Why would she give her old heels to Housing Works instead of another charity?
Housing Works is a real brand in New York, but we need to do a better job of explaining our mission to potential donors. We are serving a really difficult client base, helping people with mental illnesses and drug-addiction problems in addition to living with HIV and AIDS. Twenty percent of people who work in our stores are former clients, so we help them get jobs as well. In this job it’s about relationships and bridges. We really need people to support our mission by donating products to our stores or events. Are you reaching beyond New York for donations? We’ve started a Web site to sell merchandise. In the first month, August, we did $10,000 and had 100 items available. In November we had 450 items and tripled our income. Google gives us some advertising to promote it, and we have hired three people in public relations and marketing to help with the effort. What else have you been doing to ramp up business? The first thing I did was redesign the layout of each store so they all loo
