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Connie Ramos-Williams remembers how she met Barbara Dell in 2009, shortly after the recession cost Dell her job in the fashion industry. Ramos-Williams, it turns out, had started a business-to-business networking group to help match people with jobs.
Dell wasn’t looking for a job. She was instead working to start a local chapter of the worldwide organization Dress for Success so she could help other women find one. What Dell and Ramos-Williams didn’t know at the time is they were looking for each other.
“Barbara told me many people said she had to meet Connie Ramos-Williams, and a lot of my friends had asked me if I had met her because she could really use my help,” says Ramos-Williams, president and chief marketing officer of Fort Myers-based Conric PR and Marketing. “We felt it was time for us to have a meeting.”
Together, in 2010, they founded Dress for Success Southwest Florida, with a mission to help unemployed and underemployed women struggling to find jobs. Dell owned and operated a successful New York modeling agency before moving to Fort Myers, where she continued to work in fashion as an event coordinator with Stein Mart until the recession resulted in the elimination of her job.
Dell retired in February 2018 to focus on her family and her health. She died Jan. 1, of cancer, while in the care of Hope Hospice. She was 66.
More than clothes, Dell saw a greater mission in mentoring women to help them find jobs and creating a program for women who want to start their own businesses. Dress for Success Worldwide recognized Dell for her launch of the Entrepreneurial Spirit Program, or E$P, which provides women with the tools and confidence to launch their own businesses by teaming them with an attorney, business loan officers and marketing professionals.
“As unemployment declined and things shifted, she created the Entrepreneurial Spirit Program because many women were interested in starting their own business,” says Ramos-Williams. “The program has continued to educate them on what is needed to start and run their own business that matches their skill set.”
Dell’s efforts garnered an honor she particularly coveted: the 2017 Apex Award from the Greater Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce Women in Business. A celebration of life ceremony to honor Dell was held Feb. 8.
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