Gem among GEMS

YAKIMA, Wash. -- She's a real gem.

Just ask Lynne Greene, her senior project adviser.

"She's so together, so cute, so smart," Greene says. "She's about as big as a minute. She's just one of these peppy little adorable girls whose heart is all about everybody else."

Everybody else includes Girls and Guys Embracing Mind and Soul, or GEMS. The new club at Davis High School is the doing of Norma Ortiz, an 18-year-old senior who started the group with Greene's encouragement.

Ortiz called the first meeting to order at the start of the school year. Since then, the club has organized a bunch of activities -- from a body image workshop held after school in September to a homecoming hairstyles event, breast cancer and teen violence awareness campaigns and a canned food drive.

Now, members are collecting formal dresses to help girls at Davis go to prom.

The fancy dance -- which can carry a price tag of hundreds of dollars by the time you add up the cost of the dress, flowers, photos, hair, make-up and shoes -- isn't until May. But Ortiz, the club president, wants to get a head start on gathering donations of dresses for girls who may otherwise not be able to afford to go.

"I know there's many, including myself," she says. "It's kind of hard right now, even if you have a job. There are other things you have to pay to help your family out."

The Dresses for Prom project would give girls at Davis one less thing to worry about when it comes to getting ready for the big night out. And club members -- a core group of about 10 girls -- are hoping to gather as many dresses as they can before the end of April.

"Prom is only one night. You only wear your dress once," says Ortiz, who's seeking donations of gently used formal dresses in all sizes and colors. She's hoping students, teachers and community members will get involved.

"So far, I have at least 10 or 12," she says. "Hopefully, we can get a lot so we can keep it going even after I graduate and that there will be a prom dress drive every year for the club to get different dresses."

Founding and running the club fulfills the requirement for her senior project and underscores an important message, which Greene sums up like this: "You're more than your looks."

And it's proven to be popular with students. For the first activity in the fall, the body image workshop, "There were girls lined up halfway across the quad," says Greene, director of the Davis Library and Media Center. "It was just unbelievable. They have this need to be able to connect in this way and talk about the issues that affect them."

But it's not just girls. It's guys, too. Several have been known to show up for GEMS events.

"I was very surprised," admits Ortiz, who has taken a summer fashion marketing class at Yakima Valley Technical Skills Center and loves fashion magazines -- "Seventeen, Vogue, Cosmo, anything."

She's considering a career in fashion marketing and was recently accepted to the Art Institute of Seattle, where she plans to study in the fall. Meantime, she loves to talk about new looks and trends and ways to help teens feel confident.

"It's about inner beauty," says Ortiz, stressing she wants to help build students' self-esteem through GEMS' activities. "My goal is to have everybody feel comfortable in their own shoes" -- whether those shoes are flip-flops, Converse, platforms, ballerina flats or Ugg boots.

"At school, there are a lot of stereotypes," she says. "There's a lot of people that try to be like other people. You try to fit in and everything. But I want people to be themselves. I want them to find their inner strength and their inner beauty."

And she doesn't want a dress to keep them from going to the dance.

"I have some of my own that I'm going to donate," says Ortiz, who hopes students will keep GEMS going after she graduates in June.

Meantime, she has a message for them: "You don't have to wear expensive clothes.

"You should buy clothes you feel comfortable in," she says. "You can walk to class with your head held high, and you don't have to worry about what other people have to say about your clothes."

* To donate to the Dresses for Prom project, call Norma Ortiz at 509-480-8497. Dress donations can also be dropped off at the Davis High School library.

* Adriana Janovich can be reached at 509-577-7653 or ajanovich@yakimaherald.com.