On Friday night, lots of individuals gathered at North Eugene High to browse designer clothes and discover the best prom outfit to bring home for nothing.
With the assistance of student volunteers from Key Club, an extra team centered on group support, Clair Wiles, a professor at North Eugene High, organized the event.
“Anyone who’s been to graduation knows that it can be an unique occasion”, Wiles said. “You’re paying to go to prom, you’re probably going to go out to dinner, next there’s flowers, all these expectations about what should be part of graduation. That is very restricted to individuals, but we want to make sure that every student feels like graduation is fun and worthwhile.”
How did the convention begin?
This was NEHS’s next annual prom dress freebie. One of the students in Wiles ‘ Key Club wanted to make graduation more visible, and it all started in 2022.
What do you do with all your graduation clothes at the end of the season, she said, “Her original plan was to view companies at the store. But there was a lot of business dark strip that was just really insurmountable”, Wiles said. “She didn’t want to give up.”
Then they discovered Abby’s Closet, a Portland-based nonprofit that offers a large-scale elegant dress giveaway to boost confidence in high school. Sharing the Love initiative at Abby’s Closet is a partnership between schools in Oregon and Washington that donate prom dresses to higher schools who then hand out clothes to their kids. Since 2019, Abby’s Closet has donated more than 7, 700 garments to high institutions.
North Eugene applied for the Abby’s Closet programme in 2022 for the first time.
“Our second time, we were still kind of struggling with what it meant”, Wiles said. “We weren’t really thinking about what the experience would be like for students”.
Local tailors and tailors have been hired by the organization since then.
What clothes were accessible?
Wiles said there are clothes of all styles, designs, colors and sizes. There were much dresses, brief dresses, in- between gowns. Some appeared to be from a fairy story, while others were sophisticated and contemporary.
Individuals’ volunteer laborers have spent months sorting the clothes so they could point students in the right direction.
“We have a lot of undergraduate participants, and a lot of them did it last year”, Wiles said. They believe that we are helping people and making recommendations because we have seen all the dresses and are familiar with what might be appropriate.
Wiles said there were no copies, also in different sizes. This method, students can feel exclusive at their graduation.
“When they ship out dresses, they make sure that they don’t ship more than one of each one”, Wiles said. There will be some visitors who come in and locate themselves looking for something because the selection is so extensive. Or they’ll find the perfect one, but it’s not quite in their in their dimensions. That’s why we try to do the function first”.
Now, the giveaway is primarily for clothes, but Wiles said she’s begun looking into expanding to outfits. She just reached out to a few neighborhood retailers.
“If everyone knows me, I’m not the most girly girl on on campus, and I was not as geeked about it when it first started”, Wiles said. “Then I walked in and started helping individuals and I was like,’ Oh, well, that clothing is you. It’s the ideal gown for you.’ Their eyes lighting up, and they’re but excited… It only helps them feel more optimistic about themselves, about their body, no matter who it is. That was just truly, truly awesome”.