Bev Coplin

Four times a year, for 10 days at a time, retired mortgage broker Bev Coplin turns her living room into a showcase for the Doncaster Collection of designer clothing. An eastern Washington native, Coplin started in banking as a teller, worked her way up to VP, then built her own mortgage company. "I was the first female appointed to the Washington Mortgage Brokers Commission," she notes. She moved her business to Oregon when her husband took a job here in 1999. Recently looking to scale back to part-time and try something new, she took over a friend's Doncaster agency, then closed her mortgage company last May. "I wanted to do something worthwhile," says Coplin, who has partnered with St Vinnie's to launch Ruby Tuesday's Closet, a program to provide quality used clothing and job-finding mentorship free of charge to women who have been on public assistance. "We'll start with 10 women in the first quarter of '07, and quarterly thereafter," she says. "We'll accept applications from any non-profit that has a jobs program."