Her Campus caught up with Paige Bromley to hear about the amazing work her campaign is doing for homeless women in Nottingham.
Can you tell me a bit about the campaign, for people who haven’t heard of it before?
So it’s a campaign to increase donations of sanitary towels to be distributed to homeless and other disadvantaged women. This is a really important issue for women. Having limited access to proper sanitary products means many have to use things such as tissue, or re-use tampons and towels which can be really dangerous. When someone thinks of homeless people, they often think of food and shelter as the two main things, however there is this whole other area that not many people think about.
Where can people donate? Are there places on campus?
There are two main donation points at the moment. There is one in the city centre in Cow Vintage. Cow are really supportive and great and offer anyone who donates 10% discount and they don’t give discounts for anything else. There is also one in the Student Volunteer Centre – the donations here are mainly collected by the Souprunners Society who give them out on their soup runs.
How long have you been involved with the charity? What is your role?
So the organisation has been running since September. I got involved through an amazing lady called Christina Ward who runs the campaign in Manchester – the first “Monthly Gift”. I noticed that there wasn’t anything like this in Nottingham so I contacted her and she gave me loads of amazing advice. My role is campaign organiser, I guess.
What impact is the campaign currently having?
We have had one big collection so far, a full box was sent to Emmanuel House in the Lace Market and I currently have one bin and four bin bags full of tampons and towels that I am about to donate. Souprunners have also had a collection and handed items out recently. So I would like to think that we are helping homeless women have a better access to these items.
What are the aims for the campaign in the future?
My main aim is to raise awareness and challenge the taboo around periods. I would love for women to know where we take donations so that they know that they can have access to them. No one wants to talk about periods, even though half of the population has them and even though without periods none of us would have even been born. I would also love the campaign to grow as much as possible, with more donation bins and being able to have more collections.
Do you have any promotional events lined up on campus or in town?
At the moment, what I really want to do is organise a Monthly Gift Donation Weekend where I contact local businesses and ask if they will offer discounts to people who donate – I think this would be a really good way to raise awareness and to reach more people.
I would also love our supporters to get more involved in things other than donating. Christina and Manchester held an event called PACKS where they showed Mean Girls and everyone either bought a ticket or brought a donation and they created sanitary packs which included packs on tampons, towels, wipes, clean underwear and chocolate bars and these were given to food banks; something like that would be amazing to get more people involved. We also sometimes have donation bins at Fan Club events that are focused around celebrating women, and they’re really supportive.
If someone is interested in the campaign, how can they get involved?
By donating is the main thing people can do. It would be great if anyone who is part of a society or club could organise a group collection and take it to COW.
Also if anyone is hosting an event, a pub quiz or anything like that, and wants to have a donation bin there so they can collect donations that way then that’s also something that I would love to do. The campaign is on social media (Facebook and Instagram are the main two – monthlygiftnotts) so people can share things, and tag themselves in pictures or send me a message to ask me anything they want.
Edited by Jess Shelton
Sources:
http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Assets/1/h16745639.jpg