Pam Philipp and her daughter Emily had a good idea, and together they turned it into a formitable organization that offers girls in difficult situations a ray of light – Operation Glass Slipper. Pam says it started while she was watching coverage of Hurrican Katrina. She hearda bout a teenage girl who was collecting prom dresses and sending them to girls in New Orleans who had lost everything.
“I ran into Emily’s room — who at that time was still 16 — and I said, ‘we could do this,’ ” Pam says in an interview this Mother’s Day with ParentDish. “She said, ‘Yeah, we could do this. We could ship them down,’ and I said, no, we could do this locally. There’s got to be a need, and that really started it.”
They started out by recruiting local second hand and concignments shops to offer donations. Before they knew it the dresses, purses, jewelry and shoes were pouring in. That’s when they knew it was going to be something more than just a mother daughter effort to help some local girls have a great prom. That’s when it became Opperationg Glass Slipper.
“We had no warehouse space, so we were stocking hundreds of dresses on top of the ping pong table,” Pam says. Soon word got out in the local press, and storage space was donated.
They started with 500 girls, which is impressive enough for a two woman opperation. The next year it was 750, then 1,000. This year it was 1,100, more than double their starting place in less than four years.
Opperation Glass Slipper now has a 5,000 square foot space in the Mall of America during the pre-prom season. Girls who are accepted into the program (there’s a referral form that has to be signed by a parent, teacher or community leader) get a “fairy godmother” who helps them pick out a dress and decide if any alterations are needed (OGS does those too). Then they get to pick out accessories and make up.
Pam has poured a lot of energy into OGS, but she says it’s worth it to see how happy she’s made these girls, and their parents. “We constantly get comments from women who are in their 50s or 60s who say, ‘oh, I wish you had been around when I was a teenager, I didn’t get to go, we didn’t have the money,’” she explains. “It’s remained fun and emotionally rewarding.”
