BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD)– The East Baton Rouge Parish School System is trying to fill a void by bringing a community partnership to life. That partnership will bring in female hygiene product donations.
Deidra Mwalimu, founder of Network of Women, picked up hygiene products from the EBR Parish School System such as pads, hand sanitizers and tampons. “Our mission is to supply feminine hygiene products to young girls who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it, so it’s everything that we do,” Mwalimu said.
All the items will go towards the Supporting Our Girls Campaign, a program that was started in March by the district. The program is being taken over by Mwalimu’s nonprofit organization. “We’re supplying them with supplies that they may not be able to afford or have access to,” Mwalimu said.
“They are taking over the initiative, the leadership of this program, because we want somebody with the caliber, with the strength, with the knowledge, with the manpower to not only supply or help 11 schools, which we initially started out with, but with the whole entire school district,” said a spokesperson for the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, Paris Flannigan.
Flannigan says the district is looking forward to impacting more students and emphasizes the importance of the products available for students.
“It’s important that they learn and support, that they get an education, and it’s important that they’re not distracted from that education. So it’s good that we supply them with the necessary resources that they may need,” she said.
Flannigan says more items were needed and staff were taking it into their own hands to fix the issue.
“Sometimes our school counselors, our nurses are reaching into their own pockets to supply these resources. We do not want that to happen,” she said.
Although the nonprofit is taking over, Mwalimu says they are not doing it alone and couldn’t do it without the help of community organizations such as Namaste Baton Rouge, Walgreens and other local organizations. Mwalimu said, “We are getting the community together to answer the call for EBR Parish Support All Girls Campaign.”
The program is set to assist female students in grades 3 to 12 in the EBR Parish School System. For more information on the nonprofit and how to donate, head to networkofwomen.org
