Teens donate prom dresses to Maritime wildfire relief

For Taylor Hernandez of Sydney Mines, N.S., donating her old prom dress to a girl who may have lost hers in the Nova Scotia wildfires was the least she could do.

"It really hit close to home for me,” Hernandez said. “There's a lot of friends and family that I have near those fires."

It hit so close to home that had the 24-year-old paramedic not moved from Hammonds Plains to Cape Breton just a few weeks ago, she would have been directly impacted by the wildfires.

"Luckily, I got out of there before the fires started, but had I not left when I did, I would be evacuated from where I was living at the time,” Hernandez said.

More than 60 dresses from across the province have already been collected at Alyssa’s Formals in Lower Sackville, N.S.

The online movement to donate a dress to a girl in need has grown so quickly, the owner decided to provide a central location to make everything easier.

"With the idea of girls donating their dresses individually, you may have to go to someone's home,” said owner Tracey Simms. “Maybe it's not the right size, then you'd have to go to another location. This way, we're trying to centralize that."

She adds that it’s not just the girls she's looking out for.

"There's also the consideration too that there are some young men that have lost their prom attire as well, so a little bit more men's wear would be fantastic,” Simms said.

Back in Cape Breton, Hernandez has collected at least ten dresses from friends and plans to drop them off on her next trip back to Halifax.

She hopes in spite of what's going on, someone else can have a prom night as magical as hers.

"Hopefully it can make their day feel a lot better, even though their dress that they had originally picked out for themselves is gone,” Hernandez said. “Hopefully they can still feel as beautiful as they would have felt in their dress, in mine."