Japanese fashion designer Saya Fukuda of Sand by Saya will be the guest speaker of Runway to Success, a benefit event to take place Thursday, Nov. 11 at Dong Hai Grill in Midtown. Fukuda will discuss how she started from scratch in the fashion industry to build an internationally successful brand. The event, co-produced by MX2 Design Force, will benefit Hour Children and encourage the women in the program to pursue success.

Based in Long Island City, Hour Children provides health, educational and social services to the children of incarcerated women. In order to be in the Hour Children program, the women must pledge to do better for themselves and their kids. This is a crucial fundraising event as Hour Children works to establish a good relationship with New York's Asian community and bolster the self-esteem of the women in its program.

“I have been on the Hour Children board of directors, as a member of the organization's development committee, for a little over one year,” says Mike Millis, MX2 Design Force’s president and CEO. “This past August, I was asked into a lunch meeting with the executive director, Sister Tesa Fitzgerald, and the president of the board of directors, Stephen Cavallo, and asked for some ideas about taking Hour Children in new directions and finding new support. The Asian community is a growing and vital community in New York, but Hour Children has no footing in the community, at all—none.”

Millis has been working with nonprofit and business organizations in New York's Asian community for the past two years, and he pitched his idea of the event as a way to combine his experience and contacts in the fashion industry with those in the Asian community. “Multicultural marketing has become a very important aspect of community relations for every company and organization to put energy and resources into,” he explains. “I designed this Hour Children event around the idea of creatively getting the organization some exposure to the Asian community while, at the same time, promoting multiculturalism in the fashion industry.”

Tickets for the event include dinner with a glass of wine. There will also be a special raffle featuring items from Sand by Saya during the evening as well as networking opportunities.

Millis was introduced to Fukuda through two swimwear shows that they worked together on this past summer. “She has never been incarcerated, as the women in the Hour Children program have been, but she certainly understands going through very hard times and being determined to rebuild,” he says. “She started with almost nothing and has been able to build a successful fashion brand. Especially because of how difficult things are for so many people in the current economy, I think that just about anyone will get a great deal out of Saya's talk.”

“If I can help people just by telling them how to succeed, it's an easy thing for me to do it,” Fukuda says. “I am not a special person. Anyone can do the same thing like me, and I want many people to succeed. The speech is all about how a regular person can succeed like me.”

There are programs similar to Hour Children in operation throughout the state of New York. The average repeat offender rate in those programs is 10 to 15 percent. Hour Children's repeat offender rate is one percent.

“I don't know this organization well, but I always love to work for helping people,” Fukuda says. “I am going to be a mother of a child in the future. If there are any children who are living by themselves, we as adults we need to help them, because they are going to build the world for us when we are getting old. They have a bright future. We cannot limit their dream.”

Runway to Success will take place at Dong Hai Grill, 108 West 39th Street (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue) Thursday, Nov. 11 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $65 per person. Pay by cash or check at the door or charge by calling Kristin Miller at (718) 433-4724 ext. 15. RSVP to Mike Millis at Mike.MX2DesignForce@gmail.com by Nov. 9.

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