Suite Success Stories

Barbara Mickens: “There are a lot of Barbaras in the World”

After she lost her job as a family resource specialist with the Washington Scholarship Fund, Barbara Mickens couldn’t function for about a year because she was “very depressed.” Mickens received help from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, but the $300 in cash and $400 in food stamps she could count on each month were not enough to cover her $817 rent, let alone provide food for her two children, Ashley, now 20, and Samuel, now 11.

“I started doing little odd jobs, driving people around, running errands, writing speeches, helping people with their homework, any way I could make a fast, honest dollar,” she says. She bought costume jewelry for $5 and sold it for $15. She prepared and sold meals from her car to the drug dealers in her neighborhood. She and her children sat in the dark, ate by candlelight and slept in warm clothes, because they could not afford electricity. When their cupboards were bare, they ate with family. They were under constant threat of eviction, once avoiding being put out on the street by hours.

Family and friends from her church helped, but “to this day I cannot begin to explain how I managed,” says Mickens. “One day I had this epiphany and I decided it was time for me to get up and take control of my life and do something other than wallow in my sorrow.”

She enrolled in the welfare-to-work program at the Pilgrim AME Job Connection and was referred to Suited for Change. “I expected that it was going to be some warehouse like a bunch of thrift store clothes that I probably wouldn’t like,” says Mickens. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m a black woman from a black neighborhood. I am accustomed to looking and acting a certain way, and … I have this white woman trying to dress me.‘ Well, I’m thinking that ‘white people don’t dress like black people. Oh, God, they’re going to give me something that will make me look like Nancy Drew.’ ”

She was pleasantly surprised that Suited for Change offered her “great suits with accessories and great people who were there to empower you and inspire you to take control of your life.”

Mickens picked out two pantsuits, one with a Macy’s tag still dangling from it. There was a tan three-piece pantsuit and a brown pin-stripe pantsuit with a camisole, which Mickens calls her “lucky suit. “ She also received earrings, a necklace, a purse and a pair of Ferragamo shoes. “I left there thinking, ‘I’m on welfare with Ferragamos. Who would believe this?’ ”

Three days after visiting Suited for Change, Mickens landed two jobs wearing her lucky suit. One job was as a certified nursing assistant at Providence Hospital and the other was at Gentle Touch as a counselor for the developmentally disabled. “It was the turning point of my life. Things were going well,” she says.

Mickens enrolled in Trinity University and was balancing two jobs and her family. Then, in June 2008, she fell on a freshly mopped floor at work, tore her right rotator cuff and sustained a herniated disc in her neck. She had to have surgery and continues with physical therapy. She’s been unemployed since the accident, but has been receiving temporary disability. “I have income,” she says, “but it’s still not like work because bills fall behind.”

She continues as a student at Trinity with a 3.5 GPA and expects to receive her bachelor‘s degree in human relations in 2011. She is grateful for the help that Suited for Change provided her, both with the suits and with the seminars she took. “The workshops built my self esteem and self confidence,” she said. “They made me a stronger candidate walking into corporate America. I could be more assertive and not as nervous answering the questions during the interviews.”

Today, Mickens’s daughter is a student at the University of Alaska, while she continues to live with her son in Ward 7, which she describes as one of the worst neighborhoods in the District. “When you come from the neighborhoods that some of us come out of, it’s really depressing. And it takes a lot of inner strength to not get sucked in by the environment,” she says. “We go to bed hearing ambulances, gun fire and the police. Coming home in the middle of the day, we see yellow police tape and you’re hoping that’s not your kid lying on the ground covered with a sheet,” she says.

“I have proven that in the face of adversity, I have overcome all the odds. … There are a lot of Barbaras in the world,” she adds.

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