Editor’s Note: Felicia C. Sullivan, the critically acclaimed author of the 2008 memoir The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here, shares how she came about launching the national nonprofit Fashion For All. Graduate of Columbia’s MFA program, Sullivan also founded the literary journal Small Spiral Notebook and co-founded the KGB Nonfiction Series in New York City. Her latest endeavor, though, is quickly becoming one of her most significant. Read her success story. Don’t just sit there … Think Up!

As a child in an economically depressed area in Brooklyn, my friends and I never conceived of college, a corporate job and the requisite postage-stamp lawn — these things were the sole property of the affluent that lived in the city, a foreign place where ambulances arrived within minutes, fresh food was the norm and every day was rife with opportunity. Who could think of prosperity when surviving was the immediate reality?

It was through sheer determination and the refusal to accept that I could never have all that I saw on television, that I put myself through college and an Ivy League graduate school, was a successful corporate professional, published my first book and launched a nonprofit organization. For years, I experienced success, but felt as if I lacked significance, and after a great deal of deliberation and proverbial soul searching last October, I embarked on my most frightening journey to date — I left a comfortable corporate job to pen the screen adaptation of my recently published book and pursue something other.

Over the past six months, I’ve volunteered for New York Cares providing dignified, "white glove" meal service to those who are homeless or simply struggling to make ends meet, and it’s changed me in ways I hadn’t imagined. There is something truly gratifying about placing your needs aside and helping someone who really needs a meal, shelter and companionship – basic needs that people have that are not being met in today’s economy.

Combining my love of fashion, style and need to give back to the community in which I grew up, Fashion For All was born. Our mission is to provide women in low-income communities a day of gratis dignified shopping and access to community-based organizations, which provide educational, personal, professional and parenting resources.

Growing up among the poor and unemployed, I realized there was a need for a positive organization like Fashion For All. In Brooklyn, we cranked open Johnny pumps during the day when our necks were hot and pink from summer sun, and we smelled of saltwater taffy behind the ears. Come evening our shirts were still damp as we listened to tales that old men in Marlboro hats sitting on milk crates and women perched on stoops used to tell us. We kids from around the way would listen, rapt with attention, because these were people who lived; they were our teachers. Chest heaving, voice raspy from a two-pack-a-day habit, they cleared their throats and proceeded to recount their epic tales of neighborhoods that had fallen to blight; kids hitting the pipe, working the street; kids who would do anything to make a dollar out of 15 cents. They talked of their once-beloved community as if it were a cracked pipe ready to burst, a dress worn down to the seams. The men on milk crates mourned for what once was; they cried out, bitterly, for their expansive lawns and digital televisions. Why did they need deadbolts and stainless steel locks, yet 30 miles east in Long Island people slept with their doors open? And we kids realized that the stories our elders were telling us were not just about our home, but how our community fit or didn’t into the larger picture.