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The end of 2024 brings us little hope for the future in as much as so long as there is any type of poverty there will always be period poverty. Buying period products for anyone who is sruggling to pay for food, rent, heating etc etc is way down the list of priorities. It will, therefore, take some kind of government support and legislation to alleviate all poverty.

We have, however, made some progress in the areas in which we work: mainly Staffordshire and Cheshire.

This year has been busier than previous years with many more organisations reaching out for support. We are now working with a number of local hospitals, Primary Care Trusts, Health Centres, GP Surgeries and Community Health Workers. The need for help and support is being reported back from Health Workers across the board and the need for support for our Health Workers is growing. We are currently supporting two local hospitals who are operating food hubs for their staff who are struggling with the cost of living and rent/mortgage increases. This is something which we have found quite shocking as nobody in work should struggle in this way.

We are continuing our work and collaboration with Staffs Girls and Ladies Football League and were honoured to be invited to attend their Cup Finals event to present the winning teams with their medals and cups. We have also joined forces with Staffordshire County Netball Association and provided them with period products for all of their teams.

We have worked with a number of community representatives in a growing number of towns and cities and we now have 6 Period Dignity towns and cities throughout Staffordshire where high street businesses carry supplies of period products so that anyone, for whatever reason, can call in and ask for support.

More recently, we have been working with MPs from the areas in which we work to encourage them to become Period Dignity employers and to date we have 8 MPs who have already taken supplies or are in the process of setting up their offices to be able to accept supplies. We are still waiting to hear back from a couple of MPs but will be in touch with them early 2025.

In June of this year we hosted our second Regional Conference, Seeing Red Going Green, in collaboration with Borderlines, New Vic Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent. This was an absolute success and well attended by many local organisations and some who travelled from much further afield. It was based around Reusable Period Products and how they could be an answer to the growing use of single-use, plastic heavy, period products which are creating a threat to the environment by ending up in land-fill and in our rivers and seas. A number of local schools were invited to perform to the audience and it was a great success. We also held workshops with local schools, local girls football teams and home educated girls. All of which were well received and we have a number of further bookings for the New Year.

It’s going to be an even busier year to come but we are all up to keeping up the fight. Hopefully we will be able to encourage more of our MPs to be Period Dignity employers by visiting the House of Commons sometime in 2025.

We will let you know next year.

Linda Allbutt. Founder.

We actually thought that it couldn’t get worse but it really has. The cost of living crisis has actually worsened for the poorest people in our country and it has affected many more thousands of families this year.

We have been even busier than ever with an increasing number of organisations asking for our support and help. What has been different with this year is that we have been contacted by 10 NHS Trusts in Staffordshire and Cheshire so that their Community Nurses have period products to distribute to their patients. I have no words for this. Our country is broken for many and I cannot see a way forward at the moment.

On a more positive note, we successfully launched our new book “All Things Menopause” in October of this year and it has been extremely successful. As with our previous book “All Things Periods” it is now in all of the libraries throughout Staffordshire and in many in the West Midlands. It is a compilation of “ordinary” women’s experiences and thoughts on their menopause and hopefully this will open up the conversation so that all women will feel more able to discuss more openly about the big M.

We also worked with another local football club, Port Vale F.C., so that they are now a “Period Dignity” employer placing period products in all of the public and staff toilets. We have continue our work supporting all grass roots football clubs throughout Staffordshire so that they have period products available for their young women and girls.

Not much more to say except a big thankyou to all of our “Monthly Gifters” who continue to support us and also a thankyou to all of our Funders this year.

Hope 2024 sees an improvement in the lives of the people we continue to support.

Linda Allbutt

Well what a year this has been and not in a good way. We seriously thought that at the end of 2022 things could only get better. How very wrong we were. When we had come through the worst of the pandemic and people started to go back to work, our lives became a little easier and the pressure was reduced. However, this lasted only a very short time.

The cost of living crisis and the increase in the prices of gas and electricity put massive pressures on growing numbers of families. This in turn resulted in more and more organisations approaching us for help and asking for more regular deliveries. To date, we still have not refused any requests of help and support and are currently supporting over 150 organisations and charities throughout the region.

We have done this with the support of a great team of volunteers who have gone above and beyond in their help and we cannot thank them enough.

We have also been very fortunate in our funding applications this year. We have received further funding from the Newby Trust so that we can pay for our storage facility for another 18 months. We have also received another year’s funding from The Mercer Foundation which will go a long way to support our work in encouraging the use of reusable period products. Once again, a big thank you to the Community National Lottery for their continued funding and to Stoke-on-Trent City Council for their continued support. We have developed a new partnership with the Coalfields Regeneration Trust and their funding will allow us to continue our work within the coalfields regions.

