Bayview Youth Prepared For Career In High Fashion

Few people look back fondly on the day they got a traffic ticket.

Traci Peace Greco does, however.

That's because that traffic ticket the wardrobe sytlist got about a decade ago lead to community service at a small San Francisco community theater.

Upon hearing she had a background in fashion, the theater staff asked Greco if she would like to run a fashion program for kids.

It was a question that would lead eventually lead Greco to her calling in life: Visions of La Moda.

Founded nine years ago, Visions of La Moda is a free, hands-on program for youth in San Francisco's Bayview district.

Once a week in summer, and once a month during the school year a carefully selected handful of young women meet in the basement of the Faith Temple Church on Oakdale Avenue.The course of study is rigourous: volunteer teachers from the fashion industry teach not just sewing and design, but French as well.

Students also recieve education counseling to help see them through their middle school, high school, and college careers.

Greco arranges for fashion professionals to lecture to the girls as well, and even took them on a trip to New York's Fashion Week in 2008.

The fact that La Moda meets below a church is not by accident: Greco's grandfather was the church's founder.

In fact, Greco says, it was in that church as a young girl in the 1970's that her love of fashion was born. "This aisle looked, to me, like a runway. These were the most beautiful women I had ever seen."

Learn more about Visions of La Moda at http://www.visionsoflamoda.org/

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