Our ongoing clothing service provides a dedicated shopping experience for youth in foster care to use their voice, which is often denied to them by the necessities of foster care. Each youth is able to choose 5 NEW outfits including shoes, socks, underwear, a seasonal outer layer, and comfort items. We are committed to providing a good selection of options in each size from 0-3 months all the way to adult, so that each child can find clothing that makes them feel comfortable and confident as they navigate the significant challenges they face.

While youth can shop at any of our physical locations, our newest program is our Mobile Closet, which brings the shopping experience to youth in foster care in Central, Western and Northern Nebraska who cannot travel to one of our stores in Southeast Nebraska. We load up our bus with a full store's worth of inventory and "set up shop" locally for a weekend. Our Mobile Closet trips occur in spring and fall, making sure children in foster care have seasonally appropriate clothes in time for the extremes of Nebraska weather.

The issue we seek to address is minimizing trauma and restoring dignity to youth in foster care. We are all familiar with the image of a child arriving at his or her new foster home with nothing but the clothes they are wearing. They may never have worn new clothes, clothes that fit them, or clothes that they like.

While foster parents are sometimes provided a stipend to buy clothes, we can all understand that with inflation, children's growth spurts, and fickle Nebraska weather, that stipend can only go so far. When foster youth can pick out their own clothes free of charge at our mobile closet, the stipend can be used for other normalcy opportunities for them, such as cleats for soccer, a gymnastics leotard, or the brand name shoes that everyone else is wearing at school. The shopping experience is also dignifying to them, communicating without words, you have value.

Individuals in foster care benefit from our services in both tangible and intangible ways. The opportunity to pick out their own new clothes boosts their comfort and confidence, which benefits them in all areas of life. This can especially impact other education opportunities, where not looking or feeling your best can be distracting, embarrassing, and debilitating. Our wardrobe allotment significantly lightens the mental load on foster parents, with one-stop shopping enabling them to focus more on the emotional needs of the child in their care instead of being preoccupied with scrambling to meet the physical needs.