However, our biggest thanks is to our “Monthly Gifters” who have supported us over the years and without this support we could not continue our work at the level it is needed.

I would love to end this message with a hint of optimisim but that is becoming increasingly difficult. Until the “powers that be” value and support the poorest in our communities and the “working poor” we will be struggling again into the New Year. However, hopefully, with the continued support of people and organisations who have been so helpful in the past we will be able to keep on saying “Yes”.

Linda Allbutt

Over the last couple of years we have been busy trying to raise awareness of the use of reusable period products and also educating people on the effect of single use products on the environment. Our Ambassador, Gigi Ermoyenous, along with our Youth Ambassadors, has been encouraging friends and peer groups to “trial” these products. The feedback from many of these young people has been very positive and Gigi gives her own feelings on the use of these products.

“I have been using reusable products since starting my periods at the age of 11. I use a mix of menstrual cup, washable pads and period pants. I enjoy using these reusable products for the comfort and ease as well as the environmental benefits. The washable period pads supplied by Period Power are really easy to use due to their soft fabric. They are comfortable, easy to clean and fast drying compared to some of my homemade ones”.

Well 2021 was a year we would all like to forget and to leave behind. However, hopefully, we will all have learned more about our strengths that we were not aware of before the pandemic. I think that most of us thought that we would have reached the end of the year pandemic free but it is obviously not the case.

With this in mind we have to move forward in a more cautionary way than expected but it will not stop us from doing our core work of supplying our charity partners with period products and hygiene products. We are still not able to proceed with our workshops with schools and organisations in the way we had anticipated but thank heavens for Zoom.

2021 saw us move forward with our campaign to raise awareness of the environmental factors surrounding single use period products and to encourage more women and girls to try reusable products, such as pads, pants and menstrual cups. To this effect we have been giving away packs of products to dozens of people to trial them and report back to us on their thoughts. This has proven to be really encouraging and a large majority of “triallers” have reported back very favourably and will continue to use these products. We will be working on this campaign throughout 2022 and have the funding in place to be able to supply many more women and girls with the product which is best fitted to their personal preferences.

2021 also saw the fruition and publication of our book “All Things Periods” and we held a launch evening at The New Vic Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent where people travelled many miles to attend (Spain being the furthest away) and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all the contributors to the book which, if we say so ourselves, is looking quite cool.

However, the year has mainly been spent on continuing with our work supplying charities, foodbanks and organisations with period products to support the work they do with the most vulnerable in our society. Again, as the previous year, the demand on our support has grown and grown and we can still say, with pride, that we have never turned any organisation down and, hopefully, we will always be able to say the same.

Let’s hope that 2022 brings some normality back to our lives and eventually we can also say that period poverty does not exist any more and that we, at Period Power, can take a well earned rest.

We are now well into 2021 and thankfully our vaccination programme is well underway which will, hopefully, start our slow return to normality.

However, we feel that this will not alleviate the financial and economic problems of the many of millions of our citizens who are still to be taken off the furlough scheme. We will continue with our work of supporting all of our charity partners until we feel that we are no longer needed and will continue with supplying the wide range of toiletries which we started to supply at the onset of the pandemic.

We have also worked with two further Fire Services, Derbyshire and West Midlands, in supporting them to become Period Dignity employers by supplying them with pads and tampons to be placed in all of their stations. This is now three Fire Services we have supported and will hopefully be working with even more in the future.

In our previous post we talked about our proposed book “All Things Periods” and we have now extended our cut-off date to 30th June for contributions, as the schools have been closed for many weeks this year. We have received some truly inspirational, honest and often brutal contributions from many women and girls and will hopefully be going to print sometime during the summer of this year.

If this pandemic has taught us anything at all it is that our lives can change in a moment and that we should never take anything, or anyone, for granted. Livelihoods and more importantly, lives, have been lost when they should not have been lost. Let’s hope that our world will be better prepared for any future disasters that can affect us without very little warning.

Please keep following us on social media, particularly our Facebook page where we post on an almost daily basis.

What a year this has been for everyone so we are so glad to see the end of it. However, we realise that the problems which the pandemic has created are not going to go away even if we manage to eradicate the virus at any time. We have seen a massive increase in the requests of help and support we have received over the last nine months and, as ever, we have responded accordingly.

This has meant that we have needed to apply for funding on an almost weekly basis as we are now spending at almost 10 times our normal rate. Fortunately, we have been successful in many of our funding applications so today we want to give out a massive shout out to all of our funders and donors, of which there have been many.

