Starting over? Working Wardrobes’ Bonni Pomush knows the feeling and has your back

The taste of humble pie.

When you understand how much Bonni Pomush knows about it, and how that relates to helping people get back to gainful employment, you’ll get why she’s viewed by many in the county as such an effective CEO of the workforce development nonprofit Working Wardrobes.

But first you need to know Pomush took the reins of Working Wardrobes in 2022 after a trifecta of major losses had hit the company – a devastating fire that destroyed its headquarters, followed almost immediately by the pandemic lockdown, then the retirement of its founder Jerri Rosen, who served as CEO and guiding light for three decades.

“Knowing that Jerri had been the founder and CEO for 30 years, I knew that we could build on that strength. And I’m all about let’s build on strength. Like, what are you good at? Let’s do that,” says Pomush, who, with her high-wattage smile and sparkling eyes comes across as the very definition of the word “effervescent.”

Working Wardrobes started in 1990 as a charity to offer women escaping domestic abuse professional clothing so they could successfully interview for jobs and start new lives. Although clothing donation is still a cornerstone of the nonprofit, Pomush says now clothes are really the first on-ramp into what’s become a total program to provide clients a path that leads to gainful employment in workplaces that look far different from 30 years ago.

More than just providing people with a power suit, Working Wardrobes offers career coaches who put together an employment plan, with career and personality assessments, practice interviews, help from human resources professionals to develop résumés and job leads. The program served 5,200 people in 2023, surpassing its goal by a couple hundred.

The other side of the coin is that employers get well-prepared and able job applicants who can hit the ground running.

“I think about what are the most transferable skills we can give people that, whatever industry, whatever occupation they go into, these will be foundation stones of what they need to succeed and keep on succeeding,” she says.

In fact, she could be talking about her own career.

The things we do for love

There she was, in her home state of Arizona, happily working at a position she loved – assistant director of continuing education for the Kyrene School District, which covers Tempe, Chandler and Phoenix. She managed a $10 million budget with hundreds of staff and helped develop and implement policies affecting 26 facilities, 18,000 students and more than 2,000 employees.

Pomush’s mom and dad, both of whom work in law enforcement, had wanted her to go to law school, but summer jobs as a camp counselor had gotten her hooked on the idea of how education could transform people. She’d gotten a master’s degree in family research and human development because she was interested in the question: How do you change a system by changing an individual?

So suffice it to say Pomush was in her element, career-wise.

Then she went on a vacation to Maui.

And fell in love with Patti Holliday, a native of Orange County.

“Literally, our first week of dating, it was, ‘Well, would you be willing to move out to Orange County?’”

Pomush loves the beach – there’s sand in Arizona but no beach, after all – and she knew this relationship with Holliday felt serious. But she had a job she loved and would offer a good retirement, in a state she called home. If she went to California, she’d be completely starting over.

“It was a really big thing for me, to take this leap from everything I had ever known,” Pomush admits.

She and Holliday today wear matching necklaces that explain what happened next: Engraved in Hebrew on their pendants is a quote from the Book of Ruth, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.”

Pomush thought she’d create a business and become a strategic planning consultant after moving here. Being Jewish, Pomush wanted to connect with her community and start meeting people by joining and volunteering at her nearby synagogue, Temple Beth El: The Samueli Center for Progressive Judaism, of South Orange County.

Starting over

Pomush just went in to chat with the synagogue’s director of education, with whom she had a common connection. She walked out with a job offer.

To work at the front desk.

“I admit, I had a bit of an ego there,” Pomush says with a laugh. “I was polite and I was grateful, but inside I was like, Are you kidding me?”

Here she was, with an advanced education and C-suite level experience being offered an entry-level position. The thought stung. “But I went home and Patti said, ‘Why did you go there this morning? I said, ‘To lay down roots, to meet people. To start my business.’ And she said, ‘So they offered to pay you to do that, and that’s a problem?’”

In a 12-year career at the center, Pomush would rise from that desk job to being the executive director. But the experience of getting there informs how she relates to the people who come to Working Wardrobes today: “I see myself in the clients we serve.”

“I had to eat a lot of humble pie. I had gone from leading a $10 million organization with 300 staff to being treated like … the help. Not everyone was that way, but it’s true not everyone treated me with dignity when I was at the front desk,” she says.

Respect and dignity

“It’s about the dignity of each person and the way we treat each other. It’s my North Star. I don’t go home at night and wonder, you know, what metric I achieved. I go home and wonder, How do I show up for people today? That’s the question I’m always asking myself.”

That might be why county leaders like Nicole Suydam, CEO of Goodwill Orange County, call Pomush “a breath of fresh air.”

“She is proactive in building relationships with other non-profit leaders and creating collaborative partnerships,” Suydam says. “I love that she’s a role model for cheering on and encouraging other non-profit leaders and organizations.”

Coming in as a new CEO, to an established company, filling the shoes of a long-time leader like Rosen isn’t always easy, Suydam observes, but Pomush succeeds with “a true and authentic desire to collaborate versus compete.”

“All of this matters because it takes trust to create collaboration and partnerships.  Her enthusiasm and energy is contagious.”

For Pomush’s part, she thinks back to the feeling of when she was a first-grader starting a new school all those years ago in Arizona. When the school bus picked her up, she tried to find a seat, but just like in a scene out of a movie, every kid snubbed her with a “you can’t sit here.”

“It still makes me sad thinking about that,” Pomush says.

But then, just as she was about to burst into tears, an older sixth-grade girl said, “You can sit with me.” And with that kindness, everything changed.

“I just put that girl on a pedestal. It was really about how she was a human being showing up in the world,” Pomush says. “The best person I’ve ever heard embody exactly how I feel was (the writer) Maya Angelou. She said, ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’”

Source: Orange County Register