Nestled within the sprawling campus for about 250 unhoused women and families off of North St. in Sparks, in the back of building 2A, is the Our Place to Shine Community Boutique. It looks and feels like a cozy vintage thrift shop.
Mary Gilbert is working on painting a new section with more warm colors and a mountain scene to make it look she says “more like a boutique and not an institution.” There’s a row of funky hats, racks full of useful and beautiful clothes, cosmetics, hygiene products, and endless boxes of hand sanitizer. The twist: items here are free for those in need at Our Place.
“So this area is gonna be the space for kids and male identifying folks,” Gilbert, the community engagement director for the Reno Initiative for Shelter and Equality (RISE) explained on a recent tour. “So I'm in the process of painting this right now and all of this will be filled in the way that is over here. And so over on this side, we've got the women's clothes. So jackets are over here. We have sweaters and long sleeve shirts, bras, underwear, socks, blankets. We also have like work wear. We have like scrubs, we have the uniform black pants, which are common in a lot of the casinos and spaces like that. So it's like a multitude of things. We do have dresses and stuff over here for folks that would prefer to wear a dress for like a job interview. Or we also have women who want church clothes. We have a ton of socks. When I first came in here, we had like virtually no underwear, and now we have so much underwear, somebody when they donated a big box of underwear, I've never seen somebody so excited about underwear. ”
The items are also a stocking area for Our Place outreach director Wendy Wiglesworth, a notorious expert collector herself, who has donated many of the hats. She will sometimes take blankets to people not yet at Our Place but as part of her outreach efforts along the river, where she used to live herself.
“And a lot of these hats, some of them are really fun,” Gilbert said. “Like I think that honestly there's some of them that people come in and they're like, well, look at this weird hat. Right. Like, at least it brings a smile to their face, even if they're not gonna take it with them.”
Gilbert continues the tour meticulously and explains the worth of having a special boutique. “We’ve got like pants and makeup, and job interview clothes over here, we have a dressing room. So when I first came into this project, it was just kind of like the requests were filled and taken down, which was definitely effective. Everybody got the stuff that they needed. But now with the support from our Washoe County partners, we were able to make it super pretty in here and a space where women can come in, and essentially shop for clothes. And they get to decide what they're wearing. And so then they leave feeling better as opposed to, you know, just getting they needed. They can get some stuff that they want.”
The boutique is a partnership between RISE which operates Our Place and the Washoe County Human Services agency. It’s had a soft opening for the ready women’s area, and plans to do a bigger opening once all areas are finished. Excess donations are sometimes handed out on a per need basis to other advocates doing outreach.
“The main focus is obviously the folks that we're serving here on campus, but I'm really fortunate to work with folks that understand that if we have enough, then we should be able to share it with the folks that are out there that we can't quite serve yet,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert herself has lived experience with institutions, “and it wasn't super healing for me,” she says, so she’s trying to get it right with this boutique. “I’m like, why would we not make this a more comfortable space? We can bring this to the folks that we're serving and then they can have a much more enjoyable experience than feeling like they're in like some weird flesh tone institution, grabbing clothes, right. Everybody deserves that sort of compassion, dignity, and a beautiful space to spend time in.”
Gilbert draws on her own experiences of living in poverty to make the store part of the healing journey for residents of Our Place.
“I could never go to a store and just like grab whatever I wanted,” she said. “Like I had to check the price tags and be like, okay, I can maybe afford this. And then like, you gotta go up to the register and then you gotta like put things back or whatever. I think that it's not only like a great feeling to know that you can, you can grab things that make you feel like beautiful or comfortable or, you know, like some of the folks that we've had come in have been like, holy crap, like this is the first time, I felt good about myself in a really long time. And also it gives them that motivation to be like, dude, you know, like if I keep working on my case plan, if I keep moving forward, like eventually I could get to that point where I can go into a store and not have to add everything up, like perfectly in my mind and maybe have to return one or two things. Like it gives them that motivation as well to start moving forward.”
The wide array of blankets is for people entering the boutique to find that blanket that will make them feel more secure at night. They can also choose from different types of pajamas. There’s a table with boxes of chapstick, makeup, hair ties, earrings, toiletries including Black hair products, and travel size items. There’s a wall decorated with fancy purses.
“For the most part, we do encourage, when they come in, like, remember that, you're sharing this with everybody else,” Gilbert said in explaining in more detail the process of when someone staying at Our Place enters the boutique. “I just ask them to be conscious of that. And we try to make sure that the amount of things that they take, isn't going to overwhelm them on campus.”
Gilbert has been in her job since November and is thrilled with this new part of her duties. “I was essentially working on my own, working on social media and making all these fun graphics, but I felt like I could be doing so much more. And so this was like, this was just like a dream, right? Like, this is the best because, not only is it a space where people can come and find things that make them feel better, [it also gives them] some peace for a minute…”
It’s also open for community donations which also makes people giving feel better about themselves. “People want to help, but not everybody always has money to donate, but everybody always has at least like some clothing items or toiletry items or something that they can give and so that feels good for the community to be able to contribute these things to the guests that we serve that so greatly deserve it,” Gilbert said.