We will continue our work into the New Year and beyond until we feel that we are no longer needed. 2020 has seen a change in the attitude from No.10 in that they have bowed to pressure and are supplying all of our state schools with period products. However, we feel that they need to go a step further as the Scottish Parliament has agreed to do. This is to make period products freely available across the board so that we can be totally confident that all women and girls will be able to have a dignified period. Until then, we feel that we will still need to keep on campaigning for, and supporting, all of our women and girls.

At the beginning of December we reached out to our women and girls and have asked them to contribute to a book which we hope to be published next year. “All Things Periods” will, hopefully, be full of anecdotes, poems, feelings and emotions surrounding our periods and with a bit of luck, and a lot of contributions, we will get this published by the summer of 2021. If you would like to contribute, or know of someone who would make a great contributor, please e.mail us on periodpower2017@gmail.com

All the information is on our Facebook page so please check it out.

In the meantime, we hope that 2021 will give us all a light at the end of what has been a long dark tunnel of 2020.

Well who would have believed that we would still be in the midst of the chaos and pain that this pandemic has heaped onto our world? Not us for sure. However, we have worked extremely hard to make sure that we can continue with our work in supporting our partner charities and our communities by applying for funding from many organisations. We have been very fortunate in gaining some much needed funding from some of these organisations, without which we would have had to cut short our support to many groups.

This isn’t the time to list these organisations but be assured when we are through the physical aspects of the pandemic our thanks will be recorded. We have continually posted our thanks on social media so if you are interested in checking them out please check our Twitter posts on the website.

However, we are not complacent that once the pandemic is under control that we will be through the worst. We feel that the economic fallout already felt will be much worse in the future when more jobs are lost and more people are having to turn to charities and to the benefits system. We will be here to continue with our support within our communities.

That is our promise to our people.

Since the pandemic took hold across the country, we at Period Power have done everything possible to help alleviate the issues we have seen as they have arisen.

We have always responded to need but we have seen a new level of need since Covid-19. Need to respond not only to the organisations we have always helped, but to individuals who have contacted us or been referred to us. In general these are families or individuals who have been unable to gain necessities to allow them to live as normal a life as possible. This could be the new mum who had an emergency c-section and was allowed home but had no nappies for a premature baby, no baby wipes and no paracetamol. Luckily, we were able to step in and source all the items , with some difficulty due to the panic buying during the early stages of the pandemic. Likewise, this could be the mum who couldn’t get the incontinence team to deliver incontinence pads for her 13 year old daughter because even they couldn’t source them. Luckily, we were able to source some suitable pants to hopefully see her through until the local incontinence team were able to deliver her supplies. Then there is the young couple left waiting for their Universal Credit application to be sorted (they had received an advance but used it for rent/council tax and utilities). The young woman cried when she saw the box of goods we delivered which included toiletries, toilet rolls, cleaning products and some food. They were tears of relief because they knew that they could now eat and keep themselves and their home clean. No-one should ever be in that position and for us it can be heart breaking to see people who would normally manage their affairs suddenly finding themselves floundering.

We have also seen the gratitude from both hoteliers, who are housing some of our homeless residents, and from the homeless citizens also, when we have been able to offer them a range of items to help them adjust to temporary living “off the streets”. These items have included period products for the women and a full range of hygiene toiletries for all.

So how do people feel about the support we have been able to offer? Grateful is probably an understatement. Relieved is probably a more apt descriptor.

I never thought that I would be speaking to you about the situation we are all facing now.  Corona virus, Covid 19, however we want to call, it is a problem none of us could have ever envisaged we would ever have to overcome.

However, we have still been delivering to all of our partner charities and Foodbanks and fortunately we foresaw what may happen and have delivered larger than usual stocks to everyone

before the “lock down”.

We have now expanded our remit to include items which we know people are struggling to access, either through them not being available in many shops or because many more people are now struggling to afford them due to businesses closing and laying off staff.  Hopefully, this situation will improve once benefits and payments get through to the people in most need.

We are now sourcing many more baby products than before, including baby food.  We are also sourcing cleaning products and a greatly increased number of toiletries and personal hygiene products.  However, our suppliers are also struggling to source certain items but we will continue with our work until there comes a time when we cannot. I really cannot see that happening as we will find a way around almost anything.

Just to finish on a more positive note.  Recently we were given boxes and boxes of make-up gift sets by a wonderful young couple, Charlotte and Marc.  Many of these had already been

delivered to our local women’s refuges but we still have quite a lot left.  We have now begun delivering to our local hospitals so that our fabulous nurses can have a gift from us all, with love. They have been truly overwhelmed with the gesture and feel that there are millions of us who truly appreciate the work they are doing and have been doing for decades.

It’s a bloody pity that it has taken a pandemic to make people

truly appreciate them.

PS We haven’t forgotten our male NHS workers and will be

sourcing products for them also.

Take care everyone and STAY HOME if you can.