Smiling faces flooded through the doors of Southdale Shopping Center as hundreds of girls searched for their perfect prom dress.

The Operation Glass Slipper Princess Event was held on Saturday, March 14 and Sunday, March 15 in an unoccupied corner of the mall in Edina. This year, seven girls from HHS participated.

Operation Glass Slipper is a charity that specializes in distributing prom dresses and accessories to junior and senior girls who are unable to afford them.

“If you have the money to buy a 300 or 400 dollar prom dress, you don’t understand what it is like to not have what you want. You don’t want to get something at a Savers or a Goodwill so I think we are a wonderful option,” said Pam Phillipp, founder and director of Operation Glass Slipper.

In 2007, a news story about a foundation in New Orleans that donated prom dresses to girls whose homes were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina opened Phillipp’s eyes to the need in her own community.

Inspired, Phillipp and her daughter, a high school student at the time, decided to start their own organization.

Junior and senior girls from low-income families are eligible to participate in the event after filling out minimal paperwork and acquiring a signature from a counselor, school staff member, or clergy member.

After signing up, each girl has the opportunity to bring one female of their choice along to Operation Glass Slipper’s rented space on the day of the annual event and choose a prom dress, shoes, a purse, and two pieces of jewelry – all for free.

“I think that prom is a very important time in a teenager’s life. [Being] outside looking in and knowing that you can’t afford to go is really hard,” Phillipp said.

Over the course of the two-day event, over 1,800 dresses are available for distribution, all of which have been donated or sold to the charity for $20 or less.

Periodic dress drives, dry cleaning, and sorting through thousands of dresses and accessories require Phillipp and her team of volunteers to spend three to four days a week for the entire year preparing for the event.

Despite Phillipp’s main goal of providing girls easier access to prom, the message she sends through her charity work reaches greater lengths.

“By enabling them to go to this, they can see what prom is all about and they hopefully have a great time, but they also know that somebody has done something nice for them and maybe someday in the future, they will do something nice for somebody else,” Phillipp said. “It’s a pay-it-forward kind of thing. You just have to do something nice for somebody else.”