Countless indignities come with being homeless. It can be hard to find a place to shower, let alone use a bathroom. There’s nowhere to store your belongings, so they can be stolen or cleared by police. Not to mention the stigma from passersby who may judge you for your predicament.
But women who find themselves homeless face a unique problem: getting the sanitary products they need when they get their periods. Just as with other personal products, they may not be able to purchase them, but unlike toothpaste and shampoo, pads and tampons are rarely donated to shelters.
The issue has started to garner attention, however. A project called The Homeless Period launched recently in the U.K. with a video from a homeless woman describing dealing with her period by going to public restrooms and using ripped cloths. “I used to feel very depressed,” she says. “It used to get me down.” And she notes that it’s a hurdle women face that doesn’t impact men. “If a man could get razors anywhere, which a man could, then why can’t a woman get sanitary towels anywhere?”
The project aims to change that by making sure that tampons and pads are available at homeless shelters, “the same way the government provides condoms,” the site notes. It has a petition asking parliament to give shelters an allowance to cover this need.
The project was launched by three women who met as interns at an advertising agency. “When researching homelessness we realised that we all considered it to be a ‘male’ issue but we were surprised to find that approximately 26% of people who access homelessness services in the UK are women,” Sara Bakhaty, one of the three, told ThinkProgress in an email. She noted that many shelters that don’t have enough money to get all the supplies they need don’t necessarily offer sanitary products and people don’t think to donate them. “In those situations then women will either have to be resourceful or go without,” she said.
The project’s goal is to get to 100,000 signatures on its petition, which would make it more likely for the government to respond once a new one is formed after the elections in May. It got more than 13,000 signatures in its first ten days and had nearly 90,000 as of Tuesday. But it also wants the impact to go further. “[I]t is really inspiring and heartwarming to see people taking action themselves off the back of the petition through fundraising and making contact with local shelters to arrange their own donations of sanitary care,” she said.
Groups are working here at home to address the issue as well for the American women who make up a third of all homeless people in shelters. Distributing Dignity became an official 501c3 at the end of 2013 and organizes donation drives of both sanitary products as well as bras to homeless and domestic violence shelters in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. That project was started by Joanie Balderstone and Rebecca MacIntire in 2010 after one day when they were donating used business clothing to a homeless center in Camden, New Jersey. “One of my committee members was pulled aside by one of the clients, and she said thank you very much for the suit, but I don’t have a decent bra to wear underneath it,” Balderstone said. They asked what else she might need besides bras. “She said we receive shampoo and donations of deodorant, but we never receive pads and tampons.”
“We were pretty moved by that,” she noted. So they started annual “mardi bra” parties where they invited friends and family to bring gently used bras as well as packages of tampons and pads. It’s a problem most people hadn’t thought about before. “We find most people don’t know, and a lot of women in particular say, you know it’s something I’ve never thought about even tough it’s very personal to myself,” she said. Most shelters say they don’t get such donations frequently or even at all.
The two women now operate the nonprofit as volunteers and they have ambitions to become a national organization. They’ve already gotten a number of applications from organizations that want to partner with Distributing Dignity to receive their donations and expect to expand into new states by the end of this year. “We hope eventually that we’re able to provide them with enough support that maybe the shelter gets to have an extra bed or an extra person admitted to the program, that we can alleviate their budget to some extent and increase how many women they’re able to help,” MacIntire noted.
The awareness these campaigns have also gone a long way. In New York City, for example, increased awareness led to a quintupling of donations of sanitary products to shelters last year. They help overcome the discomfort some people have about talking about menstruation and a blind spot some might have for a problem that only confronts women. “Everybody needs a toothbrush, everybody needs deodorant, everybody needs soap,” Balderstone noted. “This is something specifically needed by women.”