Social worker Princess Morgan, at right, admires some of the clothing at Dress For Success alongside the organization’s founder and CEO, Linda Loop. Morgan, a treatment coordinator at the Luzerne County Department of Corrections, said she is grateful for Loop’s visits to the county jail to give women advice on getting jobs when they are released.
Linda Loop, founder and CEO of Dress For Success Luzerne County, proudly welcomes Latravious Hall, Khalil Manning and Massiel Perez from Keystone Job Corps to check out the new space at 60 Public Square. Manning and Perez helped move the clothing from the old space on West Market Street to the new space, and Perez, who is a Job Corps instructor, said other students painted and installed carpeting.
As they attended the Dress For Success open house on Thursday, Kelly Ciravolo of Shavertown, and her aunts Ann Kolanowski of Kingston, Mary Pape of Wilkes-Barre and Karen Bird of the Bloomsburg area lovingly remembered how Ciravolo had donated the clothes of her late mother, Susan Frank Ochreiter Rutchauskas, to Dress For Success after her death last year.
“I’ve had women giggling. I’ve had women crying,” Melinda Gilpin said, recalling the reactions of clients who have picked out new-to-them clothing at the Dress For Success Luzerne County space in downtown Wilkes-Barre.
“One woman looked at herself in the mirror and said, ‘I haven’t seen myself look like this in years. I look like a real person.’ Just thinking about it makes me cry.”
Gilpin is the operations manager at the not-for-profit Dress For Success, which celebrated its move to a new space at 60 Public Square in downtown Wilkes-Barre with an open house on Thursday afternoon.
The new space is twice as large as the organization’s previous space on West Market Street, CEO and founder Linda Loop said, explaining it is filled with clothing for all four seasons, as well as shoes and other accessories that will help women find attire suitable for job interviews and various workplaces.
Women in need are referred to Dress For Success, where they are welcome to select clothing at no expense to them. Since the local program was founded in Dec. 2010, it has helped more than 3,500 clients.
“A lot of the women who come here are mothers, single moms with two or three children,” Gilpin said. “Like most mothers, they’re the last ones to think of themselves.”
Stories like that have touched Kelly Ciravolo’s heart, and after the Shavertown woman lost her mother, Susan Frank Ochreiter Rutchauskas, in Aug. 2025, she decided to help women in need by donating her mother’s clothing.
On Thursday, which was one year to the day since her mother’s death, Ciravolo and her mother’s sisters, Ann Kolanowski of Kingston, Mary Pape of Wilkes-Barre and Karen Bird from the Bloomsburg area, all gathered to wish Dress For Success well.
In honor of her mother, Ciravolo wore to the open house the dress she had worn to the funeral, which in a way shows how meaningful clothing can be.
Most of the clients at Dress For Success are 25 to 35 years old, Loop said. But sometimes the organization helps older women, too. One woman, about 60, was hospitalized for two months, Gilpin said. During that time, the woman lost her job and her apartment, and her former landlord threw away all her belongings.
“That woman worked in management, and she will again,” said Gilpin, who was glad that Dress For Success was there to help.
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