UCA’s Panhellenic Council’s annual Cinderella’s Closet event was met with success for a good cause.

On Sunday, March 12, girls of all ages came to the Ronnie Williams Student Center Ballroom where they were greeted with hundreds of dresses and smiling faces.

The girls were presented with dresses ranging not only in different colors but also in many different sizes, making it a shopping experience for everyone.

Each dress was donated not only by students but by people in the community and outside of it as well.

With the theme “Say yes to the dress,” many girls were able to do exactly that and find the perfect dress.

Each girl who found a dress was also able to walk on stage and strut their stuff to see how they felt in the dress before they bought it. 

Kylie Garritty, the vice president for Development in Panhellenic Council, said that most of the dresses had been sold only 40 minutes after the event had started. 

Dresses cost $10 and all proceeds from the event will be going towards the B+ Foundation. 

The Panhellenic Council recently changed its charity of choice to the B+ Foundation due to its message about cancer awareness.

“We have a lot of different sisters in our different sororities who have battled with cancer, so that spoke to a lot of us on the council,” Morgan Trent said, who is on the Panhellenic Council.

The B+ Foundation was created by a boy named Andrew who was diagnosed with and overcame leukemia because he happened to have the B+ blood type and matched with other donors that had the same blood type, Trent said.

Now the foundation works with many other childhood cancer patients and their families to ensure they get the coverage and help they need, according to their mission statement. 

Almost 200 girls had picked out their dresses only thirty minutes into the event, which was a much bigger turnout than last year, Garritty said.

“We were in room 214, which is very small, and only had around 100 people show up to last year’s Cinderella’s Closet,” Garritty said.

Garritty also said that this year brought in the most dresses she’s seen since helping out with Cinderella’s Closet. 

“I would say around four or five hundred dresses were donated this year alongside our backstock making almost one thousand dresses available,” said Garritty.

While the main crowd was high school-age girls looking for prom dresses, the event was open to people of all ages and events. 

The turnout this year could be due to more events opening up with the slow decline of the pandemic and the incline of dress costs, Trent said.

“People are ready to hang out with their friends and now they’re not going to have to spend so much to be able to enjoy themselves,” Trent said.

Social media was another key resource to getting the event out there which could also explain the increase in donations, Trent said.

Cinderella’s Closet is hosted around the same time each year and with this year’s massive increase in customers, the closet expects growth.