Earlier this week I attended Printsource and picked up the January issue of FashionMANNUSCRIPT.  While reading the latest news in the fashion industry, I came across an organization that provides new clothing to those in need, emphasis on NEW.  Dignity U Wear works with fashion designers to procure overruns, excess inventory and seasonal items and places them in homes where humans suffer embarrassment and despair because they literary have NO underwear, ragged pants and dirty shirts. 

Dignity U Wear started in 2000 out of Florida by Henri Landworth.  His story is inspiring:

Between the ages of 13 to 18, Henri was shuffled among five Nazi death and labor camps; from Auschwitz to Matthausen, Gusen I and Gusen II and Ostrowitz.  “You cannot imagine how it was,” Henri says of the camps. “Auschwitz was my first realization that the camps were there for our extermination.  I never expected to get out of there.  I knew it would be a matter of time and I would be murdered like the rest.”

At the end of the war, he and four other prisoners were marched into the woods to be shot, but at the last minute a Nazi soldier decided to spare their lives and told them to run into the woods when the shots were heard.  “It is only a miracle that I am alive today,” says Landwirth.

But, Henri says, “From the darkness of the concentration camps, grew many compassionate, courageous and generous souls.”

“I started Dignity U Wear because I was in the concentration camps for five years with no clothes,” says Landwirth. “After I left the camps, I was 18 years old and I was homeless. And I promised myself that one day, God willing, I would be able to help other people not to suffer as much as I did.” To date, Dignity U Wear has distributed over 6.6 million pieces of clothing valued at over $120 million to families in all 50 states.

Please help spread the word of this organization and and remember to be grateful for having the ability to purchase new clothing for yourself (I’ll try to remember too)!

(Source: dignityuwear.org)