Champions For Change

Leary Short: From the Streets to the Suited for Change Board

Leary Short, the first former client to sit on the board of Suited for Change, calls her early life “a horror.”

As a teenager growing up in Washington, DC’s tough Anacostia neighborhood, she was abducted and brutally raped. Decades of drug abuse followed. She gave birth to four children with four different fathers and turned to prostitution to support her drug habit. Finally, fed up and aware that there was a warrant out for her arrest, Short turned herself into an undercover cop and went to jail.

What could have been just another stop on a bus to hell instead became the first of a series of “miracles“ that eventually led her to Suited for Change. First, Short was admitted to the D.C. Superior Court Drug Intervention Program with the stipulation that she would remain free as long as she passed surprise drug tests.

Then, while walking in her mother’s neighborhood, she ran across a new employment training program being launched by So Others Might Eat (SOME), a non-profit organization, in a Catholic church. “It was … ready to open right as I was coming out of a cloud of confusion and getting a hold on my life again,” she says.

Short acquired office skills at SOME, but she still didn’t know how to get a job. That’s when she received a “beautiful, really fancy-antsy,” red and white invitation asking her to check out the Personal and Professional Development Program (PPD) at Suited for Change. (SOME is a Suited referral partner.)

She was immediately impressed with the panels of successful women from the corporate and government worlds she met at Suited’s PPD event. She was even more grateful for what she calls the “secrets” these women shared with her. “You’re getting ready to go into their world and they were telling you to be ready,” she recalls. She signed up for a series of personal and professional development workshops at Suited. During the workshops, she learned more secrets of getting a job: A job interviewer is not your friend. You have less than three seconds to make an impression and only 15 minutes to convince someone that you can do a job. You can and must negotiate.

“You didn’t just get a suit. It wasn’t about the clothes. That was to lure you in, but the main thing was they gave us valuable work etiquette that normally you wouldn’t know,” she says.

Short finished with SFC on a Wednesday, had an interview with Xerox that Friday, and by Monday she had a job. She kept coming back to Suited for more advice. “I used every secret and presentation tool that Suited for Change gave me. It catapulted me from account associate to manager in almost three years at Xerox,” she says.

In 2005, she became the first client to sit on the Suited for Change board.

Today, Short is an entrepreneur with a new travel business. She is also a voice for Suited for Change’s clients, both on the board and as a public speaker. She tells people that Suited for Change is “a place within the Washington Metropolitan area where women can go and receive a thirst for excellence.”

Her vision for Suited for Change includes community satellite offices. “If we’re satellite in the community, we’re accessible,” she says.

Short says her vision is fueled by “a desire that’s in me to make sure that the place that gave to me continues to give, so I bring back to the table what I can. And Suited still gives to me. I love that umbilical cord, because Suited for Change still gives me all that I need.”

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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