OHS Dress Swap

            I was about 3 weeks in second semester and my project had lots of good ideas, but I had yet to start anything.  My initial plan was to collect clothes for our DLR Clothing Closet for the students in our Jr. High that needed or wanted clothes and then to have a fashion show in May.  So I decided to go to our schools service day meeting to see if I could get a service project in. The project would have been collecting clothes and sorting them during service day.  When I went to the meeting I was talking to one of the seniors and she had a great idea about swapping dresses with her friends.  When I heard this idea I was ecstatic! I knew I had a huge opportunity to in doing this.  I decided to expand it to an event, OHS Dress Swap.  After 2 weeks of non-stop planning and talking to my teachers/mentors for help and advice, I knew that I was as prepared as I would have ever been. 

            The first step was to talk to Mr. Lawton, our activities director, about using our gym for this event.  Then I had to come up with how I was going to operate this.  I had many ideas and some were great, and some were terrible.  But talking to my mentor Ms. Rad, I was able to have three different sections in my dress swap.  First was a donation table were participates could just donate their old dresses.  Then the donations would go to a certain rack for Take a Dress, Leave a Dress.  Participates could swap their dresses for one that was on the dress rack.  And finally the Loan table, where participates can loan out their dresses for others to borrow, and then afterwards the borrower would return the dress.  An additional section that I added to my swap to get people excited to go was to have a gift card raffle.  I had two prizes, a Tiger Lily gift card (dress store) and a Joannes Gift card (Salon and Spa).  This was just to get everyone excited about going to the swap because they would have a very good chance in winning. 

                 To me this was a great experience and I have learned a lot in how to plan an event and talk to sponsors.  This was a great start to my project and I can’t wait to continue my project and a see what else I can do to improve my community.