Fear. Shame. Exclusion. These are just a few of the many devastating effects of hygiene poverty.
The sheer fact that hygiene poverty affects over 50% of 18-24 year olds in the UK, yet receives so little attention is truly alarming. Hygiene poverty is the inability to afford many of the daily hygiene and personal grooming products that we often take for granted. Due to the pandemic, more families are thrown into financial hardship, often falling victim to hygiene poverty whereby they are forced between choosing to pay their rent, buy food or keep clean. It is our responsibility to fight for a better future for our young people and bring an end to hygiene poverty.
With this motivation to eradicate hygiene poverty, myself and 8 students, created a youth-led initiative called ‘Period’ during the lockdown of Summer 2020. We are a group of teenagers that come from a variety of schools with a large proportion of our work focusing on directly helping the homeless population in Birmingham: this is done through weekly volunteering at homeless shelters. In addition, our organisation has already created and distributed care packages amongst those sleeping rough. These care packages consist of essential hygiene items which we strongly believe every human is entitled to. As we find ourselves in another lockdown situation, hygiene poverty is rising faster than ever. For this reason, we are creating and distributing a greater number of care packages to those who need them most.
To fund the creation of the aforementioned care packages we organised a fundraising event “If I could walk 500 miles” where we walked 500 miles (equivalent to 1 million steps). For more details, please watch this short video our team has put together: https://youtu.be/aBgfo_8FGZ8
To date we have received over £4,000 in donation; quadrupling our original target! To make a donation please click here: GoFundMe page
