students is using this organization for a persuasion project– they call themselves the BC fairy Godmothers and their goal is to “make prom dreams come true” (like them on Facebook!). They need your help in order to give the Cinderellas their night of glamour and beauty.
As a fellow female college student, I know that each and every one of you has dresses in the back of your closet that you wore that one time to that one thing. It may be hard, at first, to part with dresses that made up your teen and young adult years because they brought you good (and probably some dramatic) memories. But there are girls who need your dresses more than the back corner of your closet does. You can give a high school girl a prom night to remember by taking two minutes, if that, to look through your closet and find an old dress. Ladies– you have to admit that this is effortless, but it can bring so much joy to another person. How could you pass up an opportunity like that?
Here is all the information you need to know in order to help out with this great cause:
According to Belle Of The Ball, dresses must be gently worn, 3-4 years old, and have no broken zippers, rips, tears, holes, or stains.
Dress donations can be made to BC girls on campus:
Liz Albanese: Edmond’s 928
Erica Moise: The Gate 205
Grace Heisenbottle: 239 Foster St.
So no matter where you live on campus, there is a drop-off location near you! But, if you are feeling really, really lazy, especially because the weather is getting colder, you have no excuse! The BC fairy Godmother team will come to your location on or off-campus to pick up your donation. Just email the team at BCdonatemydress@gmail.com.
So ladies… now’s your chance to clean out your closet and donate to a great cause. Think about it this way– once you get rid of some of your old dresses, that just means you can buy newer better ones. At least, that’s how I look at it. Out with the old, in with the new. So be a fairy Godmother to someone else and maybe one of your wishes will come true, too!
Photo Sources:
http://www.sciwoburn.org/content/belle-ball-2011
http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Wand
http://blog.stylevise.com/category/beauty-news/
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