The SJM Team ENG 210 

Shamoona, Maria, Jenifer 

There are several basic necessities that I believe should be free, but, sadly, our capitalist society considers them commodities. Specifically for this project, we will concentrate on women’s products and women in need of them. How has the government and culture been able to take on, evidently feminine, the necessities and turn them into a privilege for so many women?

The problem lies in the very fact that a box of tampons cost more than a cup of coffee, something that is certainly not important. More importantly, these “necessities” become more “luxurious” for women in difficult circumstances, such as staying in homeless shelters, refugee shelters, and/or domestic violence shelters. Because many of these shelters are extremely underfunded, many of these women do not receive any of these items. Products that need to be seen as important as air. If this were a national proposal, we would be involved in attempting to amend those laws that provide many other important yet “luxury” facilities and products.

The solution to this problem comes in the form of our grant proposal. Our idea revolves around women in any shelter in the central New York City area. We have created a project in which my team and I will have six different  tables( to begin with) around six different areas of NYC. Each table will be charged to a group of volunteers, including my team members. We plan our setting up these tables in front of the shelters and handing out feminine products as well as medication, to women on a monthly basis.We will be handing out a month’s supply of tampons, pads, as well as pain medication (e.g. Advil). We will check our progress by doing weekly check-ins with the shelters and having reports written up on how many products were given. In order to prompt our project, as well, as get more volunteers we will be using social media as well as hand-made posters. This will be displayed around the areas in which we will have tables set-up. We have also drawn-up a budget plan in order to effectively get our point across to the grant writers. 

According to our study, by using toilet tissues, since women in homeless shelters have no access to feminine items, they address this issue inadequately. During their menstruation, homeless women would wrap toilet paper around their underwear. Tampons and sanitary pads are costly, they claim. Some shelters have just 2 pads per cycle, while about 20 tampons/pads per cycle are used by the average woman. Using toilet paper, reused clothing or maybe just leaving it be are the only choices they have after using 2 pads they are given. The Homeless Period Project is one of the major projects that has provided feminine products for homeless women. The Homeless Period Project was formed in 2015 with a singularly oriented goal to provide homeless people living in shelters and on the street with menstrual hygiene products. Nearly 8,000,000 million period projects have been donated to them since they began this mission. They allocated their contributions to the “806 schools and 459 shelters/ food banks/ organizations throughout the US who serve the homeless and those experiencing low wealth. (Mission)” Similarly, our team wants to focus on developing an organization that provides homeless people with pads, tampons and pain relief medication. Our team would like to begin this in 2020 and as it expands over time, we would want to make it bigger. We wanted to set up tables in front of shelters for the homeless. We’re going to have 6 different places. We’re going to be distributed once a week and every week we change our location.We will only distribute it to 200 people every month at the beginning. We would like to work with businesses as we expand and build a fund for donations. One is given to our community for every feminine product that they sell. After we have developed and obtained more assistance from funders, this would start. In order to have art departments help create posters, we also plan to partner up with local schools. 

Like the majority of organisations that contribute money to initiatives such as this one. We know they need to know how we can assess the outcomes of our enhancement and our long-term objectives. Our team is specialized in developing the most efficient way of evaluating our success. We accept that one of the team leaders will be put in charge of this mission. She would have to be in charge of ensuring that it uses all the budget and that all the items are delivered on a regular basis. We want to focus on helping women in homeless shelters, asylum shelters, and  immigration camps. In homeless shelters, refugee shelters, and immigration camps, we want to concentrate on supporting women. By making weekly visits to these various shelters and asking all the homeless women if they get the product and if they need more, we intend to assess the improvement of our project. This is the best way to handle how many people are missing on each visit, we believe. Also this data comes from homeless people, there is no space for misinterpretation or miscounting.On each visit, we plan to send one team leader and 2 team members so that they can question everyone in the shelter more easily and report all the results. Every week in an excel folder, we will keep these results updated and the founders will have access to this information. 

On the other side, We as women, have seen first hand how important feminine hygiene products are. Feminine hygiene products are essential necessities to every person with female reproductive organs. This is why one of our long term goals is to find enough funders to keep this project permanet for a long time. We realized that this project has potential to become a permanent help for homeless women because these products are principal needs not something optional. With our social media camping and the poster that we will be placing all over New York City. Also, we plan to engage people to donate these products because they are not really expensive , so in this way we will not only depend on the funders ,if not from the community. Due to the necessity of these products, we would like that homeless women don’t have to worry about getting these products. 

Works Cited 

“Mission.” The Homeless Period Project, www.homelessperiodproject.org/mission.

Accessed December 11 2020.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication license.