Women get boost with jobs

It's a little bit funny, but if Virginia Jacobs gets the job she really wants, she'll be wearing bluejeans and steel-toed boots.

Who, after all, ever saw a forklift operator wearing heels and a business suit?

Heels and a business suit are precisely what Jacobs wore to her job interview, though, and if she lands her ideal job, she said, she'll owe it -- along with the heels and business suit -- to Dress for Success.

"It's great for single moms who want to better themselves because it gives us something to make us look good," Jacobs said of the nonprofit organization that helps disadvantaged women enter or climb within the work force by supplying new clothes, accessories and attitudes.

Jacobs, 45, currently works at KFC, but only "until I find something better," she said.

Dress for Success was founded in 1996 in New York and now has 90 affiliates in seven countries.

The clothes the women receive are not worn-out, moth-eaten rejects from the backs of people's closets. The headquarters in the basement of Durham's Northgate Mall looks like a chic boutique.

Emily Page, a volunteer who helps women pick out clothes, said, "When they walk in here, we want them to think they're in Nordstrom's or someplace."

That attitude, volunteer Sheila Creth said, starts with Pat Nathan, founder of the Triangle chapter of Dress For Success.

"Someone brought in a suit that had the style of ... the 1940s. Pat said 'That's all right. That's coming back' " in style, Creth said. "Then she saw that it had a little stain on it, and she said, 'Out! It's got to go. None of us would show up in that, and we're not going to give it to these ladies.' "

What they do give the ladies is confidence -- "You can see their posture start changing even before they put on the clothes," Page said -- and an outfit and accessories for their scheduled job interview. If they get the job -- two of every three they've helped got the job they sought -- they give them a week's worth of outfits.

Just as the job Virginia Jacobs yearns for won't require heels and a suit, the job Mary Frink got with Dress for Success' help won't be too demanding about what she wears to work. Frink, 38, said she wore a navy blue pantsuit with matching heels to land a job as a customer service representative at a call center. All her interactions with the public will be via telephone.

"I won't actually be seeing people, but it's that first interview, when someone first sees you -- that's what's important," she said. "... I had nothing I would have worn to an interview. Being a single mom, my kids come first. I hadn't been doing a lot of shopping for myself."

Neither had Litoya Hunt, a 24-year-old single mother who starts a new job with the Durham Public Schools system next week. For her last job, as a security officer, Hunt wore a uniform. For Monday's open house, she wore an executive-style red suit and black suede pumps.

"I had clothes, but I didn't have interview clothes," she said.

It was hard to tell who was prouder -- the beaming, newly employed women in their new clothes, or the women who'd helped them enter the work force.

To Page, it was no contest.

"We are the luckiest women in the world to do what we do," she said.

If you want to learn how to become one of those lucky women helping women who are down on their luck, visit www.dressforsuccess.org.