Members of Fashion Club showing off the dresses they made for the charity Little Dresses 4 Africa. Photo Credit: CHEYENNE PINO
BY DAVID DEACON
The Cooper City Fashion Club has shown that they are about more than style this year by doing charitable events to help not just the community, but the globe.
A recent charitable event that Fashion Club has organized is Headbands for Hope. For this charity, the club made headbands for children with leukemia at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital. Fashion Club president, Lexy Lopez, came up with the idea of the headbands, and with the help of member Kelsea Maver, she distributed the headbands to the children. Since the leukemia treatment causes hair loss, the motive behind the charity was to give the children something stylish to cover their head so that they would feel less self-conscious. The felt material that club members used to insure maximum comfort took more time than expected to sew, but the endeavor was still a success with 72 headbands collected.
“We’re doing these charities because it’s fun, and it’s a way for us to give back,” Fashion Club Sponsor Linda Snider said. “There’s a big need when it comes to clothes, and there’s always something to do when it comes to fashion.”
Another charity event that Fashion Club has participated in is Jeans for Teens. With help from NHS, the Jeans For Teens charity has had a thriving second year bringing in over 305 jeans from CCHS. Unlike the Headbands for Hope, Jeans for Teens is a nationwide charity. The jeans are collected in an attempt to help clothe the unprivileged and the homeless.
“Even if we’re not creating anything with this charity, and just collecting jeans, the jeans are still part of fashion,” Snider said.
In February, the Fashion Club involved themselves in another charitable event by making pillow case dresses and sending them to Africa. One of Lopez’s duties as Fashion Club president is to choose charities for Fashion Club to be involved with and she came up with the idea of bringing fashion to Africa. Not only are the pillowcase dresses cheap and easily mass-produced, but they also are clean. Fashion Club members even learned how to sew so that they could work on their dresses.
“I was very happy with the amount of dresses that we’ve made, when we were making the dresses I was worried that we were not going to have a lot of dresses,” Snider said. “I thought we might only have 30 dresses, but we stepped it up and were able to make 75 dresses.”
The Fashion Club shipped out the dresses on April 22 to a company in Ohio who will then distribute the dresses to areas of need. The designated location isn’t specific, but it is believed that the dresses will be shipped to South Africa. Mrs. Snider was very pleased with the donations that the school provided. The Fashion Club only bought lace for the dresses and the school obtained donations for the rest of the materials.
By making the Fashion Club charitably involved, Lopez hopes that she is setting an example for officers in the future to continue.
“Honestly, the thing that I like the most about doing these charities is the feeling that I’m doing something to spread hope, by helping the community,” Lopez said.
