What could entice you to wear the same dress for all 31 days of every December for a decade? 👗 For Kennett Square resident RuthAnn Deveney, raising funds to help end human trafficking was a catalyst for this fashion adventure. Over a decade and $1 million later 💰 ($1 MILLION!!), RuthAnn has exceeded her wildest dreams of what a December social media style challenge and a simple button could achieve. Meet Dressember.

Various styling options for RuthAnn's Dressember dress

To understand how Deveney and her fundraising team, Thrive with Dressember, turned style selfies into serious cash for a serious cause, take a ride in the time machine with me back to 2014. Instagram was still a simple photo-sharing app built for fun with friends. Fashion blogging was not yet a full-time influencing career. Capsule wardrobes were all the rage, and wearing the same dress in different ways solicited a slew of style challenge hashtags.

Among these style challenges, RuthAnn found Dressember and never looked back. Dressember is an advocacy initiative in which participants wear one dress for the entire month of December to spark conversations, raise awareness, and fundraise for a nonprofit organization that fights human trafficking worldwide.

In her first year, RuthAnn set out to raise $1,200 over one month. She wore the same black dress from Target every day, styled differently for the occasion and the weather. Of course, she cleaned it regularly.

She crushed her initial fundraising goal within days and realized the opportunity to support a cause close to her heart. Over the next several years, she honed her messaging, welcomed new participants to her fundraising team, continued to advocate against human trafficking, and raised over $1 million cumulatively with her Dressember team.

picture of Clean State Goods in Kennett Square

RuthAnn’s journey has been anything but a solo adventure. Over the years, she’s brought in more people to raise awareness and funding through unique advocacy efforts tied to the Dressember mission, but with their own spin.

She worked at Chatham Financial when she started her fundraising, and several coworkers joined her team. Many of those former colleagues continue to host fun Dressember fundraising events in the office, and the company provides a corporate match!
The owner of Salon Secrets in Kennett has encouraged her team to participate in Dressember at work, which allows the message to spread like tendrils through the community as their customers pop in and out of the salon.
Kari Matthews, owner of Clean Slate Goods in Kennett Square, is a former Dressember team member. She hosts an in-store fundraiser, through which she donates 15% of that day’s total sales to RuthAnn’s Dressember fundraiser. As a shop selling fair-trade and ethical goods, Dressember aligns perfectly with the store’s mission.
RuthAnn, also an Instagram book influencer for fun, partners with the Hockessin Bookshelf to give away a selection of books on human trafficking each December to Dressember donors. Every donor receives an entry to win the book of the week for each $10 donation towards her goal.

RuthAnn’s Dressember advocacy work exemplifies community building and collective action for a good cause. Neighbors from diverse backgrounds share a common goal of raising awareness and funding for this important humanitarian work, and each brings unique skills and interests to the project. Not only do the partnerships raise funds for the non-profit organization, but they also bring new customers to local businesses.

Best of all, they do all of this work through acts of joy and friendship, even when the topic of human trafficking is heavy on the heart. RuthAnn knows that human trafficking feels intractable. But when her team shows up consistently over time, it’s incredible how much impact they’ve had through their fundraising and friendraising.

The team structure creates a network effect that brings in friends of teammates she doesn’t even know. Small amounts add up to big totals with time. And she loves finding others who share her passion for developing solutions to human trafficking.

Don’t underestimate the power of one person doing one thing to help someone else a little bit. The small things matter, and you never know when they will grow into something as significant as seven-figure fundraising success.

If you’re interested, it’s not too late to get involved in this year’s Dressember project. You can donate to their fundraising team, slip into a dress (you don’t have to wear the same one every day 🥰) and join the team, spread the word through social media or good old-fashioned word of mouth, partner as a business to support their efforts and uplift your own brand, and more. And of course, there’s always next year.

Have you heard of Dressember before today? Do you know anyone who participates? RuthAnn has 33 team members, many of whom live in and around Kennett Square. Several of them wear buttons that say “Ask About My Dress!” If you see RuthAnn or her other team members out in the wild, ask them about their dress! And maybe you’ll be wearing a dress (or a suit if that’s more your style) every day in December next year.