Champions For Change

Kristin Henrikson: Young, Energetic and Cheap

When Kristin Henrikson was offered a job as Suited for Change's first executive director and only employee in 1994, she was participating in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps and working at the National Association of Service and Conservations Corps (NASCC). She was also headed to law school. She postponed her school plans and jumped at the opportunity.

Henrikson was already familiar with Suited because her boss at NASCC was founder Lisa Woll, who had involved her in Suited as a volunteer.

"I knew Lisa would be good to work with. I had met the board. They were all young professional women. It was just a pretty amazing opportunity," says Henrikson. "I was 23. I had no work experience and they were giving me the job as executive director of their new non-profit, so how could I say 'no'?"

Henrikson's salary was $20,000 a year, "a ton of money compared to what I had been making," she says. "I was young. I was energetic. I was cheap."

The office -- a basement at 1531 P Street that flooded regularly -- was always piled with clothes in need of sorting. Part of Henrikson's job was to develop a corps of volunteers. "I learned that volunteers volunteer for different purposes and they need different things to stay," she says. Some, she says, need the personal contact they receive from Suited. Others want to come in and "do their own thing." Many of the volunteers she worked with are still coming to Suited more than ten years later.

There were also non-stop phone calls. "Suited got a lot of publicity early on," says Henrikson, "so people were calling to donate clothes, to volunteer, to find out how to get our services. There were calls from job service agencies." Henrikson established the organization's relationships with job service programs. She set up systems and wrote information sheets for anyone interested in working with Suited.

The board was also very active in Suited's day-to-day activities. "Fortunately, many of them were in jobs where they could close their doors and work for Suited several hours a day, so I was not completely alone," she says. "Suited was also an amazing opportunity for the young women on the board."

Suited's budget "was certainly under $100,000," recalls Henrikson. "The organization was very thrifty." Big cost items included Henrikson's salary, rent and a few supplies. Most items were donated.

Part of Henrikson's job was raising the budget. "That was really out of my league," she says. Working with Lisa Woll, she learned to grind out foundation proposals. "The organization got good grant money in the early years," she recalls. She adds that from the beginning, Suited had "a robust individual donor base, especially for such a small organization."

Henrikson recalls immense amounts of work preparing for board meetings -- and plenty of assignments as a result of board meetings. "It wasn't one of those boards that comes and listens and nods and asks a few questions … they were involved and active," she says.

"It was one of the best experiences I've ever had, but it was really hard," she says. "The advantage of bringing in a young person was that I didn't have any other obligations, so I could work a lot."

After two years as executive director, Henrikson went to law school at the University of Virginia. She came back to Washington, DC, in 1999, and held jobs as a law clerk and as a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and the DC Office of the Attorney General, where she worked on child support issues. She also joined Suited's board for a two-year term.

By then, Suited had moved to 1712 Eye Street, to a larger, brighter basement "that really looked like a store," she says. It had also grown into a much more sophisticated organization, with two full-time and one part-time staff, an advisory council in addition to the board and many more clients.

Suited plays a crucial role in the community, says Henrikson. "When Suited came along, it really filled a gap for a lot of training programs. People know that they have a place to send their folks when they finish training." Unlike other job training organizations, she says, Suited relies on a cadre of volunteers with a few paid staff and has important connections to the professional working community.

She also thinks Suited's Personal and Professional Development (PPD) program is an important but too little known part of what the organization does. "The clients who are closest to Suited and stayed with us are the ones who did the program side of it. So, it's a smaller side in terms of numbers, but it is the transformative piece for a lot of people."

Henrikson, who is now in private family law practice, fantasizes about a larger role for Suited. "If Suited just did clothes, it would be a good organization," she says. "I think because of who is involved and what they want, I would love for Suited to be able to grow the professional development side into something that's really big, really measurable. Suited has the connections and the people to do fascinating thinking about social policy."

Suited for Change thanks Kathleen Currie, a Washington, D.C. freelance writer for writing the profiles and Dara Walsh, a freelance Washington, D.C. photographer, for photographing some of the profilees.

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