DATELINE, SATURDAY, APRIL 6TH: The KABC truck just arrived at El Sereno Middle School (where our high school seniors have their base camp) to cover our Prom Dress Day! Please set your DVRs for Channel 7 KABC news at 5pm or 6pm today! The KABC news actually begins at 4pm, but the camera man said it would most likely be on at 5 or 6pm.

For the article published by ABC, please follow the link here.

Here’s how Prom Dress Day came about:

At our staff meeting last month, the Program Coordinators from our East LA site said that our seniors were really moved by the celebration at our Dreamer Brunch, and it was sinking in that they were almost done with high school – that they wanted to celebrate, but prom was so expensive.  Our Executive Director Katy Garretson mentioned that she had dresses from awards shows that she’d never wear again, and knew friends who did also – thus, we decided to do a donation drive for prom dress attire.

We put Prom Dress Day out there on Facebook and Twitter, sent some emails and announced it on our website. In just the last three weeks we have received well over 300 (if not 400) dresses, shoes, accessories, gift cards – PLUS a bridal shop called out of the blue and donated over $25,000 worth of shoes/shirts/tuxes for our boys!

We have Emmy dresses, WGA/SAG/DGA Awards dresses, bridesmaid dresses, and actual prom dresses. Some dresses still have the tags on them – they were either never worn, or donors went out and bought new dresses for our girls! Donors include students at Beverly Hills High, TV writers, directors and producers, studio execs (we got over 25 dresses from NBCUni and 35 from ABC) and the wonderful supporters of IHADLA – AND we received boxes of dresses from as far away as Oregon and Kentucky – people who just found us online! Anyway, it’s pretty amazing – all from a little discussion at our staff meeting on March 5th. We will be posting a “gallery” of photos on our website and sharing them on Facebook soon.

We are so happy that Prom Dress Day turned out so well – we thank profusely all of the wonderful souls who contributed, and we thank El Sereno Middle School for allowing us to open our classrooms on a Saturday.  And, we thank ABC7 news for helping us publicize this beautiful story of community and giving.

By the way, we’ve already been in touch with the non-profit A Place Called Home, which is having a Prom Dress drive for their girls next weekend. We will be donating what our girls don’t take to them next Thursday evening.