Helping Others "Dress for Success"

By RAHEL MUSLEAH

Nancy Lublin is not the stereotypical Jewish woman who lives to shop. But, she laughs, she'd love to meet as many women like that as possible, because they are typically cleaning out their closets.

The non-profit organization Lublin founded four years ago, Dress for Success, depends on individuals and corporations who donate new or used suits which are then distributed to low-income women for job interviews. "Women are in a Catch-22," Lublin explains. "Without jobs they can't afford career-oriented clothes. Without the right clothes, they can't get jobs." The program has suited over 25,000 women, and has branches in 58 cities and four countries (U.S., Canada, England and New Zealand).

"To me this is not about clothing," says the 29-year-old Lublin, who refused to wear dresses as a child, preferring soccer and football. "It's about confidence building. It just so happens we do it through suits."

Raised in a Reform home in West Hartford, CT, where Judaism and tzedakah were synonymous, Lublin remembers spending Thanksgivings giving out meals at shelters. She majored in politics at Brown University and political theory at Oxford, and just received her law degree from New York University (she took a two-year hiatus). As her political savvy grew, so did her pride in Judaism: "I realized the long history of Jewish activists committed to civil rights and women's rights. Dress for Success is the most Jewish thing I do."

An "epiphany in the elevator" inspired the idea for the organization, she says. A full-time law student at the time, she came home to discover a $5000 check in her mailbox from the estate of her great-grandfather, Poppy Max, an immigrant from Poland who peddled everything from bath mats to cubic zirconia in America. "By the time I got to the sixth floor," Lublin says, "I knew what I wanted to do with it." The next day, one of her professors put her in touch with three nuns from Spanish Harlem who each ran non-profit organizations. They became her first board of directors.

Pictures of Poppy Max and the nuns hang in Lublin's Manhattan office, along with an article about Nelson Mandela, one of her heroes; part of his inaugural speech; pictures of her Yorkie, Lulu, and a letter from her father, a retired lawyer, telling her to keep up the good work. She buys her own clothes from philanthropic companies: an orange leather jacket from Julie Chaikin, for example (she contributes to Dress for Success), which she matches with black pants, $6 shoes from Chinatown and a black t-shirt from a flea market. She does admit to a handbag fetish, and likes to play poker in her spare time.

Lublin is "committed to contributing to the world," but does not know what direction her future will take. "There are two kinds of leaders," she explains. "Czars who leave power only when their heads are cut off, and leaders who create things that are sustainable and move on. I have no intention of losing my head. I'll be here as long as I'm useful to the mission and inspired by it."