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From left, Krissy Lagomarsino, Kim Selby and Vivian Clausing are pictured Aug. 15 at the Twilight Fashion Show, a fundraiser for a women’s center funded by the St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Mateo. Lagomarsino is director of marketing and communications at SVdP San Mateo and Vivian Clausing is program director for the society’s Catherine Center program to help recently incarcerated women start a new path in life. (Photo by Nicholas Wolfram Smith/Catholic San Francisco).
August 23, 2018
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
Couture and courage appeared together Aug. 15 in Menlo Park at Twilight Fashion Show, a fundraiser for a women’s center funded by the St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Mateo County. In front of a large and appreciative crowd, women from SVdP’s Catherine Center program took to the runway to model fashionable clothing and how their lives have changed.
Catherine Center, now in its 15th year, is a privately funded faith-based program that helps recently incarcerated women change their lives as they transition back into society. Through counseling, drug and alcohol treatment, and education, its residents are able to identify how they ended up with their past and what they want to create in their future.
After a happy hour, the empowerment and strength the center has nurtured in its residents was in full display on the runway, set up in the courtyard of Trinity Church in Menlo Park. “We Will Rock You” was the opening song in the evening’s program, with residents and staff of the center modeling looks ranging from jungle print jumpsuits to evening gowns. The crowd clapped and cheered the women, all of whom wore items that had been donated to SVdP thrift stores in San Mateo County.
The lighthearted and joyful evening did not disguise the serious work at the heart of Catherine Center. After the fashion show, two of its residents sat down for an on-stage interview with Kim Selby, the event’s impresario. While Katrina and Isabel (their names have been changed in this article to protect their privacy) came from very different upbringings, both had encountered early on drug use, broken families and deep unhappiness.
When Katrina heard about Catherine Center from her probation officer, she told the crowd, she was in “a hardened spiritual place.” Guilt and shame over the direction of her life left her feeling “paralyzed,” she said, and she prayed for death. Through living at Catherine Center, she was able “to do a lot of work spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically to recover.”
Isabel said that as someone who had used drugs since 16, she never hoped she could change until she arrived at Catherine Center.
“They have given me a life that I never thought would be possible,” she said.
The outlook for those returning to society after being incarcerated can be bleak. The California State Budget for 2018-2019 has directed more funds toward in-prison rehabilitative programming, and to employment for ex-offenders. But the most recent data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation found that 46 percent of ex-offenders released between 2012 and 2013 were convicted of a new crime within three years.
Mercy Sister Marguerite Buchanan, one of several visionaries who helped start SVdP’s Catherine Center, told Catholic San Francisco that seeing the same faces leave and return to prison provided a significant impulse to establishing the center
“They always came back,” she said. “They just couldn’t make it.”
Some 135 women have successfully completed the program since it began in 2003. Sister Marguerite said the key to their success was the unconditional love offered by the center’s staff and volunteers.
“We empower women to become the people we know they can be,” she said.
Selby told Catholic San Francisco the fashion show was “transformative” for residents, who become much more confident in themselves, and said event attendees recognized “the courage those women have to get up in front of a crowd and show off.”
Sister Marguerite said her favorite part of the Twilight Fashion Show was seeing the residents bring out the best in themselves.
“Some of them are real hams, and some of them are shy,” she said. “We love them in every way.”