Image: Opening of the clothing showroom with the town’s mayor, who has since become a club member!

In the third of our series focussing on Soroptimist Projects of Excellence, Dorothy Bowker from SI Leigh & District (UK) writes about the club’s "Just The Job" project, which provides advice, support and interview outfits to help unemployed women find work. 

Leigh Soroptimist Club wanted to help unemployed women in our local area and decided to offer interview advice and
confidence building workshops and also provide a free interview outfit to improve the candidates chances of interview
success. The Leigh Club is delivering ‘Just The Job’ as our contribution to
SI’s International 3E programme, to Educate, Empower and Enable women and girls.
The mission of the project is to help women realise their full potential with
confidence, knowing that they look their best to make a good first impression

Club members were able to facilitate workshops themselves with
members from business and employment backgrounds, the workshops covering
grooming, make-up, confidence building, job applications, presenting the right
image and interview techniques.  When the
candidate has an interview to attend she is eligible to choose an outfit with
the help of club members who are a qualified personal stylist and a beauty therapist.

 

Image: Training session to help women improve their job application skills

During the first twelve months 6 workshops were held with 24
ladies attending, all with serious confidence issues. Attendees have come from
diverse backgrounds and circumstances including lone parents, from the women’s
refuge, ethnic minorities and disabled peope. We have had very positive feedback from
all the attendees. For the club members running the workshops the buzz at the
workshops made it all worthwhile. A number of these ladies have been provided
with an interview outfit and some of them have been successful in gaining
employment

With the help of a small grant we were able to open our
clothing showroom. We organised a launch event attended by local agencies,
businesses, local careers service, local councillors, the Mayor (who has since
become a club member) and the local MP. The launch was also supported by our
South Lancashire Region Vice President and Leigh club members. It generated a
great deal of publicity for us and some donations of clothing from the people
who read the newspaper articles. We also appealed to all the South Lancashire
Soroptimist clubs to donate clothes and are very grateful for their support. We
have also had support from a local supermarket and a bank with donated clothes,
and we have had a bag pack at the supermarket to raise funds to enable us to fund
expenses for the project.

Our plans for the next twelve months are to continue to
offer workshops to individual referring organisations, as we found that this is
the best way to get the candidates to attend. We had to move out of our original
clothing showroom premises and we are lucky to have been given the use of a
building by a members husband, as our new clothing showroom. We are hoping to
expand our one-to-one interview dressing appointments in our new premises. Club
members have raided their wardrobes and donated their pre-loved items. They
have joined in with cleaning the premises, ironing steaming and sorting
clothes.

We have had some brochures printed to promote the project to
local businesses, referring agencies and the local job centres. We are hoping
to be able to engage businesses to support us with raising funds, sponsorship, donate
clothes and volunteer staff as part of their corporate social responsibility. We
are also hoping to recruit volunteers to help as personal dressers, stockroom
volunteers and interview volunteers. This is also seen as an opportunity to
promote Soroptimism and potentially attract new members. We have been
approached to deliver workshops to some local schools.

We are planning to hold club fund raising events to pay for
utilities etc. with a Gladrags and Handbags Sale. Any donated clothes which are
not suitable for interview outfits, such as eveningwear we will sell.  Other events to include coffee mornings,
raffles and prize draw.

Our vision is to make a difference to women’s lives,
inspiring them to achieve success and empower them with the knowledge to look
good and feel great. We believe it is tragic that any woman should lose out on
a job through the lack of appropriate clothing, or because she has not received
the right advice about how to make a good first impression.  

Read about Just the Job on the Global Impact Report website.

The SI Global Impact Report 2012-13 highlights 39 Soroptimist Projects of Excellence from around the world to educate and inspire.