While food banks strive to feed so many in strained, even desperate, financial circumstances, little is in place to help with another big item that takes up much of the typical shopping bill – personal-care items.
Port Hope resident Avril Ewing has organized a drive to collect one special kind of personal-care product – feminine-hygiene and period-care items.
“Pads, tampons, menstrual cups and incontinence pads,” Ewing listed last week.
Once in a while, someone does think to purchase and donate personal-grooming products like shampoo and toothpaste and even diapers to the local food banks, but products of the kind Ewing listed are rarely donated. And this is where she will place half the products she collects (and half of those she purchases with donations).
The other half will go to the Rose Quest project organized several years back by Port Hope resident Rose Wilton to collect personal-grooming products and place them with local agencies to give out, from schools to crisis shelters.
People don't often talk about feminine-hygiene and period-care products, but the need is universal and on-going among at least half the population. A family of four which includes at least one teenage daughter will have to factor this cost into their budget to some degree. But what about families who struggle with every expense?
“When you don't have any money, how are you going to buy an $8 pack of pads?” Ewing said.
“If you are homeless, are you going to carry those around?”
Ewing applauds her native Scotland, which has become the first nation in the world to mandate and legislate that these products are free.
Meanwhile in Canada, she expects schools keep such supplies for young girls who need them and whose families' budgets are constrained. But, like the food programs that provide breakfast to students who otherwise might have none, the need continues on weekends and holidays.
Ewing got the idea from a similar project in Toronto called Tampon Tuesday. Given that it's Christmas and people are looking to help their neighbours (and may be out shopping a little more than usual), she organized this local version.
“This is such a simple thing to toss in your cart at the grocery store or Walmart,” she said.
She is already beginning to get donations via e-mail. She converts this money into product, then sends photos of the receipts and the items purchased so the donor can know how he or she helped out.